The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now

CONTENTS

About this Book

About the Author

Acclaim

Preface

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Origin of This Book

The Truth That Is Within You

CHAPTER ONE: You Are Not Your Mind

The Greatest Obstacle to Enlightenment

Freeing Yourself from Your Mind

Enlightenment: Rising above Thought

Emotion: The Body's Reaction to Your Mind

CHAPTER TWO: Consciousness: The Way Out of Pain

Create No More Pain in the Present

Past Pain: Dissolving the Pain-Body

Ego Identification with the Pain-Body

The Origin of Fear

The Ego's Search for Wholeness

CHAPTER THREE: Moving Deeply into the Now

Don't Seek Your Self in the Mind

End the Delusion of Time

Nothing Exists Outside the Now

The Key to the Spiritual Dimension

Accessing the Power of the Now

Letting Go of Psychological Time

The Insanity of Psychological Time

Negativity and Suffering Have Their Roots in Time

Finding the Life Underneath Your Life Situation

All Problems Are Illusions of the Mind

A Quantum Leap in the Evolution of Consciousness

The Joy of Being

CHAPTER FOUR: Mind Strategies for Avoiding the Now

Loss of Now: The Core Delusion

Ordinary Unconsciousness and Deep Unconsciousness

What Are They Seeking?

Dissolving Ordinary Unconsciousness

Freedom from Unhappiness

Wherever You Are, Be There Totally

The Inner Purpose of Your Life's Journey

The Past Cannot Survive in Your Presence

CHAPTER FIVE: The State of Presence

It's Not What You Think It Is

The Esoteric Meaning of "Waiting"

Beauty Arises in the Stillness of Your Presence

Realizing Pure Consciousness

Christ: The Reality of Your Divine Presence

CHAPTER SIX: The Inner Body

Being Is Your Deepest Self

Look beyond the Words

Finding Your Invisible and Indestructible Reality

Connecting with the Inner Body

Transformation through the Body

Sermon on the Body

Have Deep Roots Within

Before You Enter the Body, Forgive

Your Link with the Unmanifested

Slowing Down the Aging Process

Strengthening the Immune System

Let the Breath Take You into the Body

Creative Use of Mind

The Art of Listening

CHAPTER SEVEN: Portals into the Unmanifested

Going Deeply into the Body

The Source of Chi

Dreamless Sleep

Other Portals

Silence

Space

The True Nature of Space and Time

Conscious Death

CHAPTER EIGHT: Enlightened Relationships

Enter the Now from Wherever You Are

Love/Hate Relationships

Addiction and the Search for Wholeness

From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships

Relationships as Spiritual Practice

Why Women Are Closer to Enlightenment

Dissolving the Collective Female Pain-Body

Give Up the Relationship with Yourself

CHAPTER NINE: Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness

There Is Peace

The Higher Good beyond Good and Bad

The End of Your Life Drama

Impermanence and the Cycles of Life

Using and Relinquishing Negativity

The Nature of Compassion

Toward a Different Order of Reality

CHAPTER TEN: The Meaning of Surrender

Acceptance of the Now

From Mind Energy to Spiritual Energy

Surrender in Personal Relationships

Transforming Illness into Enlightenment

When Disaster Strikes

Transforming Suffering into Peace

The Way of the Cross

The Power to Choose

About this Book

To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to

leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego,

behind. From the beginning of the first chapter we move

rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where one breathes

a lighter air, the air of the spiritual. Although the journey is

challenging, Eckhart Tolle offers simple language and a

question and answer format to guide us. The words

themselves are the signposts.

For many of us there are new discoveries to be made

along the way: we are not our mind; we can find our way out

of psychological pain; authentic human power is found by

surrendering to the Now. We also find out that the body is

actually one of the keys to entry into a state of inner peace,

as are the silence and space all around us. Indeed, access is

everywhere available. These access points, or portals, can all

be used to bring us into the Now, the present moment, where

problems do not exist. It is here we find our joy and are able

to embrace our true selves. It is here we discover that we are

already complete and perfect.

Many of us will find that our biggest obstacle to this

realization is our relationships, especially our intimate

relationships. But again, we are in "new territory" and all is

not what it had seemed before. We come to see that our

relationships are yet another doorway into spiritual

enlightenment if we use them wisely, meaning if we use

them to become more conscious and therefore more loving

human beings. The result? Real communion between self

and others.

If we are able to be fully present and take each step in

the Now; if we are able to feel the reality of such things as

the "inner-body," "surrender," "forgiveness," and the

"Unmanifested," we will be opening ourselves to the

transforming experience of The Power of Now.

About the Author

Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany, where he spent the first

thirteen years of his life. After graduating from the

University of London, he was a research scholar and

supervisor at Cambridge University. When he was twentynine,

a profound spiritual transformation virtually dissolved

his old identity and radically changed the course of his life.

The next few years were devoted to understanding,

integrating, and deepening that transformation, which

marked the beginning of an intense inward journey.

Eckhart is not aligned with any particular religion or

tradition. In his teaching, he conveys a simple yet profound

message with the timeless and uncomplicated clarity of the

ancient spiritual masters: there is a way out of suffering

and into peace.

Eckhart is currently traveling extensively, taking his

teachings and his presence throughout the world. He has

lived in Vancouver, Canada, since 1996.

Acclaim for “The Power of Now”

"If I were allotted only one book, I would choose

Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Why? Because this book

emanates a spirit of love, not only through its words, but in

the spaces between the words. No book has touched me, nor

embraced me as this one has."

— Patricia Gordon, Calgary, Alberta

"This book offers us a wonderful gift, but we must have

the courage to seize it. I encourage you to accept this gift. I

believe our very survival on this planet is dependent on the

inner journey that Eckhart Tolle is urging us to take."

—Bill Carpenter, Businessman and Fellow Spiritual Seeker

"I found this book to be a wonderful perspective for

people like me who wish to integrate the message delivered

so eloquently by A Course in Miracles and Deepak Chopra's

Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. Every time I return to a

segment of the book, I am surprised to find a new deeper

meaning than the previous read."

— Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, CEO, SAJ E (manufacturer and

retail chain of natural health products)

"This manuscript is like a collection of 'Daily Bread' in

that the gleanings of knowledge that are made available by

Eckhart are in a spiritually digestible form of question and

answer. These conscious awareness triggers are a must read

in this present age of truth seekers."

— David L. Jones, author of A Warrior in the Land of Disease

"The book gave me comfort and inspired me no end

and gave me insight after insight regarding my own personal

journey. It was a revelation and a joy to read."

— Albert Koopman, Business Executive

"I have searched for meaning, well-being, health and

life, but unfortunately I was searching outside myself. The

Power of Now has shown me how to find life's elusive

treasures within."

— John Kuchenthal, Organizational Development Consultant

"I heartly recommend this profoundly inspiring book to

all seekers today."

—Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within

" . . . a reminder to be truly present in our own lives and

liberated from our past and future. It can transform your

thinking. The result? More joy, right now!"

— O: The OPRAH Magazine

"Tolle has succeeded on two fronts: synthesizing the

teachings of masters such as Jesus and the Buddha into an

easily accessible guide to achieving spiritual consciousness

and making a strong case that the inability of humans to free

themselves from dominance by the mind and live in the

present is the root cause for misery in the world . . . . He

makes enlightenment seem attainable and necessary for both

individual peace and the health of the planet."

— ForeWord Magazine

"Fresh, revealing, current, new inspiration. Out of the

many spiritual books that cross my desk this one stands out

from the flock . . . . If you are considering getting back in

touch with your soul, this book is a great companion."

— Common Ground, Vancouver, British Columbia

"With intense and compelling clarity, Tolle's guidance

holds the promise of leading us to our own best and highest

place within, to resonate with and reflect the energy of true

transformation."

— Spirit of Change Magazine

"This seems to be the 'right book' for many people at

this point in time. The writing is clear as a bell; the words

ring true. Truly an exceptional book that promises to make a

real difference in people's lives."

— Tom Oakley, Banyen Books, Vancouver, British Columbia

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

BY MARC ALLEN

Author of Visionary Business and A Visionary Life

Perhaps once in a decade, or even once in a generation, a

book like The Power of Now comes along. It is more than a

book; there is a living energy in it, one you can probably feel

as you hold it. It has the power to create an experience in

readers, and change their lives for the better.

The Power of Now was first published in Canada, and

the Canadian publisher, Connie Kellough, told me she heard

repeated stories of positive changes and even miracles that

have happened once people got into the book. "Readers call

in," she said. "And so many of them tell me of the wonderful

healings, transformations, and increased joy they are

experiencing because they have embraced this book."

The book makes me aware that every moment of my

life is a miracle. This is absolutely true, whether I realize it

or not. And The Power of Now, over and over, shows me

how to realize it.

From the first page of his writing, it is clear that Eckhart

Tolle is a contemporary master. He is not aligned with any

particular religion or doctrine or guru; his teaching embraces

the heart, the essence, of all other traditions, and contradicts

none of them — Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim,

indigenous, or anything else. He is able to do what all the

great masters have done: to show us, in simple and clear

language, that the way, the truth, and the light is within us.

Eckhart Tolle begins by briefly introducing us to his

story — a story of early depression and despair that

culminated in a tremendous experience of awakening one

night not long after his twenty-ninth birthday. For the past

twenty years, he has reflected on that experience, meditated,

and deepened his understanding.

In the last decade, he has become a world-class teacher,

a great soul with a great message, one that Christ taught, one

that Buddha taught: a state of enlightenment is attainable,

here and now. It is possible to live free of suffering, free of

anxiety and neurosis. To do this, we have to come to

understand our role as the creator of our pain; our own mind

causes our problems, not other people, not "the world out

there." It is our own mind, with its nearly constant stream of

thoughts, thinking about the past, worrying about the future.

We make the great mistake of identifying with our mind,

thinking that’s who we are — when, in fact, we are far

greater beings.

Over and over, Eckhart Tolle shows us how to connect

with what he calls our Being:

Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond

the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and

death. However, Being is not only beyond but also

deep within every form as its innermost invisible and

indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible

to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.

But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don’t try to

understand it. You can know it only when the mind is

still, when you are present, fully and intensely in the

Now . . . . To regain awareness of Being and to abide

in that state of 'feeling-realization' is enlightenment.

The Power of Now is nearly impossible to read straight

through — it requires you to put it down periodically and

reflect on the words and apply them to your own life

experience. It is a complete guide, a complete course, in

meditation and realization. It is a book to be revisited again

and again — and each time you revisit it, you gain new depth

and meaning. It is a book that many people, including me,

will want to study for a lifetime.

The Power of Now has a growing number of devoted

readers. It has already been called a masterpiece; whatever it

is called, however it is described, it is a book with the power

to change lives, the power to awaken us to fully realize who

we are.

Marc Allen

Novato, California U.S.A.

August I999

FOREWORD

BY RUSSELL E. DICARLO

Author of Towards a New World View

Blanketed by an azure sky, the orange-yellow rays of the

setting sun can, at special times, gift us with a moment of

such consider able beauty, we find ourselves momentarily

stunned, with frozen gaze. The splendor of the moment so

dazzles us, our compulsively chattering minds give pause, so

as not to mentally whisk us away to a place other than the

here-and-now. Bathed in luminescence, a door seems to open

to another reality, always present, yet rarely witnessed.

Abraham Maslow called these "peak experiences," since

they represent the high moments of life where we joyfully

find ourselves catapulted beyond the confines of the

mundane and ordinary. He might just as well have called

them "peek" experiences. During these expansive occasions,

we sneak a glimpse of the eternal realm of Being itself. If

only for a brief moment in time, we come home to our True

Self. "Ah," one might sigh, "so grand . . . if only I could stay

here. But how do I take up permanent residence?"

During the past ten years, I have committed myself to

finding out. During my search, I have been honored to

engage in dialogue with some of the most daring, inspiring

and insightful "paradigm pioneers" of our time: in medicine,

science, psychology, business, religion/spirituality, and

human potential. This diverse group of individuals is joined

by their commonly voiced insight that humanity is now

taking a quantum leap forward in its evolutionary

development. This change is accompanied by a shift in world

view — the basic picture we carry with us of "the way things

are." A world view seeks to answer two fundamental

questions, "Who are we?" and "What is the nature of the

Universe in which we live?" Our answers to these questions

dictate the quality and characteristics of our personal

relationships with family, friends and employers/employees.

When considered on a larger scale, they define societies.

It should be of little surprise that the world view which

is emerging calls into question many of the things Western

society holds to be true:

MYTH #1 Humanity has reached the pinnacle of its

development.

Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, drawing upon

comparative religious studies, medical science, anthropology,

and sports, has made a provocative case that there are more

advanced stages of human development. As a person reaches

these advanced levels of spiritual maturity, extraordinary

capacities begin to blossom — of love, vitality, personhood,

bodily awareness, intuition, perception, communication, and

volition.

First step: to recognize they exist. Most people do not.

Then, methods can be employed with conscious intention.

MYTH #2 We are completely separate from each other, nature,

and the Kosmos.

This myth of "other-than-me" has been responsible for wars,

the rape of the planet, and all forms and expressions of

human injustice. After alt, who in their right mind would

harm another if they experienced that person as part of

themselves? Stan Grof, in his research of non-ordinary states

of consciousness, summarizes by saying "the psyche and

consciousness of each of us is, in the last analysis,

commensurate with "All-That-Is" because there are no

absolute boundaries between the body/ego and the totality of

existence."

Dr. Larry Dossey's Era-3 medicine, where the thoughts,

attitudes, and healing intentions of one individual can

influence the physiology of another person (in contrast to

Era-z, prevailing mind-body medicine) is very well

supported by scientific studies into the healing power of

prayer. Now this can't happen according to the known

principles of physics and world view of traditional science.

Yet the preponderance of evidence suggests that indeed it

does.

MYTH #3 The physical world is all there is.

Materialistically bound, traditional science assumes that

anything that cannot be measured, tested in a laboratory, or

probed by the five senses or their technological extensions

simply doesn't exist. Ifs "not real." The consequence: all of

reality has been collapsed into physical reality. Spiritual, or

what I would call nonphysical, dimensions of reality have

been run out of town.

This clashes with the "perennial philosophy," that

philosophical consensus spanning ages, religions, traditions,

and cultures, which describes different but continuous

dimensions of reality. These run from the most dense and

least conscious — what we'd call "matter" — to the least

dense and most conscious, which we'd call spiritual.

Interestingly enough, this extended, multidimensional

model of reality is suggested by quantum theorists such as

Jack Scarfetti who describes superluminal travel. Other

dimensions of reality are used to explain travel that occurs

faster than the speed of light — the ultimate of speed limits.

Or consider the work of the legendary physicist, David

Bohm, with his explicate (physical) and implicate (nonphysical)

multidimensional model of reality.

This is no mere theory — the i982 Aspect Experiment

in France demonstrated, that two once-connected quantum

particles separated by vast distances remained somehow

connected. If one particle was changed, the other changed —

instantly. Scientists don't know the mechanics of how this

faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel can happen, though

some theorists suggest that this connection takes place via

doorways into higher dimensions.

So contrary to what those who pledge their allegiance to

the traditional paradigm might think, the influential,

pioneering individuals I spoke with felt that we have not

reached the pinnacle of human development, we are

connected, rather than separate, from all of life, and that the

full spectrum of consciousness encompasses both physical

and a multitude of nonphysical dimensions of reality.

At core, this new world view involves seeing yourself, others,

and all of life, not through the eyes of our small, earthly self

that lives in time and is born in time. But rather through the

eyes of the soul, our Being, the True Self. One by one,

people are jumping to this higher orbit.

With his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle

rightfully takes his place among this special group of worldclass

teachers. Eckhart’s message: the problem of humanity

is deeply rooted in the mind itself. Or rather, our

misidentification with mind.

Our drifting awareness, our tendency to take the path

of least resistance by being less than fully awake to the

present moment, creates a void. And the time-bound mind,

which has been designed to be a useful servant, compensates

by proclaiming itself master. Like a butterfly flittering from

one flower to another, the mind engages past experiences or,

projecting its own made-for-television movie, anticipates

what is to come. Seldom do we find ourselves resting in the

oceanic depth of the here and now. For it is here — in the

Now — where we find our True Self, which lies behind our

physical body, shifting emotions, and chattering mind.

The crowning glory of human development rests not in

our ability to reason and think, though this is what

distinguishes us from animals. Intellect, like instinct, is

merely a point along the way. Our ultimate destiny is to re16

connect with our essential Being and express from our

extraordinary, divine reality in the ordinary physical world,

moment by moment. Easy to say, yet rare are those who have

attained the further reaches of human development.

Fortunately, there are guides and teachers to help us

along the way. As a teacher and guide, Eckhart's formidable

power lies not in his adept ability to delight us with

entertaining stories, make the abstract concrete, or provide

useful technique. Rather, his magic is seated in his personal

experience, as one who knows. As a result, there is a power

behind his words found only in the most celebrated of

spiritual teachers. By living from the depths of this Greater

Reality, Eckhart clears an energetic pathway for others to

join him.

And what if others do? Surely the world as we know it

would change for the better. Values would shift in the

flotsam of vanishing fears that have been funneled away

through the whirlpool of Being itself. A new civilization

would be born.

"Where's the proof of this Greater Reality?" you ask. I

offer only an analogy. A battery of scientists can get together

and tell you about all the scientific proof for the fact that

bananas are bitter. But all you have to do is taste one, once,

to realize that there is this whole other aspect to bananas.

Ultimately, proof lies not in intellectual arguments, but in

being touched in some way by the sacred within and without.

Eckhart Tolle masterfully opens us to that possibility.

Russell E. DiCarlo

Author, Towards a New World View:

Conversations at the Leading Edge

Erie, Pennsylvania U.S.A.

January 1998

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply thankful to Connie Kellough for her loving

support and her vital part in transforming the manuscript into

this book and bringing it out into the world. It is a joy to

work with her.

I extend my gratitude to Corea Ladner and those

wonderful people who have contributed to this book by

giving me space, that most precious of gifts — space to write

and space to be. Thank you to Adrienne Bradley in

Vancouver, to Margaret Miller in London and Angie

Francesco in Glastonbury, England, Richard in Menlo Park

and Rennie Frumkin in Sausalito, California.

I am also thankful to Shirley Spaxman and Howard

Kellough for their early review of the manuscript and helpful

feedback as well as to those individuals who were kind

enough to review the manuscript at a later stage and provide

additional input. Thank you to Rose Dendewich for wordprocessing

the manuscript in her unique cheerful and

professional manner.

Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to

my mother and father, without whom this book would not

have come into existence, to my spiritual teachers, and to the

greatest guru of all: life.

You are here to enable the divine

purpose of the universe to unfold.

That is how important you are!

— Eckhart Tolle

INTRODUCTION

THE ORIGIN OF THIS BOOK

I have little use for the past and rarely think about it;

however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a

spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence.

Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost

continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal

depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past

lifetime or somebody else's life.

One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I

woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I

had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this

time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of

the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room,

the distant noise of a passing train everything felt so alien,

so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a

deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all,

however, was my own existence. What was the point m

continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on

with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep

longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now

becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to

continue to live.

"I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the

thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly

I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one

or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me:

the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I

thought, "only one of them is real."

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my

mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more

thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of

energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated.

I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to

shake. I heard the words "resist nothing," as if spoken inside

my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt

as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly,

there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I

have no recollection of what happened after that.

I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the

window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes

were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond.

Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would

be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was

filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I

knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize.

That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love

itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around

the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had

never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine,

as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a

pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and

aliveness of it all.

That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at

the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this

world.

For the next five months, I lived in a state of

uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished

somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it

became my natural state. I could still function in the world,

although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add

anything to what I already had.

I knew, of course, that something profoundly significant

had happened to me, but I didn't understand it at all. It wasn't

until several years later, after I had read spiritual texts and

spent time with spiritual teachers, that I realized that what

everybody was looking for had already happened to me. I

understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night

must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its

identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self,

which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal

must have been so complete that this false, suffering self

immediately collapsed, just as if a plug had been pulled out

of an inflatable toy. What was left then was my true nature as

the ever-present I am: consciousness in its pure state prior to

identification with form. Later I also learned to go into that

inner timeless and deathless realm that I had originally

perceived as a void and remain fully conscious. I dwelt in

states of such indescribable bliss and sacredness that even

the original experience I just described pales in comparison.

A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on

the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home,

no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting

on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.

But even the most beautiful experiences come and go.

More fundamental, perhaps, than any experience is the

undercurrent of peace that has never left me since then.

Sometimes it is very strong, almost palpable, and others can

feel it too. At other times, it is somewhere in the background,

like a distant melody.

Later, people would occasionally come up to me and

say: "I want what you have. Can you give it to me, or show

me how to get it?" And I would say: "You have it already.

You just can't feel it because your mind is making too much

noise." That answer later grew into the book that you are

holding in your hands.

Before I knew it, I had an external identity again. I had

become a spiritual teacher.

THE TRUTH THAT IS WITHIN YOU

This book represents the essence of my work, as far as it can

be conveyed in words, with individuals and small groups of

spiritual seekers during the past ten years, in Europe and in

North America. In deep love and appreciation, I would like

to thank those exceptional people for their courage, their

willingness to embrace inner change, thought that kept

repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware

of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I

cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and

the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only

one of them is real." their challenging questions, and their

readiness to listen. This book would not have come into

existence without them. They belong to what is as yet a small

but fortunately growing minority of spiritual pioneers:

people who are reaching a point where they become capable

of breaking out of inherited collective mind-patterns that

have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.

I trust that this book will find its way to those who are

ready for such radical inner transformation and so act as a

catalyst for it. I also hope that it will reach many others who

will find its content worthy of consideration, although they

may not be ready to fully live or practice it. It is possible that

at a later time, the seed that was sown when reading this

book will merge with the seed of enlightenment that each

human being carries within, and suddenly that seed will

sprout and come alive within them.

The book in its present form originated, often spontaneously,

in response to questions asked by individuals in seminars,

meditation classes and private counseling sessions, and so I

have kept the question-and-answer format. I learned and

received as much in those classes and sessions as the

questioners. Some of the questions and answers I wrote

down almost verbatim. Others are generic, which is to say I

combined certain types of questions that were frequently

asked into one, and extracted the essence from different

answers to form one generic answer. Sometimes, in the

process of writing, an entirely new answer came that was

more profound or insightful than anything I had ever uttered.

Some additional questions were asked by the editor so as to

provide further clarification of certain points.

You will find that from the first to the last page, the

dialogues continuously alternate between two different levels.

On one level, I draw your attention to what is false in

you. I speak of the nature of human unconsciousness and

dysfunction as well as its most common behavioral

manifestations, from conflict in relationships to warfare

between tribes or nations. Such knowledge is vital, for unless

you learn to recognize the false as false — as not you —

there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always

end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of

pain. On this level, I also show you how not to make that

which is false in you into a self and into a personal problem,

for that is how the false perpetuates itself.

On another level, I speak of a profound transformation

of human consciousness — not as a distant future possibility,

but available now no matter who or where you are. You are

shown how to free yourself from enslavement to the mind,

enter into this enlightened state of consciousness and sustain

it in everyday life.

On this level of the book, the words are not always

concerned with information, but often designed to draw you

into this new consciousness as you read. Again and again, I

endeavor to take you with me into that timeless state of

intense conscious presence in the Now, so as to give you a

taste of enlightenment. Until you are able to experience what

I speak of, you may find those passages somewhat repetitive.

As soon as you do, however, I believe you will realize that

they contain a great deal of spiritual power, and they may

become for you the most rewarding parts of the book.

Moreover, since every person carries the seed of

enlightenment within, I often address myself to the knower

in you who dwells behind the thinker, the deeper self that

immediately recognizes spiritual truth, resonates with it, and

gains strength from it.

The pause symbol § after certain passages is a suggestion

that you may want to stop reading for a moment, become still,

and feel and experience the truth of what has just been said.

There may be other places in the text where you will do this

naturally and spontaneously.

As you begin reading the book, the meaning of certain

words, such as "Being" or "presence," may not be entirely

clear to you at first. Just read on. Questions or objections

may occasionally come into your mind as you read. They

will probably be answered later in the book, or they may turn

out to be irrelevant as you go more deeply into the teaching

— and into yourself.

Don't read with the mind only. Watch out for any

"feeling-response" as you read and a sense of recognition

from deep within. I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that

deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind

you of what you have forgotten. Living knowledge, ancient

and yet ever new, is then activated and released from within

every cell of your body.

The mind always wants to categorize and compare, but

this book will work better for you if you do not attempt to

compare its terminology with that of other teachings;

otherwise, you will probably become confused. I use words

such as "mind," "happiness," and "consciousness" in ways

that do not necessarily correlate with other teachings. Don't

get attached to any words. They are only stepping stones, to

be left behind as quickly as possible.

When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the

Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings,

I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to

the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one

spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of

these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so

overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence

has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large

extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer

recognized and their transformative power lost. When I

quote from the ancient religions or other teachings, it is to

reveal their deeper meaning and thereby restore their

transformative power — particularly for those readers who

are followers of these religions or teachings. I say to them:

there is no need to go elsewhere for the truth. Let me show

you how to go more deeply into what you already have.

Mostly, however, I have endeavored to use terminology

that is as neutral as possible in order to reach a wide range of

people. This book can be seen as a restatement for our time

of that one timeless spiritual teaching, the essence of all

religions. It is not derived from external sources, but from

the one true Source within, so it contains no theory or

speculation. I speak from inner experience, and if at times I

speak forcefully, it is to cut through heavy layers of mental

resistance and to reach that place within you where you

already know, just as I know, and where the truth is

recognized when it is heard. There is then a feeling of

exaltation and heightened aliveness, as something within you

says: "Yes. I know this is true."

Chapter One

YOU ARE NOT YOURMIND

THE GREATEST OBSTACLE TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment — what is that?

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty

years. One day a stranger walked by. "Spare some change?"

mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old

baseball cap. "I have nothing to give you," said the stranger.

Then he asked: "What's that you are sitting on? " " Nothing,"

replied the beggar. "Just an old box. I have been sitting on it

for as long as I can remember. " " Ever looked inside?" asked

the stranger. "No," said the beggar. "What’s the point?

There's nothing in there." "Have a look inside," insisted the

stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With

astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was

filled with gold.

I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who

is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the

parable, but somewhere even closer, inside yourself.

"But I am not a beggar," I can hear you say.

Those who have not found their true wealth, which is

the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that

comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material

wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or

fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have

a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is

infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some

superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it

that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness

with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something

immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost

paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than

you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.

The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the

illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world

around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or

unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and

conflict within and without becomes the norm.

I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment

as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in

that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It

only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But

what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is

silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find

out for yourself. He uses a negative definition so that the

mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a

superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for

you to attain. Despite this precaution, the majority of

Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the Buddha,

not for them, at least not in this lifetime.

You used the word Being. Can you explain what you mean by

that?

Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the

myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.

However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within

every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible

essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your

own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it

with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it

only when the mind is still. When you are present, when

your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be

felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain

awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feelingrealization"

is enlightenment.

When you say Being, are you talking about God? If you are,

then why don't you say it?

The word God has become empty of meaning through

thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so

sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never

even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness

behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they

knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as

if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse

gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions,

such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God

is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead."

The word God has become a closed concept. The

moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no

longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a

mental representation of someone or something outside you,

and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.

Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or

explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only

important question is whether the word is a help or a

hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which

it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental

reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more

than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?

The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God.

Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept.

It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is

impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim

exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it

is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own

presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am

that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the

experience of Being.

What is the greatest obstacle to experiencing this reality?

Identification with your mind, which causes thought to

become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a

dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost

everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.

This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that

realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also

creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear

and suffering. We will look at all that in more detail later.

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found

the most fundamental truth when he made his famous

statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given

expression to the most basic error, to equate thinking with

Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker,

which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent

separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous

problems and conflict, a world that reflects the everincreasing

fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a

state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace.

At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as

with your deepest self and life unmanifested — at one with

Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of

continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of

the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an

incredible liberation this is!

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen

of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and

definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between

you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and

woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is

this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness,

the illusion that there is you and a totally separate "other."

You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level

of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with

all that is. By "forget," I mean that you can no longer feel this

oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true,

but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be

comforting. Only through your own experience, however,

does it become liberating.

Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when

things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing

wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but

when this process continues in disregard of the total

organism, cells proliferate and we have disease.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used

wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it

more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind

wrongly — you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is

the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the

delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

I don't quite agree. It is true that I do a lot of aimless

thinking, like most people, but I can still choose to use my

mind to get and accomplish things, and I do that all the time.

Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an

atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as

dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into

problems. That’s why it does crossword puzzles and builds

atom bombs. You have no interest in either. Let me ask you

this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to?

Have you found the "off" button?

You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except

maybe for a moment or two.

Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously

identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its

slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it,

and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The

beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the

possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to

observe the entity. The moment you start watching the

thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.

You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of

intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny

aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things

that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace

— arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.

FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND

What exactly do you mean by "watching the thinker"?

When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in

my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist.

The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone

hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the

involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have

the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.

You have probably come across "mad" people in the

street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well,

that’s not much different from what you and all other

"normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The

voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains,

likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant

to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be

reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining

possible future situations. Here it often imagines things

going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry.

Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images

or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the

situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This

is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind,

which is the result of all your past history as well as of the

collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and

judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a

totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice

to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a

tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and

punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause

of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.

The good news is that you can free yourself from your

mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first

step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as

often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive

thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have

been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is

what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way

of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the

witnessing presence.

When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially.

That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what

you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has

come in again through the back door. You'll soon realize:

there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it.

This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not

a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of

the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought.

A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you

listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your

deeper self— behind or underneath the thought, as it were.

The thought then loses its power over you and quickly

subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind

through identification with it. This is the beginning of the

end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

When a thought subsides, you experience a

discontinuity in the mental stream — a gap of "no-mind." At

first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but

gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur,

you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the

beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being,

which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the

sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no

end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy

arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There is no loss of

consciousness here. The opposite is the case. If the price of

peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price

of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would

not be worth having. In this state of inner connectedness, you

are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified

state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational

frequency of the energy field that gives life to the physical

body.

As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, as

it is sometimes called in the East, you realize the state of

pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence

with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all

emotions, your physical body, as well as the whole external

world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it.

And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you

beyond what you previously thought of as "your self." That

presence is essentially you and at the same time

inconceivably greater than you. What I am trying to convey

here may sound paradoxical or even contradictory, but there

is no other way that I can express it.

Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap

in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your

attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of

the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do.

In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind

activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly

alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of

meditation.

In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking

any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end

and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end

in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the

stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to

every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally

present. Or when you wash your hands, pay attention to all

the sense perceptions associated with the activity: the sound

and feel of the water, the movement of your hands, the scent

of the soap, and so on. Or when you get into your car, after

you close the door, pause for a few seconds and observe the

flow of your breath. Become aware of a silent but powerful

sense of presence. There is one certain criterion by which

you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of

peace that you feel within.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward

enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light

of your consciousness grows stronger.

One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in

your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This

means that you no longer take the content of your mind all

that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

ENLIGHTENMENT: RISING ABOVE THOUGHT

Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world?

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a

specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it

down. As it is, I would say about 8o to 90 percent of most

people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but

because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much

of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find

this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an

addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this:

you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems

stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure,

pleasure that invariably turns into pain.

Why should we be addicted to thinking?

Because you are identified with it, which means that you

derive your sense of self from the content and activity of

your mind. Because you believe that you would cease to be if

you stopped thinking. As you grow up, you form a mental

image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural

conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It

consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through

constant thinking. The term ego means different things to

different people, but when I use it here it means a false self,

created by unconscious identification with the mind.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past

and future are considered important. This total reversal of the

truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so

dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past

alive, because without it — who are you? It constantly

projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival

and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says:

"One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going

to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be

concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It

misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the

eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an

end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future.

Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.

The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you

cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.

I don't want to lose my ability to analyze and discriminate. I

wouldn't mind learning to think more clearly, in a more

focused way, but I don't want to lose my mind. The gift of

thought is the most precious thing we have. Without it, we

would just be another species of animal.

The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the

evolution of consciousness. We need to go on to the next

stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be

destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster. I

will talk about this in more detail later. Thinking and

consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small

aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without

consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.

Enlightenment means rising above thought, not filling

back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a

plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking

mind when needed, but in a much more focused and

effective way than before. You use it mostly for practical

purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal

dialogue, and there is inner stillness. When you do use your

mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed,

you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and

stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is

consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it

possible to think creatively, because only in that way does

thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no

longer connected with the much vaster realm of

consciousness, quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and

defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and

analyzing information — this is what it is good at, but it is

not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or

not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The

mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even

the great scientists have reported that their creative

breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The

surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America's

most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out

their working methods, was that thinking "plays only a

subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative

act itself." So I would say that the simple reason why the

majority of scientists are not creative is not because they

don't know how to think but because they don't know how to

stop thinking!

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the

miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and

are being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work

that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human

cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across contain instructions

within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages

each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the

more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work

within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects

with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves

something greater than itself.

EMOTION: THE BODY'S REACTION TO YOUR MIND

What about emotions? I get caught up in my emotions more

than I do in my mind.

Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It

includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mentalemotional

reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place

where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your

mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the

body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought

will create a build-up of energy in the body that we call

anger The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that

you are being threatened, physically or psychologically,

causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of

what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions

even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These

biochemical changes represent the physical or material

aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually

conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only

through watching your emotions that you can bring them into

awareness.

The more you are identified with your thinking, your

likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to

say the less present you are as the watching consciousness,

the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether

you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions,

if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience

them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or

symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent

years, so we don't need to go into it here. A strong

unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an

external event that appears to just happen to you. For

example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of

anger inside without being aware of it and without

expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even

physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent

reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain

people pick up subliminally and that triggers their own latent

anger.

If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by

focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body.

Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch

with your emotions. We will explore this in more detail later.

You sap that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body.

But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind

saps "no" while the emotion saps "yes,' or the other way

around.

If you really want to know your mind, the body will always

give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion or rather

feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between

them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.

Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth

of your state of mind at that time.

Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious

mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be

able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness

as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an

emotion, and of this you can become aware. To watch an

emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or

watching a thought, which I described earlier. The only

difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion

has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in

the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without

being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you

are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this,

all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of

consciousness.

So observing our emotions is as important as observing our

thoughts?

Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself. What’s going on inside

me at this moment? That question will point you in the right

direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention

within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion

present, take your attention more deeply into the inner

energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.

An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized

thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering

energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present

enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and

it usually succeeds — unless there is enough presence in you.

If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the

emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the

emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle

builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed

each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified

reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the

vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the

original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the

situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the

emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in

turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one

primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the

loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.

Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a

name that precisely describes this emotion. "Fear" comes

close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also

includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It

may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that

basic emotion and simply call it "pain." One of the main

tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain,

which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it

can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the

harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater

the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it

afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an

intrinsic part of the "problem." Imagine a chief of police

trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of

police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to

derive your sense of self from identification with the mind,

which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its

place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

Yes, I know what you are going to ask.

I was going to ask: What about positive emotions such as

love and joy?

They are inseparable from your natural state of inner

connectedness with Being. Glimpses of love and joy or brief

moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs

in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen

rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is

rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty,

extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly,

there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a

subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.

Usually, such moments are short-lived, as the mind

quickly resumes its noise-making activity that we call

thinking. Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have

freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I

would call emotions. They lie beyond the emotions, on a

much deeper level. So you need to become fully conscious of

your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel

that which lies beyond them. Emotion literally means

"disturbance." The word comes from the Latin emovere,

meaning "to disturb."

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being or

rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with

Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they

arise from beyond the mind. Emotions, on the other hand,

being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of

opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good

without bad. So in the unenlightened, mind-identified

condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the

usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously

alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived

from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you

pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give

you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be

pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive

clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its

opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships,

after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate

between "love" and hate, attraction and attack.

Real love doesn't make you suffer. How could it? It

doesn't suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into

pain. As I said, even before you are enlightened — before

you have freed yourself from your mind — you may get

glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner peace, still

but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature,

which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a

"normal'' addictive relationship, there can be moments when

the presence of something more genuine, something

incorruptible, can be felt. But they will only be glimpses,

soon to be covered up again through mind interference. It

may then seem that you had something very precious and

lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an

illusion anyway. The truth is that it wasn't an illusion, and

you cannot lose it. It is part of your natural state, which can

be obscured but can never be destroyed by the mind. Even

when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared.

It's still there on the other side of the clouds.

The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire

or craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the

bonds of desire.

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in

external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of

Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those

needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from

them there is no 'I' except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled

potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even

my desire to become free or enlightened is just another

craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don't

seek to become free of desire or "achieve" enlightenment.

Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.

Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be "the

awakened one," which is what the word buddha means.

Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever

since they fell from the state of grace, entered the realm of

time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point,

they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments

in an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each

other.Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your

mind, which is to say as long as you are unconscious,

spiritually speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional

pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and

physical disease. Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger,

depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest irritation,

are all forms of pain. And every pleasure or emotional high

contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable

opposite, which will manifest in time.

Anybody who has ever taken drugs to get "high" will

know that the high eventually turns into a low, that the

pleasure turns into some form of pain. Many people also

know from their own experience how easily and quickly an

intimate relationship can turn from a source of pleasure to a

source of pain. Seen from a higher perspective, both the

negative and the positive polarities are faces of the same coin,

are both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from

the mind-identified egoic state of consciousness.

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you

create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in

your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present

and dissolving past pain — this is what I want to talk about

now.

Chapter Two

CONSCIOUSNESS:

THEWAY OUT OF PAIN

CREATE NO MORE PAIN IN THE PRESENT

Nobody's life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn't it a

question of learning to live with them rather than trying to

avoid them?

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is selfcreated

as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

The pain that you create now is always some form of

nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what

is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of

judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of

negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of

resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on

how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind

always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other

words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more

you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able

to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain,

of suffering — and free of the egoic mind.

Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now?

Because it cannot function and remain in control without

time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless

Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.

Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only

by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future?

Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The

question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?" — if

anybody were there to ask it— would be quite meaningless.

The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a

question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's

now. The time is now. What else is there?"

Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in

this world, but there comes a point where they take over our

lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks

continuously to cover up the present moment with past and

future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of

Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered

up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind.

An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating

in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this

burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment

whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or

reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which

only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The accumulation

of time in the collective and individual human mind also

holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.

If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and

others, if you no longer want to add to the residue of past

pain that still lives on in you, then don’t create any more

time, or at least no more than is necessary to deal with the

practical aspects of your life. How to stop creating time?

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.

Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas

before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now,

have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to

past and future when required to deal with the practical

aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present

moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to

create inner resistance to something that already is? What

could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now

and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life —

and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than

against you.

The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant,

or awful.

It is as it is. Observe how the mind labels it and how this

labeling process, this continuous sitting in judgment, creates

pain and unhappiness. By watching the mechanics of the

mind, you step out of its resistance patterns, and you can

then allow the present moment to be. This will give you a

taste of the state of inner freedom from external conditions,

the state of true inner peace. Then see what happens, and

take action if necessary or possible.

Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment

contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with

it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your

enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.

PAST PAIN: DISSOLVING THE PAIN-BODY

As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now,

every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a

residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain

from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged

in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you

suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the

world into which you were born.

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that

occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an

invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to

the truth. It’s the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of

being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90

percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it

may be active up to mo percent of the time. Some people live

almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may

experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate

relationships, or situations linked with past loss or

abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on.

Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain

pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its

dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made

by someone close to you can activate it.

Some pain-bodies are obnoxious but relatively harmless,

for example like a child who won't stop whining. Others are

vicious and destructive monsters, true demons. Some are

physically violent; many more are emotionally violent. Some

will attack people around you or close to you, while others

may attack you, their host. Thoughts and feelings you have

about your life then become deeply negative and selfdestructive.

Illnesses and accidents are often created in this

way. Some pain-bodies drive their hosts to suicide.

When you thought you knew a person and then you are

suddenly confronted with this alien, nasty creature for the

first time, you are in for quite a shock. However, it's more

important to observe it in yourself than in someone else.

Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in

whatever form — it may be the awakening pain-body. This

can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a

desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some

drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it

awakens from its dormant state.

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other

entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to

unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you

over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its

"food" through you. It will feed on any experience that

resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates

further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred,

grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the

pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation

in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it

to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on

joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more

pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to

inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't

really much difference between the two. You are not

conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that

you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that

your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain

going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of

it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is

insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the

ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is

afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your

unconscious identification with it, as well as on your

unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if

you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your

consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it

again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a

dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I

assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot

prevail against the power of your presence.

Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately

an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you?

A mere belief doesn't make it true. Do you want to

experience pain for the rest of your life and keep saying that

it is an illusion? Does that free you from the pain? What we

are concerned with here is how you can realize this truth —

that is, make it real in your own experience.

So the pain-body doesn't want you to observe it directly

and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its

energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the

identification is broken. A higher dimension of

consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now

the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that

it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it

can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found

your own innermost strength. You have accessed the power

of Now.

What happens to the pain-body when we become conscious

enough to break our identification with it?

Unconsciousness creates it; consciousness transmutes it into

itself. St. Paul expressed this universal principle beautifully:.

"Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and

whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light." Just as

you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body.

Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further

pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it

as part of what is at that moment.

The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has

split off from your total energy field and has temporarily

become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind

identification. It has turned in on itself and become anti-life,

like an animal trying to devour its own tail. Why do you

think our civilization has become so life-destructive? But

even the life-destructive forces are still life-energy.

When you start to disidentify and become the watcher,

the pain-body will continue to operate for a while and will

try to trick you into identifying with it again. Although you

are no longer energizing it through your identification, it has

a certain momentum, just like a spinning wheel that will

keep turning for a while even when it is no longer being

propelled. At this stage, it may also create physical aches and

pains in different parts of the body, but they won’t last. Stay

present, stay conscious. Be the ever-alert guardian of your

inner space. You need to be present enough to be able to

watch the pain-body directly and feel its energy. It then

cannot control your thinking. The moment your thinking is

aligned with the energy field of the pain-body, you are

identified with it and again feeding it with your thoughts.

For example, if anger is the predominant energy

vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts,

dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going

to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and

the pain-body has become "you." Where there is anger, there

is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes

upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern

and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has

become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become

unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack.

"Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be

identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a

complete absence of the watcher.

Sustained conscious attention severs the link between

the pain-body and your thought processes and brings about

the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain becomes fuel

for the flame of your consciousness, which then burns more

brightly as a result. This is the esoteric meaning of the

ancient art of alchemy:, the transmutation of base metal into

gold, of suffering into consciousness. The split within is

healed, and you become whole again. Your responsibility

then is not to create further pain.

Let me summarize the process. Focus attention on the

feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that

it is there. Don't think about it — don't let the feeling turn

into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity

for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the

observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not

only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who

observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now,

the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what

happens.

For many women, the pain-body awakens particularly at the

time preceding the menstrual flow. I will talk about this and

the reason for it in more detail later. Right now, let me just

say this: If you are able to stay alert and present at that time

and watch whatever you feel within, rather than be taken

over by it, it affords an opportunity for the most powerful

spiritual practice, and a rapid transmutation of all past pain

becomes possible.

EGO IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PAIN-BODY

The process that I have just described is profoundly powerful

yet simple. It could be taught to a child, and hopefully one

day it will be one of the first things children learn in school.

Once you have understood the basic principle of being

present as the watcher of what happens inside you — and

you "understand" it by experiencing it — you have at your

disposal the most potent transformational tool.

This is not to deny that you may encounter intense inner

resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the

case particularly if you have lived closely identified with

your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole

or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What

this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your

pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who

you are. In that case, unconscious fear of losing your identity

will create strong resistance to any disidentification. In other

words, you would rather be in pain — be the pain-body —

than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar

unhappy self.

If this applies to you, observe the resistance within

yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert.

Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being

unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it.

The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can

then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as

the witness, and so initiate its transmutation.

Only you can do this. Nobody can do it for you. But if

you are fortunate enough to find someone who is intensely

conscious, if you can be with them and join them in the state

of presence, that can be helpful and will accelerate things. In

this way, your own light will quickly grow stronger. When a

log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that

is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again,

the first log will be burning with much greater intensity.

After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the

functions of a spiritual teacher. Some therapists may also be

able to fulfill that function, provided that they have gone

beyond the level of mind and can create and sustain a state of

intense conscious presence while they are working with you.

THE ORIGIN OF FEAR

You mentioned fear as being part of our basic underlying

emotional pain. How does fear arise, and why is there so

much of it in people's lives? And isn't a certain amount of

fear just healthy self protection? If I didn't have a fear of

fire, I might put my hand in it and get burned.

The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not

because of fear, ifs because you know that you'll get burned.

You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger — just a

minimum of intelligence and common sense. For such

practical matters, it is useful to apply the lessons learned in

the past. Now if someone threatened you with fire or with

physical violence, you might experience something like fear.

This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but not the

psychological condition of fear that we are talking about here.

The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any

concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms:

unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia,

and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of

something that might happen, not of something that is

happening now. You are in the here and now, while your

mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you

are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the

power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be

your constant companion. You can always cope with the

present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is

only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind,

the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its

phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms,

the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as

constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if

the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an

emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is

the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false,

mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the

emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of

course.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of

failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is

the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is

always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state,

fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example,

even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the

compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the

other person wrong — defending the mental position with

which you have identified — is due to the fear of death. If

you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong,

your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with

annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To

be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and

countless relationships have broken down.

Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether

you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of

self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply

unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence,

will no longer be there. You can state dearly and firmly how

you feel or what you think, but there will be no

aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self

is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself,

not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness

within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory

identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By

making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you

disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the

unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the

end of all arguments and power games, which are so

corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness

disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is

available to you now.

So anyone who is identified with their mind and,

therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper

self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant

companion. The number of people who have gone beyond

mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that

virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear.

Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety

and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and

distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become

conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute

forms.

THE EGO'S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS

Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part

of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or

incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is

conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it

manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being

worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be

felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In

either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit

of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill

this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions,

money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship,

basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel

more complete. But even when they attain all these things,

they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless.

Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude

themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more

difficult.

As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you

cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled

except for brief intervals when you obtained what you

wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego

is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external

things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The

most common ego identifications have to do with

possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition,

knowledge and education, physical appearance, special

abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief

systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial,

religious, and other collective identifications. None of these

is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know

this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or

later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am

certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot

be found in any of those things. You will know the troth of it

for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel

death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not

you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" — and find

that there is no death.

Chapter One

MOVING DEEPLY INTO THE NOW

DON'T SEEK YOUR SELF IN THE MIND

I feel that there is still ct great deal I need to learn about the

workings of my mind before I can get anywhere near full

consciousness or spiritual enlightenment.

No, you don't. The problems of the mind cannot be solved on

the level of the mind. Once you have understood the basic

dysfunction, there isn’t really much else that you need to

learn or understand. Studying the complexities of the mind

may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won't take

you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn't

enough to create sanity. You have already understood the

basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with

the mind, which creates a false self, the ego, as a substitute

for your true self rooted in Being. You become as a "branch

cut off from the vine," as Jesus puts it.

The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and

threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you

know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to

explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it

into a complex personal problem. The ego, of course, loves

that. It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in

order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self, and

it will readily attach itself to your problems. This is why, for

so many people, a large part of their sense of self is

intimately connected with their problems. Once this has

happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them;

that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of

unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

So once you recognize the root of unconsciousness as

identification with the mind, which of course includes the

emotions, you step out of it. You become present. When you

are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without

getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is not dysfunctional.

It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek

your self in it and mistake it for who you are. It then

becomes the egoic mind and takes over your whole life.

END THE DELUSION OF TIME

It seems almost impossible to disidentify from the mind. We

are all immersed in it. How do you teach a fish to fly?

Here is the key: End the delusion of time. Time and mind are

inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops —

unless you choose to use it.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time:

the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory

and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with

past and future and an unwillingness to honor and

acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The

compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and

the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in

whatever form. Both are illusions.

But without a sense of time, how would we function in this

world? There would be no goals to strive toward anymore. I

wouldn't even know who I am, because my past makes me

who I am today. I think time is something very precious, and

we need to learn to use it wisely rather than waste it.

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you

perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out

of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are

focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the

Now, the most precious thing there is.

Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is

the only thing. It’s all there is. The eternal present is the

space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor

that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time

when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly,

the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the

limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access

into the timeless and formless realm of Being.

NOTHING EXISTS OUTSIDE THE NOW

Aren't past and future just as real, sometimes even more real,

than the present? After all, the past determines who we are,

as well as how we perceive and behave in the present. And

our future goals determine which actions we take in the

present.

You haven’t yet grasped the essence of what I am saying

because you are trying to understand it mentally. The mind

cannot understand this. Only you can. Please just listen.

Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt

anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it

possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now? The

answer is obvious, is it not?

Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the

Now.

Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in

the Now.

What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored

in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past,

you reactivate a memory trace — and you do so now. The

future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When

the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think

about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously

have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of

its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past

and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and

reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed"

from the Now.

The essence of what I am saying here cannot be

understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a

shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to

presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy,

emanates Being.

THE KEY TO THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in

consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens

naturally. The personality that has a past and a future

momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious

presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever

response is needed then arises out of that state of

consciousness.

The reason why some people love to engage in

dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing,

and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it

forces them into the Now — that intensely alive state that is

free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the

burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present

moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately,

they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that

state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger.

You can enter that state now.

Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have

pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension.

Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret. It is

certainly not taught in churches and temples. If you go to a

church, you may hear readings from the Gospels such as

"Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take

thought for the things of itself," or "Nobody who puts his

hands to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of

God." Or you might hear the passage about the beautiful

flowers that are not anxious about tomorrow but live with

ease in the timeless Now and are provided for abundantly by

God. The depth and radical nature of these teachings are not

recognized. No one seems to realize that they are meant to be

lived and so bring about a profound inner transformation.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the

razor's edge of Now — to be so utterly, so completely

present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who

you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in

the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering

needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

The great Zen master Rinzai, in order to take his

students' attention away from time, would often raise his

finger and slowly ask: "What, at this moment, is lacking?" A

powerful question that does not require an answer on the

level of the mind. It is designed to take your attention deeply

into the Now. A similar question in the Zen tradition is this:

"If not now, when?"

The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the

mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: "The Sufi is

the son of time present." And Rumi, the great poet and

teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from

our sight; burn up both of them with fire."

Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher,

summed it all up beautifully "Time is what keeps the light

from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than

time."

ACCESSING THE POWER OF THE NOW

A moment ago, when you talked about the eternal present

and the unreality of past and future, I found myself looking at

that tree outside the window. I had looked at it a few times

before, but this time it was different. The external perception

had not changed much, except that the colors seemed

brighter and more vibrant. But there was now an added

dimension to it. This is hard to explain. I don't know how, but

I was aware of something invisible that I felt was the essence

of that tree, its inner spirit, if you like. And somehow I was

part of that. I realize now that I hadn't truly seen the tree

before, just a flat and dead image of it. When I look at the

tree now, some of that awareness is still present, but I can

feel it slipping away. You see, the experience is already

receding into the past. Can something like this ever be more

than affecting glimpse?

You were free of time for a moment. You moved into the

Now and therefore perceived the tree without the screen of

mind. The awareness of Being became part of your

perception. With the timeless dimension comes a different

kind of knowing, one that does not "kill" the spirit that lives

within every creature and every thing. A knowing that does

not destroy the sacredness and mystery of life but contains a

deep love and reverence for all that is. A knowing of which

the mind knows nothing.

The mind cannot know the tree. It can only know facts

or information about the tree. My mind cannot know you,

only labels, judgments, facts, and opinions about you. Being

alone knows directly.

There is a place for mind and mind knowledge. It is in

the practical realm of day-to-day living. However, when it

takes over all aspects of your life, including your

relationships with other human beings and with nature, it

becomes a monstrous parasite that, unchecked, may well end

up killing all life on the planet and finally itself by killing its

host.

You have had a glimpse of how the timeless can

transform your perceptions. But an experience is not enough,

no matter how beautiful or profound. What is needed and

what we are concerned with is a permanent shift in

consciousness.

So break the old pattern of present-moment denial and

present-moment resistance. Make it your practice to

withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are

not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as

possible in everyday life. If you find it hard to enter the Now

directly, start by observing the habitual tendency of your

mind to want to escape from the Now. You will observe that

the future is usually imagined as either better or worse than

the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope

or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety.

Both are illusory. Through self-observation, more presence

comes into your life automatically. The moment you realize

you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able

to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.

Another factor has come in, something that is not of the mind:

the witnessing presence.

Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your

thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various

situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the

situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how

often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or

analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the

emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal

problem out of them. You will then feel something more

powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still,

observing presence itself behind the content of your mind,

the silent watcher.

Intense presence is needed when certain situations trigger a

reaction with a strong emotional charge, such as when your

self-image is threatened, a challenge comes into your life that

triggers fear, things "go wrong," or an emotional complex

from the past is brought up. In those instances, the tendency

is for you to become "unconscious." The reaction or emotion

takes you over — you "become" it. You act it out. You

justify, make wrong, attack, defend . . . except that it isn't

you, it's the reactive pattern, the mind in its habitual survival

mode.

Identification with the mind gives it more energy;,

observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.

Identification with the mind creates more time; observation

of the mind opens up the dimension of the timeless. The

energy that is withdrawn from the mind turns into presence.

Once you can feel what it means to be present, it becomes

much easier to simply choose to step out of the time

dimension whenever time is not needed for practical

purposes and move more deeply into the Now. This does not

impair your ability to use time — past or future — when you

need to refer to it for practical matters. Nor does it impair

your ability to use your mind. In fact, it enhances it. When

you do use your mind, it will be sharper, more focused.

LETTING GO OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME

Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life — we

may call this "clock time" — but immediately return to

present-moment awareness when those practical matters

have been dealt with. In this way, there will be no build-up

of "psychological time," which is identification with the past

and continuous compulsive projection into the future.

Clock time is not just making an appointment or

planning a trip. It includes learning from the past so that we

don't repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals

and working toward them. Predicting the future by means of

patterns and laws, physical, mathematical and so on, learned

from the past and taking appropriate action on the basis of

our predictions.

But even here, within the sphere of practical living,

where we cannot do without reference to past and future, the

present moment remains the essential factor, Any lesson

from the past becomes relevant and is applied now. Any

planning as well as working toward achieving a particular

goal is done now.

The enlightened person's main focus of attention is

always the Now, but they are still peripherally aware of time.

In other words, they continue to use clock time but are free

of psychological time.

Be alert as you practice this so that you do not

unwittingly transform clock time into psychological time.

For example, if you made a mistake in the past and learn

from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if

you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt

come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and

"mine": you make it part of your sense of self, and it has

become psychological time, which is always linked to a false

sense of identity. Nonforgiveness necessarily implies a heavy

burden of psychological time.

If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are

using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go,

but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that

you are taking at this moment. If you then become

excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are

seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of

self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced

to a mere stepping stone to the future, with no intrinsic value.

Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life's

journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to

arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the

flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the

beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you

when you are present in the Now.

I can see the supreme importance of the Now, but I cannot

quite go along with you when you say that time is a complete

illusion.

When I say "time is an illusion," my intention is not to make

a philosophical statement. I am just reminding you of a

simple fact — a fact so obvious that you may find it hard to

grasp and may even find it meaningless — but once fully

realized, it can cut like a sword through all the mind-created

layers of complexity and "problems." Let me say it again: the

present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time

when your life is not "this moment." Is this not a fact?

THE INSANITY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME

You will not have any doubt that psychological time is a

mental disease if you look at its collective manifestations.

They occur, for example, in the form of ideologies such as

communism, national socialism or any nationalism, or rigid

religious belief systems, which operate under the implicit

assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that

therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a

point in the mind-projected future, when salvation in

whatever form happiness, fulfillment, equality, liberation,

and so on — will be attained. Not infrequently, the means of

getting there are the enslavement, torture, and murder of

people in the present.

For example, it is estimated that as many as 50 million

people were murdered to further the cause of communism, to

bring about a "better world" in Russia, China, and other

countries. This is a chilling example of how belief in a future

heaven creates a present hell. Can there be any doubt that

psychological time is a serious and dangerous mental illness?

How does this mind pattern operate in your life? Are

you always trying to get somewhere other than where you

are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is

fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to

short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or

thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming,

achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new

thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more

things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or

psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or

woman to give meaning to your life?

In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of

consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that

lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by

psychological time. Your life then loses its vibrancy, its

freshness, its sense of wonder. The old patterns of thought,

emotion, behavior, reaction, and desire are acted out in

endless repeat performances, a script in your mind that gives

you an identity of sorts but distorts or covers up the reality of

the Now. The mind then creates an obsession with the future

as an escape from the unsatisfactory present.

NEGATIVITY AND SUFFERING HAVE THEIR ROOTS IN

TIME

But the belief that the future will be better than the present is

not always an illusion. The present can be dreadful, and

things can get better in the future, and often they do.

Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial

changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and

depends upon whether you can become present enough to

dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now. What

you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of

consciousness now. If your mind carries a heavy burden of

past, you will experience more of the same. The past

perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of

your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future

— which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.

You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no

more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out

the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious

surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead

of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one

person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that

real change?

If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment

that determines the future, then what is it that determines the

quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So

the only place where true change can occur and where the

past can be dissolved is the Now.

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological

time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension,

stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much

future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment,

grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of

nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough

presence.

Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of

consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And

yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings

point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future

but right here and now.

You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause

of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are

caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a

conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt

with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind —

its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now —

problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems

or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were

miraculously removed for you today, but you had not

become more present, more conscious, you would soon find

yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering,

like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately,

there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.

I cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am

completely free of my problems.

You are right. You can never reach that point because you

are at that point now.

There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the

future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be

free now.

FINDING THE LIFE UNDERNEATH YOUR LIFE SITUATION

I don't see how I can be free now. As it happens, I am

extremely unhappy with my life at the moment. This is a fact,

and I would be deluding myself if I tried to convince myself

that all is well when it definitely isn't. To me, the present

moment is very unhappy; it is not liberating at all. What

keeps me going is the hope or possibility of some

improvement in the future.

You think that your attention is in the present moment when

it's actually taken up completely by time. You cannot be both

unhappy and fully present in the Now.

What you refer to as your "life" should more accurately

be called your "life situation." It is psychological time: past

and future. Certain things in the past didn't go the way you

wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in

the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what

keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future,

and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now

and therefore your unhappiness.

It is true that my present life situation is the result of things

that happened in the past, but it is still my present situation,

and being stuck in it is what makes me unhappy.

Forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention

to your life.

What is the difference?

Your life situation exists in time.

Your life is now.

Your life situation is mind-stuff.

Your life is real.

Find the "narrow gate that leads to life." It is called the

Now. Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life

situation may be full of problems — most life situations are

— but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not

tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem

now?

When you are full of problems, there is no room for

anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever

you can, make some room, create some space, so that you

find the life underneath your life situation.

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around.

Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors,

textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be

aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the

sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath

the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and

acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your

breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy

inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without.

Allow the "isness" of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental

abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind

that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly

poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out

of the dream of time into the present.

ALL PROBLEMS ARE ILLUSIONS OF THE MIND

It feels as if a heavy burden has been lifted. A sense of

lightness. I feel clear . . . but my problems are still there

waiting for me, aren't they? They haven't been solved. Am I

not just temporarily evading them?

If you found yourself in paradise, it wouldn't be long before

your mind would say "yes, but . . . "Ultimately, this is not

about solving your problems. Ifs about realizing that there

are no problems. Only situations — to be dealt with now, or

to be left alone and accepted as part of the "isness' of the

present moment until they change or can be dealt with.

Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They

cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.

Focus your attention on the Now and tell me what

problem you have at this moment.

I am not getting any answer because it is impossible to have

a problem when your attention is fully in the Now. A

situation that needs to be either dealt with or accepted — yes.

Why make it into a problem? Why make anything into a

problem? Isn't life challenging enough as it is? What do you

need problems for? The mind unconsciously loves problems

because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal,

and it is insane. "Problem" means that you are dwelling on a

situation mentally without there being a true intention or

possibility of taking action now and that you are

unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You

become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose

your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your

mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or

may have to do in the future instead of focusing your

attention on the one thing that you can do now.

When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes

is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what

happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create

no more problems. Although it is a simple choice, it is also

very radical. You won’t make that choice unless you are

truly fed up with suffering, unless you have truly had enough.

And you won't be able to go through with it unless you

access the power of the Now. If you create no more pain for

yourself, then you create no more pain for others. You also

no longer contaminate the beautiful Earth, your inner space,

and the collective human psyche with the negativity of

problem-making.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency

situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind

didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In

a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present

in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes

over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people

suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds.

In any emergency, either you survive or you don't. Either

way, it is not a problem.

Some people get angry when they hear me say that

problems are illusions. I am threatening to take away their

sense of who they are. They have invested much time in a

false sense of self. For many years, they have unconsciously

defined their whole identity in terms of their problems or

their suffering. Who would they be without it?

A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually

motivated by fear, which of course is always linked with

having your focus on the future and being out of touch with

the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no

fear either.

Should a situation arise that you need to deal with now,

your action will be clear and incisive if it arises out of

present-moment awareness. It is also more likely to be

effective. It will not be a reaction coming from the past

conditioning of your mind but an intuitive response to the

situation. In other instances, when the time-bound mind

would have reacted, you will find it more effective to do

nothing — just stay centered in the Now.

A QUANTUM LEAP IN THE EVOLUTION OF

CONSCIOUSNESS

I have had glimpses of this state off freedom from mind and

time that you describe, but past and future are so

overwhelmingly strong that I cannot keep them out for long.

The time-bound mode of consciousness is deeply embedded

in the human psyche. But what we are doing here is part of a

profound transformation that is taking place in the collective

consciousness of the planet and beyond: the awakening of

consciousness from the dream of matter, form, and

separation. The ending of time. We are breaking mind

patterns that have dominated human life for eons. Mind

patterns that have created unimaginable suffering on a vast

scale. I am not using the word evil. It is more helpful to call

it unconsciousness or insanity.

This breaking up of the old mode of consciousness or rather

unconsciousness: is it something we have to do or will it

happen anyway? I mean, is this change inevitable?

That’s a question of perspective. The doing and the

happening is in fact a single process; because you are one

with the totality of consciousness, you cannot separate the

two. But there is no absolute guarantee that humans will

make it. The process isn't inevitable or automatic. Your

cooperation is an essential part of it. However you look at it,

it is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness, as

well as our only chance of survival as a race.

THE JOY OF BEING

To alert you that you have allowed yourself to be taken over

by psychological time, you can use a simple criterion. Ask

yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing?

If there isn't, then time is covering up the present moment,

and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.

If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are

doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change

what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how.

"How" is always more important than "what." See if you can

give much more attention to the doing than to the result that

you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to

whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also

completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full

attention to something and at the same time resist it.

As soon as you honor the present moment, all

unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow

with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment

awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of

quality, care, and love — even the most simple action.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action — just

give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its

own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the

Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual

teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your

action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of

"consecrated action."

When the compulsive striving away from the Now

ceases, the joy of Being flows into everything you do. The

moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence,

a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for

fulfillment and satisfaction — you don't look to it for

salvation. Therefore, you are not attached to the results.

Neither failure nor success has the power to change your

inner state of Being. You have found the life underneath

your life situation.

In the absence of psychological time, your sense of self

is derived from Being, not from your personal past.

Therefore, the psychological need to become anything other

than who you are already is no longer there. In the world, on

the level of your life situation, you may indeed become

wealthy, knowledgeable, successful, free of this or that, but

in the deeper dimension of Being you are complete and

whole now.

In that state of wholeness, would we still be able or willing to

pursue external goals ?

Of course, but you will not have illusory expectations that

anything or anybody in the future will save you or make you

happy. As far as your life situation is concerned, there may

be things to be attained or acquired. That’s the world of form,

of gain and loss. Yet on a deeper level you are already

complete, and when you realize that, there is a playful,

joyous energy behind what you do. Being free of

psychological time, you no longer pursue your goals with

grim determination, driven by fear, anger, discontent, or the

need to become someone. Nor will you remain inactive

through fear of failure, which to the ego is loss of self. When

your deeper sense of self is derived from Being, when you

are free of "becoming" as a psychological need, neither your

happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome,

and so there is freedom from fear. You don't seek

permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form,

of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that

situations, conditions, places, or people should make you

happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your

expectations.

Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are

born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the

forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."

When this is your state of Being, how can you not

succeed? You have succeeded already.

Chapter One

MIND STRATEGIES FOR

AVOIDING THE NOW

LOSS OF NOW: THE CORE DELUSION

Even if I completely accept that ultimately time is an illusion,

what difference is that going to make in my life? I still have

to live in a world that is completely dominated by time.

Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won't make

much difference to your life. To realize this truth, you need

to live it. When every cell of your body is so present that it

feels vibrant with life, and when you can feel that life every

moment as the joy of Being, then it can be said that you are

free of time.

But I still have to pay the bills tomorrow, and I am still going

to grow old and die just like everybody else. So how can I

ever say that I am free of time?

Tomorrow's bills are not the problem. The dissolution of the

physical body is not a problem. Loss of Now is the problem,

or rather: the core delusion that turns a mere situation, event,

or emotion into a personal problem and into suffering. Loss

of Now is loss of Being.

To be free of time is to be free of the psychological

need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.

It represents the most profound transformation of

consciousness that you can imagine. In some rare cases, this

shift in consciousness happens dramatically and radically,

once and for all. When it does, it usually comes about

through total surrender in the midst of intense suffering.

Most people, however, have to work at it.

When you have had your first few glimpses of the

timeless state of consciousness, you begin to move back and

forth between the dimensions of time and presence. First you

become aware of just how rarely your attention is truly in the

Now. But to know that you are not present is a great success:

that knowing is presence — even if initially it only lasts for a

couple of seconds of dock time before it is lost again. Then,

with increasing frequency, you choose to have the focus of

your consciousness in the present moment rather than in the

past or future, and whenever you realize that you had lost the

Now, you are able to stay in it not just for a couple of

seconds, but for longer periods as perceived from the

external perspective of dock time. So before you are firmly

established in the state of presence, which is to say before

you are fully conscious, you shift back and forth for a while

between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the

state of presence and the state of mind identification. You

lose the Now, and you return to it, again and again.

Eventually, presence becomes your predominant state.

For most people, presence is experienced either never at

all or only accidentally and briefly on rare occasions without

being recognized for what it is. Most humans alternate not

between consciousness and unconsciousness but only

between different levels of unconsciousness.

ORDINARY UNCONSCIOUSNESS AND

DEEP UNCONSCIOUSNESS

What do you mean by different levels of unconsciousness?

As you probably know, in sleep you constantly move

between the phases of dreamless sleep and the dream state.

Similarly, in wakefulness most people only shift between

ordinary unconsciousness and deep unconsciousness. What I

call ordinary unconsciousness means being identified with

your thought processes and emotions, your reactions, desires,

and aversions. It is most people's normal state. In that state,

you are run by the egoic mind, and you are unaware of Being.

It is a state not of acute pain or unhappiness but of an almost

continuous low level of unease, discontent, boredom, or

nervousness — a kind of background static. You may not

realize this because it is so much a part of "normal" living,

just as you are not aware of a continuous low background

noise, such as the hum of an air conditioner, until it stops.

When it suddenly does stop, there is a sense of relief. Many

people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, or

even shopping as anesthetics in an unconscious attempt to

remove the basic unease. When this happens, an activity that

might be very enjoyable if used in moderation becomes

imbued with a compulsive or addictive quality, and all that is

ever achieved through it is extremely short-lived symptom

relief. The unease of ordinary unconsciousness turns into the

pain of deep unconsciousness — a state of more acute and

more obvious suffering or unhappiness — when things "go

wrong," when the ego is threatened or there is a major

challenge, threat, or loss, real or imagined, in your life

situation or conflict in a relationship. It is an intensified

version of ordinary unconsciousness, different from it not in

kind but in degree.

In ordinary unconsciousness, habitual resistance to or

denial of what is creates the unease and discontent that most

people accept as normal living. When this resistance

becomes intensified through some challenge or threat to the

ego, it brings up intense negativity such as anger, acute fear,

aggression, depression, and so on. Deep unconsciousness

often means that the pain-body has been triggered and that

you have become identified with it. Physical violence would

be impossible without deep unconsciousness. It can also

occur easily whenever and wherever a crowd of people or

even an entire nation generates a negative collective energy

field.

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how

you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through

those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to

become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person

more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to

awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper

sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into

a nightmare.

If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances,

such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the

woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won't be

able to stay conscious when something "goes wrong" or you

are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the

threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which

ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep

unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the

way in which you deal with them will show you and others

where you are at as far as your state of consciousness is

concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or

what visions you see.

So it is essential to bring more consciousness into your

life in ordinary situations when everything is going relatively

smoothly. In this way, you grow in presence power. It

generates an energy field in you and around you of a high

vibrational frequency. No unconsciousness, no negativity, no

discord or violence can enter that field and survive, just as

darkness cannot survive in the presence of light.

When you learn to be the witness of your thoughts and

emotions, which is an essential part of being present, you

may be surprised when you first become aware of the

background "static" of ordinary unconsciousness and realize

how rarely, if ever, you are truly at ease within yourself. On

the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of

resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental

projection away from the Now. On the emotional level, there

will be an undercurrent of unease, tension, boredom, or

nervousness. Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual

resistance mode.

WHAT ARE THEY SEEKING?

Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had

with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in

his perception most white people have tense faces, staring

eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: "They are always

seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites

always want something. They are always uneasy and restless.

We don’t know what they want. We think they are mad."

The undercurrent of constant unease started long before

the rise of Western industrial civilization, of course, but in

Western civilization, which now covers almost the entire

globe, including most of the East, it manifests in an

unprecedentedly acute form. It was already there at the time

of Jesus, and it was there 60o years before that at the time of

Buddha, and long before that. Why are you always anxious?

Jesus asked his disciples. "Can anxious thought add a single

day to your life?" And the Buddha taught that the root of

suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.

Resistance to the Now as a collective dysfunction is

intrinsically connected to loss of awareness of Being and

forms the basis of our dehumanized industrial civilization.

Freud, by the way, also recognized the existence of this

undercurrent of unease and wrote about it in his book

Civilization and Its Discontents, but he did not recognize the

true root of the unease and failed to realize that freedom

from it is possible. This collective dysfunction has created a

very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has

become a threat not only to itself but also to all life on the

planet.

DISSOLVING ORDINARY UNCONSCIOUSNESS

So how can we be free of this affliction?

Make it conscious. Observe the many ways in which unease,

discontent, and tension arise within you through unnecessary

judgment, resistance to what is, and denial of the Now.

Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of

consciousness on it. Once you know how to dissolve

ordinary unconsciousness, the light of your presence will

shine brightly, and it will be much easier to deal with deep

unconsciousness whenever you feel its gravitational pull.

However, ordinary unconsciousness may not be easy to

detect initially because it is so normal.

Make it a habit to monitor your mental-emotional state

through self-observation. 'Am I at ease at this moment?" is a

good question to ask yourself frequently. Or you can ask:

"What’s going on inside me at this moment?" Be at least as

interested in what goes on inside you as what happens

outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into

place. Primary reality is within, secondary reality without.

But don’t answer these questions immediately. Direct your

attention inward. Have a look inside yourself. What kind of

thoughts is your mind producing? What do you feel? Direct

your attention into the body. Is there any tension? Once you

detect that there is a low level of unease, the background

static, see in what way you are avoiding, resisting, or

denying life — by denying the Now. There are many ways in

which people unconsciously resist the present moment. I will

give you a few examples. With practice, your power of selfobservation,

of monitoring your inner state, will become

sharpened.

FREEDOM FROM UNHAPPINESS

Do you resent doing what you are doing? It may be your job,

or you may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but

part of you resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken

resentment toward a person close to you? Do you realize that

the energy you thus emanate is so harmful in its effects that

you are in fact contaminating yourself as well as those

around you? Have a good look inside. Is there even the

slightest trace of resentment, unwillingness? If there is,

observe it on both the mental and the emotional levels. What

thoughts is your mind creating around this situation? Then

look at the emotion, which is the body's reaction to those

thoughts. Feel the emotion. Does it feel pleasant or

unpleasant? Is it an energy that you would actually choose to

have inside you? Do you have a choice?

Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the

activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close

to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is

irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this

situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is

that you are resisting what is. You are making the present

moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness,

conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is

polluting not only your own inner being and those around

you but also the collective human psyche of which you are

an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an

outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of

unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their

inner space.

Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the

person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop

the negativity that your mind has created around the situation

and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a

false sense of self. Recognizing its futility is important.

Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any

situation. In fact, in most cases it keeps you stuck in it,

blocking real change. Anything that is done with negative

energy will become contaminated by it and in time give rise

to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative

inner state is contagious: Unhappiness spreads more easily

than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it

triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are

immune — that is, highly conscious.

Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess?

You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just

as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without:

If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to

create outer pollution.

How can we drop negativity, as you suggest?

By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you

are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and

useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that

you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore

and then letting go of it.

Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other

deep pain, such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to

be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of

your presence — your sustained attention. Many patterns in

ordinary unconsciousness, on the other hand, can simply be

dropped once you know that you don't want them and don't

need them anymore, once you realize that you have a choice,

that you are not just a bundle of conditioned reflexes. All this

implies that you are able to access the power of Now.

Without it, you have no choice.

If you call some emotions negative, aren't you creating a

mental polarity of good and bad, as you explained earlier?

No. The polarity was created at an earlier stage when your

mind judged the present moment as bad; this judgment then

created the negative emotion.

But if you call some emotions negative, aren't you really

saying that they shouldn't be there, that it's not okay to have

those emotions? My understanding is that we should give

ourselves permission to have whatever feelings come up,

rather than judge them as bad or say that we shouldn't have

them. It's okay to feel resentful; it's okay to be angry,

irritated, moody, or whatever — otherwise, we get into

repression, inner conflict, or denial. Everything is okay as it

is.

Of course. Once a mind pattern, an emotion or a reaction is

there, accept it. You were not conscious enough to have a

choice in the matter. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. If you

had a choice, or realized that you do have a choice, would

you choose suffering or joy, ease or unease, peace or conflict?

Would you choose a thought or feeling that cuts you off

from your natural state of well-being, the joy of life within?

Any such feeling I call negative, which simply means bad.

Not in the sense that "You shouldn't have done that" but just

plain factual bad, like feeling sick in the stomach.

How is it possible that humans killed in excess of 100

million fellow humans in the twentieth century alone?

Humans inflicting pain of such magnitude on one another is

beyond anything you can imagine. And that’s not taking into

account the mental, emotional and physical violence, the

torture, pain, and cruelty they continue to inflict on each

other as well as on other sentient beings on a daily basis.

Do they act in this way because they are in touch with

their natural state, the joy of life within? Of course not. Only

people who are in a deeply negative state, who feel very bad

indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how

they feel. Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the

planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are

a dangerously insane and very sick species. That’s not a

judgment. Ifs a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there

underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are

available right now.

Coming back specifically to what you said — it is

certainly true that, when you accept your resentment,

moodiness, anger, and so on, you are no longer forced to act

them out blindly, and you are less likely to project them onto

others. But I wonder if you are not deceiving yourself. When

you have been practicing acceptance for a while, as you have,

there comes a point when you need to go on to the next

stage, where those negative emotions are not created

anymore. If you don't, your "acceptance" just becomes a

mental label that allows your ego to continue to indulge in

unhappiness and so strengthen its sense of separation from

other people, your surroundings, you’re here and now. As

you know, separation is the basis for the ego's sense of

identity. True acceptance would transmute those feelings at

once. And if you really knew deeply that everything is

"okay," as you put it, and which of course is true, then would

you have those negative feelings in the first place? Without

judgment, without resistance to what is, they would not arise.

You have an idea in your mind that "everything is okay," but

deep down you don’t really believe it, and so the old mentalemotional

patterns of resistance are still in place. That’s what

makes you feel bad.

That’s okay, too.

Are you defending your right to be unconscious, your right

to suffer? Don't worry: nobody is going to take that away

from you. Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes

you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep

asserting that it is okay to be sick?

WHEREVER YOU ARE, BE THERE TOTALLY

Can you give some more examples of ordinary

unconsciousness?

See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech

or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other

people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even

the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.

It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When

you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you

speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by

taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible;

leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way

with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the

here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people

would always rather be somewhere else. Their "here" is

never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that

is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If

you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you

unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the

situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take

responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those

three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the

consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic

pollution. Keep your inner space clear.

If you take any action — leaving or changing your

situation — drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action

arising out of insight into what is required is more effective

than action arising out of negativity.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if

you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time.

If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case

ifs no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn

nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action?

Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be

fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear

and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into pour mind.

Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your

here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the

situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping

all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling

miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer

survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness.

There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has

spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free

internally of the situation. You may then find that the

situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case,

you are free.

Or is there something that you "should" be doing but are

not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely

accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment,

if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or

inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously,

you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won't. Either

way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.

Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future

that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress

is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being

in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that

tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner

split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't

make it any less insane. If you have to, you can move fast,

work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the

future and without resisting the present. As you move, work,

run — do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high

energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no

longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running,

working — and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing

and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind.

It may say: "You should be working. You are wasting time."

Observe the mind. Smile at it.

Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do

you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or

negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your

adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the

dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you

did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating

guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you

are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping

to accelerate your body's aging process by creating an

accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself

by observing those around you who have a strong tendency

to hold on to the past.

Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only

refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel

the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel

your presence.

Are you worried? Do you have many "what if" thoughts?

You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself

into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is

no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it

doesn't exist. It's a mental phantom. You can stop this healthand

life-corroding insanity simply by acknowledging the

present moment. Become aware of your breathing. Feel the

air flowing in and out of your body. Feel your inner energy

field. All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real

life — as opposed to imaginary mind projections — is this

moment. Ask yourself what "problem" you have right now,

not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is

wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the

Now, but you can never cope with the future — nor do you

have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the

resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.

"One day I'll make it." Is your goal taking up so much

of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a

means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are

you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind

pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will

never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A

perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and

nonfulfillment, don't you agree?

Are you a habitual "waiter"? How much of your life do

you spend waiting? What I call "small-scale waiting" is

waiting in line at the post office, in a traffic jam, at the

airport, or waiting for someone to arrive, to finish work, and

so on. "Large-scale waiting" is waiting for the next vacation,

for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly

meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be

important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for

people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you

want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want

what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With

every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner

conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to

be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This

greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose

the present.

There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your

life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you

cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your

deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect.

Your life situation consists of your circumstances you’re

your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals

and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as

a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point

of access for that is the Now. You are then like an architect

who pays no attention to the foundation of a building but

spends a lot of time working on the superstructure.

For example, many people are waiting for prosperity. It

cannot come in the future. When you honor, acknowledge,

and fully accept your present reality — where you are, who

you are, what you are doing right now — when you fully

accept what you have got, you are grateful for what you have

got, grateful for what is, grateful for Being. Gratitude for the

present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity.

It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity

manifests for you in various ways.

If you are dissatisfied with what you have got, or even

frustrated or angry about your present lack, that may

motivate you to become rich, but even if you do make

millions, you will continue to experience the inner condition

of lack, and deep down you will continue to feel unfulfilled.

You may have many exciting experiences that money can

buy, but they will come and go and always leave you with an

empty feeling and the need for further physical or

psychological gratification. You won't abide in Being and so

feel the fullness of life now that alone is true prosperity.

So give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch

yourself slipping into waiting . . . snap out of it. Come into

the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are

present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.

So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you

waiting," you can reply, "That’s all right, I wasn't waiting. I

was just standing here enjoying myself— in joy in my self."

These are just a few of the habitual mind strategies for

denying the present moment that are part of ordinary

unconsciousness. They are easy to overlook because they are

so much a part of normal living: the background static of

perpetual discontent. But the more you practice monitoring

your inner mental-emotional state, the easier it will be to

know when you have been trapped in past or future, which is

to say unconscious, and to awaken out of the dream of time

into the present. But beware: The false, unhappy self, based

on mind identification, lives on time. It knows that the

present moment is its own death and so feels very threatened

by it. It will do all it can to take you out of it. It will try to

keep you trapped in time.

THE INNER PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE'S JOURNEY

I can see the truth of what you are saying, but I still think

that we must have purpose on our life's journey; otherwise

we just drift, and purpose means future, doesn't it? How do

we reconcile that with living in the present?

When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know

where you are going or at least the general direction in which

you are moving, but don't forget: the only thing that is

ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are

taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

Your life's journey has an outer purpose and an inner

purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or

destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve

this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your

destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future,

take up so much of your attention that they become more

important to you than the step you are taking now, then you

completely miss the journey's inner purpose, which has

nothing to do with where you are going or what you are

doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do

with future but everything to do with the quality of your

consciousness at this moment. The outer purpose belongs to

the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner

purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical

dimension of the timeless Now. Your outer journey may

contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the

step you are taking right now. As you become more deeply

aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains

within itself all the other steps as well as the destination. This

one step then becomes transformed into an expression of

perfection, an act of great beauty and quality. It will have

taken you into Being, and the light of Being will shine

through it. This is both the purpose and the fulfillment of

your inner journey, the journey into yourself.

Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose,

whether we succeed or fail in the world?

It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your

inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game

that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It

is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and

at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the

other way around, which is actually more common: outer

riches and inner poverty, or to "gain the world and lose your

soul," as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer

purpose is doomed to "fail" sooner or later, simply because it

is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The

sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you

lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the

limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your

unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and

you make it subservient to your inner purpose.

THE PAST CANNOT SURVIVE IN YOUR PRESENCE

You mentioned that thinking or talking about the past

unnecessarily is one of the ways in which we avoid the

present. But apart from the past that we remember and

perhaps identify with, isn't there another level of past within

us that is much more deep-seated? I am talking about the

unconscious past that conditions our lives, especially

through early childhood experiences, perhaps even past-life

experiences. And then there is our cultural conditioning,

which has to do with where we live geographically and the

historical time period in which we live. All these things

determine how we see the world, how we react, what we

think, what kind of relationships we have, how we live our

lives. How could we ever become conscious of all that or get

rid of it? How long would that take? And even if we did,

what would there be left?

What is left when illusion ends?

There is no need to investigate the unconscious past in

you except as it manifests at this moment as a thought, an

emotion, a desire, a reaction, or an external event that

happens to you. Whatever you need to know about the

unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will

bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become a

bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that

you need more time to understand the past or become free of

it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of

the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of

the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the

power of Now. That is the key.

What is the power of Now?

None other than the power of your presence, your

consciousness liberated from thought forms.

So deal with the past on the level of the present. The

more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it,

and the more likely you are to make a "self" out of it. Don’t

misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as

past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your

behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears,

and desires as they occur in the present. There's the past in

you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things,

not critically or analytically but nonjudgmentally, then you

are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power

of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the

past. You find yourself by coming into the present.

Isn't it helpful to understand the past and so understand why

we do certain things, react in certain ways, or why we

unconsciously create our particular kind of drama, patterns

in relationships, and so on?

As you become more conscious of your present reality, you

may suddenly get certain insights as to why your

conditioning functions in those particular ways; for example,

why your relationships follow certain patterns, and you may

remember things that happened in the past or see them more

dearly. That is fine and can be helpful, but it is not essential.

What is essential is your conscious presence. That dissolves

the past. That is the transformative agent. So don't seek to

understand the past, but be as present as you can. The past

cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your

absence.

Chapter Five

THE STATE OF PRESENCE

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS

You keep talking about the state of presence as the key. I

think I understand it intellectually, but I don't know if I have

ever truly experienced it. I wonder — is it what I think it is,

or is it something entirely different?

It’s not what you think it is! You can't think about presence,

and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is

being present.

Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to

yourself: "I wonder what my next thought is going to be."

Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be

like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to

come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.

Well?

I had to wait for quite a long time before a thought came in.

Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence,

you are free of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The

instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level,

thought rushes in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is

lost. You are back in time.

To test their degree of presence, some Zen masters have

been known to creep up on their students from behind and

suddenly hit them with a stick. Quite a shock! If the student

had been fully present and in a state of alertness, if he had

"kept his loin girded and his lamp burning," which is one of

the analogies that Jesus uses for presence, he would have

noticed the master coming up from behind and stopped him

or stepped aside. But if he were hit, that would mean he was

immersed in thought, which is to say absent, unconscious.

To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply

rooted within yourself otherwise, the mind, which has

incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.

What do you mean by "rooted within yourself"?

It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of

your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel

the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps

you present. It anchors you in the Now (see Chapter 6).

THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF "WAITING"

In a sense, the state of presence could be compared to

waiting. Jesus used the analogy of waiting in some of his

parables. This is not the usual bored or restless kind of

waiting that is a denial of the present and that I spoke about

already. It is not a waiting in which your attention is focused

on some point in the future and the present is perceived as an

undesirable obstacle that prevents you from having what you

want. There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one

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that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at

any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely

still, you will miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks

about. In that state, all your attention is in the Now. There is

none left for daydreaming, thinking, remembering,

anticipating. There is no tension in it, no fear, just alert

presence. You are present with your whole Being, with

every cell of your body. In that state, the "you" that has a

past and a future, the personality if you like, is hardly there

anymore. And yet nothing of value is lost. You are still

essentially yourself. In fact, you are more fully yourself than

you ever were before, or rather it is only now that you are

truly yourself.

"Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master,"

says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the

master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised,

still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable,

Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who

do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps

burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now)

and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These

five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have

enough oil (stay conscious).

Even the men who wrote the Gospels did not

understand the meaning of these parables, so the first

misinterpretations and distortions crept in as they were

written down. With subsequent erroneous interpretations, the

real meaning was completely lost. These are parables not

about the end of the world but about the end of psychological

time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and

the possibility of living in an entirely new state of

consciousness.

BEAUTY ARISES IN THE STILLNESS OF YOUR PRESENCE

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What you have just described is something that I

occasionally experience for brief moments when I am alone

and surrounded by nature.

Yes. Zen masters use the word satori to describe a flash of

insight, a moment of no-mind and total presence. Although

satori is not a lasting transformation, be grateful when it

comes, for it gives you a taste of enlightenment. You may,

indeed, have experienced it many times without knowing

what it is and realizing its importance. Presence is needed to

become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of

nature. Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on

a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and

inconceivable vastness of it? Have you listened, truly

listened, to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest? Or

to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet summer evening?

To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still.

You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage

of problems, of past and future, as well as all your

knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not

hear. Your total presence is required.

Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more

here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable,

some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever

there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow.

It only reveals itself to you when you are present. Could it be

that this nameless essence and your presence are one and the

same? Would it be there without your presence? Go deeply

into it. Find out for yourself.

When you experienced those moments of presence, you

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likely didn't realize that you were briefly in a state of nomind.

This is because the gap between that state and the

influx of thought was too narrow. Your satori may only have

lasted for a few seconds before the mind came in, but it was

there; otherwise, you would not have experienced the beauty.

Mind can neither recognize nor create beauty. Only for a few

seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty

or that sacredness there. Because of the narrowness of that

gap and a lack of vigilance and alertness on your part, you

were probably unable to see the fundamental difference

between the perception, the thought-less awareness of beauty,

and the naming and interpreting of it as thought: The time

gap was so small that it seemed to be a single process. The

truth is, however, that the moment thought came in, all you

had was a memory of it.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought,

the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to

say the more conscious you are.

Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the

beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might

say, "What a pretty flower," but that’s just a mechanical

mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they

don't truly see the flower, don't feel its essence, its holiness

— just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own

essence, their own holiness.

Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture,

most modem art, architecture, music, and literature are

devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions.

The reason is that the people who create those things cannot

— even for a moment — free themselves from their mind.

So they are never in touch with that place within where tree

creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates

monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban

landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has

ever produced so much ugliness.

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REALIZING PURE CONSCIOUSNESS

Is presence the same as Being?

When you become conscious of Being, what is really

happening is that Being becomes conscious of itself. When

Being becomes conscious of itself — that’s presence. Since

Being, consciousness, and life are synonymous, we could say

that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of

itself, or life attaining self-consciousness. But don't get

attached to the words, and don't make an effort to understand

this. There is nothing that you need to understand before you

can become present.

I do understand what you just said, but it seems to imply that

Being, the ultimate transcendental reality, is not yet complete,

that it is undergoing a process of development. Does God

need time for personal growth?

Yes, but only as seen from the limited perspective of the

manifested universe. In the Bible, God declares: "I am the

Alpha and the Omega, and I am the living One." In the

timeless realm where God dwells, which is also your home,

the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, are one,

and the essence of everything that ever has been and ever

will be is eternally present in an unmanifested state of

oneness and perfection — totally beyond anything the human

mind can ever imagine or comprehend. In our world of

seemingly separate forms, however, timeless perfection is an

inconceivable concept. Here even consciousness, which is

the light emanating from the eternal Source, seems to be

subject to a process of development, but this is due to our

limited perception. It is not so in absolute terms.

Nevertheless, let me continue to speak for a moment about

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the evolution of consciousness in this world.

Everything that exists has Being, has God-essence, has

some degree of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary

consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and

molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the

earth, plants, animals, humans — all are expressions of

consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting

as form.

The world arises when consciousness takes on shapes

and forms, thought forms and material forms. Look at the

millions of life forms on this planet alone. In the sea, on land,

in the air — and then each life form is replicated millions of

times. To what end? Is someone or something playing a

game, a game with form? This is what the ancient seers of

India asked themselves. They saw the world as lila, a kind of

divine game that God is playing. The individual life forms

are obviously not very important in this game. In the sea,

most life forms don't survive for more than a few minutes

after being born. The human form turns to dust pretty

quickly too, and when it is gone it is as if it had never been.

Is that tragic or cruel? Only if you create a separate identity

for each form, if you forget that its consciousness is Godessence

expressing itself in form. But you don't truly know

that until you realize your own God-essence as pure

consciousness.

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call it John,

write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history,

and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish — that’s

tragic. But ifs only tragic because you projected a separate

self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of a

dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made a separate

entity out of it.

Consciousness takes on the disguise of forms until they

reach such complexity that it completely loses itself in them.

In present-day humans, consciousness is completely

identified with its disguise. It only knows itself as form and

therefore lives in fear of the annihilation of its physical or

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psychological form. This is the egoic mind, and this is where

considerable dysfunction sets in. It now looks as if

something had gone very wrong somewhere along the line of

evolution. But even this is part of lila, the divine game.

Finally, the pressure of suffering created by this apparent

dysfunction forces consciousness to disidentify from form

and awakens it from its dream of form: It regains selfconsciousness,

but it is at a far deeper level than when it lost

it.

This process is explained by Jesus in his parable of the

lost son, who leaves his father's home, squanders his wealth,

becomes destitute, and is then forced by his suffering to

return home. When he does, his father loves him more than

before. The son's state is the same as it was before, yet not

the same. It has an added dimension of depth. The parable

describes a journey from unconscious perfection, through

apparent imperfection and "evil" to conscious perfection.

Can you now see the deeper and wider significance of

becoming present as the watcher of your mind? Whenever

you watch the mind, you withdraw consciousness from mind

forms, which then becomes what we call the watcher or the

witness. Consequently, the watcher — pure consciousness

beyond form — becomes stronger, and the mental

formations become weaker. When we talk about watching

the mind we are personalizing an event that is truly of

cosmic significance: through you, consciousness is

awakening out of its dream of identification with form and

withdrawing from form. This foreshadows, but is already

part of, an event that is probably still in the distant future as

far as chronological time is concerned. The event is called —

the end of the world.

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When consciousness frees itself from its identification with

physical and mental forms, it becomes what we may call

pure or enlightened consciousness, or presence. This has

already happened in a few individuals, and it seems destined

to happen soon on a much larger scale, although there is no

absolute guarantee that it will happen. Most humans are still

in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified

with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free

themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed

by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict,

violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become

like a sinking ship. If you don’t get off, you will go down

with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously

insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet. What

do you think will happen on this planet if human

consciousness remains unchanged?

Already for most humans, the only respite they find

from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of

consciousness below thought. Everyone does that every night

during sleep. But this also happens to some extent through

sex, alcohol, and other drugs that suppress excessive mind

activity. If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers,

antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all

consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind

would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already.

I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the

population would become a danger to themselves and others.

These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction.

Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old

mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness.

While individual users may get some relief from the daily

torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented

from generating enough conscious presence to rise above

thought and so find true liberation.

Falling back to a level of consciousness below mind,

which is the pre-thinking level of our distant ancestors and of

animals and plants, is not an option for us. There is no way

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back. If the human race is to survive, it will have to go on to

the next stage. Consciousness is evolving throughout the

universe in billions of forms. So even if we didn't make it,

this wouldn't matter on a cosmic scale. No gain in

consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself

through some other form. But the very fact that I am

speaking here and you are listening or reading this is a clear

sign that the new consciousness is gaining a foothold on the

planet.

There is nothing personal in this: I am not teaching you.

You are consciousness, and you are listening to yourself.

There is an Eastern saying: "The teacher and the taught

together create the teaching." In any case, the words in

themselves are not important. They are not the Truth; they

only point to it. I speak from presence, and as I speak, you

may be able to join me in that state. Although every word

that I use has a history, of course, and comes from the past,

as all language does, the words that I speak to you now are

carriers of the high-energy frequency of presence, quite apart

from the meaning they convey as words.

Silence is an even more potent carrier of presence, so

when you read this or listen to me speak, be aware of the

silence between and underneath the words. Be aware of the

gaps. To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy

and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise,

there is always some silence underneath and in between the

sounds. Listening to the silence immediately creates stillness

inside you. Only the stillness in you can perceive the silence

outside. And what is stillness other than presence,

consciousness freed from thought forms? Here is the living

realization of what we have been talking about.

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CHRIST: THE REALITY OF YOUR DIVINE PRESENCE

Don't get attached to any one word. You can substitute

"Christ" for presence, if that is more meaningful to you.

Christ is your God-essence or the Self, as it is sometimes

called in the East. The only difference between Christ and

presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity

regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas

presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.

Many misunderstandings and false beliefs about Christ

will clear if you realize that there is no past or future in

Christ. To say that Christ was or will be is a contradiction in

terms. Jesus was. He was a man who lived two thousand

years ago and realized divine presence, his true nature. And

so he said: "Before Abraham was, I am." He did not say. "I

already existed before Abraham was born." That would have

meant that he was still within the dimension of time and

form identity. The words I am used in a sentence that starts

in the past tense indicate a radical shift, a discontinuity in the

temporal dimension. It is a Zen-like statement of great

profundity. Jesus attempted to convey directly, not through

discursive thought, the meaning of presence, of selfrealization.

He had gone beyond the consciousness

dimension governed by time, into the realm of the timeless.

The dimension of eternity had come into this world. Eternity,

of course, does not mean endless time, but no time. Thus, the

man Jesus became Christ, a vehicle for pure consciousness.

And what is God's self-definition in the Bible? Did God say

"I have always been, and I always will be?" Of course not.

That would have given reality to past and future. God said: "I

AM THAT I AM." No time here, just presence.

The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of

human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from

thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man

or woman. If "Christ" were to return tomorrow in some

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externalized form, what could he or she possibly say to you

other than this: "I am the Truth. I am divine presence. I am

eternal life. I am within you. I am here. I am Now."

Never personalize Christ. Don't make Christ into a form

identity. Avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters, the

very few that are real, are not special as persons. Without a

false self to uphold, defend, and feed, they are more simple,

more ordinary than the ordinary man or woman. Anyone

with a strong ego would regard them as insignificant or,

more likely, not see them at all.

If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because

there is already enough presence in you to recognize

presence in another. There were many people who did not

recognize Jesus or the Buddha, as there are and always have

been many people who are drawn to false teachers. Egos are

drawn to bigger egos. Darkness cannot recognize light. Only

light can recognize light. So don't believe that the light is

outside you or that it can only come through one particular

form. If only your master is an incarnation of God, then who

are you? Any kind of exclusivity is identification with form,

and identification with form means ego, no matter how well

disguised.

Use the master's presence to reflect your own identity

beyond name and form back to you and to become more

intensely present yourself. You will soon realize that there is

no "mine" or "yours" in presence. Presence is one.

Group work can also be helpful for intensifying the

light of your presence. A group of people coming together in

a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great

intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each

member of the group but also helps to free the collective

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human consciousness from its current state of mind

dominance. This will make the state of presence increasingly

more accessible to individuals. However, unless at least one

member of the group is already firmly established in it and

thus can hold the energy frequency of that state, the egoic

mind can easily reassert itself and sabotage the group's

endeavors. Although group work is invaluable, it is not

enough, and you must not come to depend on it. Nor must

you come to depend on a teacher or a master, except during

the transitional period, when you are learning the meaning

and practice of presence.

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Chapter Six

THE INNER BODY

BEING IS YOUR DEEPEST SELF

You spoke earlier about the importance of having deep roots

within or inhabiting the body. Can you explain what you

meant by that?

The body can become a point of access into the realm of

Being. Let’s go into that more deeply now.

I am still not quite sure if I fully understand what you mean

by Being.

"Water? What do you mean by that? I don't understand it."

This is what a fish would say if it had a human mind.

Please stop trying to understand Being. You have

already had significant glimpses of Being, but the mind will

always try to squeeze it into a little box and then put a label

on it. It cannot be done. It cannot become an object of

knowledge. In Being, subject and object merge into one.

Being can be felt as the ever-present I am that is beyond

name and form. To feel and thus to know that you are and to

abide in that deeply rooted state is enlightenment, is the truth

that Jesus says will make you free.

Free from what?

Free from the illusion that you are nothing more than your

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physical body and your mind. This "illusion of the self," as

the Buddha calls it, is the core error. Free from fear in its

countless disguises as the inevitable consequence of that

illusion — the fear that is your constant tormentor as long as

you derive your sense of self only from this ephemeral and

vulnerable form. And free from sin, which is the suffering

you unconsciously inflict on yourself and others as long as

this illusory sense of self governs what you think, say, and

do.

LOOK BEYOND THE WORDS

I don't like the word sin. It implies that I am being judged

and found guilty.

I can understand that. Over the centuries, many erroneous

views and interpretations have accumulated around words

such as sin, due to ignorance, misunderstanding, or a desire

to control, but they contain an essential core of truth. If you

are unable to look beyond such interpretations and so cannot

recognize the reality to which the word points, then don’t use

it. Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more

than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a

signpost, it points beyond itself. The word honey isn’t honey.

You can study and talk about honey for as long as you like,

but you won't really know it until you taste it. After you have

tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't

be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think

about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that

mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which

the word points? It really is no more than an obsessive

attachment to a signpost, a mental idol.

The reverse also applies: If, for whatever reason, you

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disliked the word honey, that might prevent you from ever

tasting it. If you had a strong aversion to the word God,

which is a negative form of attachment, you may be denying

not just the word but also the reality to which it points. You

would be cutting yourself off from the possibility of

experiencing that reality. All this is, of course, intrinsically

connected with being identified with your mind.

So, if a word doesn’t work for you anymore, then drop

it and replace it with one that does work. If you don’t like the

word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may

get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a

long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt.

I don't like those words either. They imply that there is

something wrong with me. I am being judged.

Of course there is something wrong with you — and you are

not being judged.

I don't mean to offend you personally, but do you not

belong to the human race that has killed over mo million

members of their own species in the twentieth century alone?

You mean guilt by association?

It is not a question of guilt. But as long as you are run by the

egoic mind, you are part of the collective insanity. Perhaps

you haven’t looked very deeply into the human condition in

its state of dominance by the egoic mind. Open your eyes

and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that

are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an

unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue

to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the

planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin.

That is insanity. That is unconsciousness. Above all, don't

forget to observe your own mind. Seek out the root of the

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insanity there.

FINDING YOUR INVISIBLE AND INDESTRUCTIBLE

REALITY

You said that identification with our physical form is part of

the illusion, so how can the body, the physical form, bring

you to a realization of Being?

The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into

Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer

shell, or rather a limited and distorted perception of a deeper

reality. In your natural state of connectedness with Being,

this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible

inner body, the animating presence within you. So to "inhabit

the body" is to feel the body from within, to feel the life

inside the body and thereby come to know that you are

beyond the outer form.

But that is only the beginning of an inward journey that

will take you ever more deeply into a realm of great stillness

and peace, yet also of great power and vibrant life. At first,

you may only get fleeting glimpses of it, but through them

you will begin to realize that you are not just a meaningless

fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between

birth and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed

by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer

form, you are connected with something so vast, so

immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived or

spoken of — yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of

it not to give you something to believe in but to show you

how you can know it for yourself.

You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes

up all your attention. When this happens — and it happens

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continuously for most people — you are not in your body.

The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it

into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive

thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense

of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your

identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a

vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates

fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing

that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness

of your deeper self your invisible and indestructible reality.

To become conscious of Being, you need to reclaim

consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most

essential tasks on your spiritual journey. It will free vast

amounts of consciousness that previously had been trapped

in useless and compulsive thinking. A very effective way of

doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away

from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be

felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that

gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.

CONNECTING WITH THE INNER BODY

Please try it now. You may find it helpful to close your eyes

for this practice. Later on, when "being in the body" has

become natural and easy, this will no longer be necessary.

Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it

alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet — in

your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy

field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to

every organ and every cell? Can you feel it simultaneously in

all parts of the body as a single field of energy? Keep

focusing on the feeling of your inner body for a few

moments. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more

attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeling will

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become. It will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive,

and if you have a strong visual sense, you may get an image

of your body becoming luminous. Although such an image

can help you temporarily, pay more attention to the feeling

than to any image that may arise. An image, no matter how

beautiful or powerful, is already defined in form, so there is

less scope for penetrating more deeply.

The feeling of your inner body is formless, limitless, and

unfathomable. You can always go into it more deeply. If you

cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever

you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your

hands or feet. That’s good enough for the moment. Just focus

on the feeling. Your body is coming alive. Later, we will

practice some more. Please open your eyes now, but keep

some attention in the inner energy field of the body even as

you look around the room. The inner body lies at the

threshold between your form identity and your essence

identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH THE BODY

Why have most religions condemned or denied the body? It

seems that spiritual seekers have always regarded the body

as a hindrance or even as sinful.

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Why have so few seekers become finders?

On the level of the body, humans are very dose to

animals. All the basic bodily functions — pleasure, pain,

breathing, eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, the drive to

find a mate and procreate, and of course birth and death —

we share with the animals. A long time after their fall from a

state of grace and oneness into illusion, humans suddenly

woke up in what seemed to be an animal body — and they

found this very disturbing. "Don't fool yourself. You are no

more than an animal." This seemed to be the truth that was

staring them in the face. But it was too disturbing a truth to

tolerate. Adam and Eve saw that they were naked, and they

became afraid. Unconscious denial of their animal nature set

in very quickly. The threat that they might be taken over by

powerful instinctual drives and revert back to complete

unconsciousness was indeed a very real one. Shame and

taboos appeared around certain parts of the body and bodily

functions, especially sexuality. The light of their

consciousness was not yet strong enough to make friends

with their animal nature, to allow it to be and even enjoy that

aspect of themselves — let alone to go deeply into it to find

the divine hidden within it, the reality within the illusion. So

they did what they had to do. They began to disassociate

from their body. They now saw themselves as having a body,

rather than just being it.

When religions arose, this disassociation became even

more pronounced as the "you are not your body" belief.

Countless people in East and West throughout the ages have

tried to find God, salvation, or enlightenment through denial

of the body. This took the form of denial of sense pleasures

and of sexuality in particular, fasting, and other ascetic

practices. They even inflicted pain on the body in an attempt

to weaken or punish it because they regarded it as sinful. In

Christianity, this used to be called mortification of the flesh.

Others tried to escape from the body by entering trance states

or seeking out-of-the-body experiences. Many still do. Even

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the Buddha is said to have practiced body denial through

fasting and extreme forms of asceticism for six years, but he

did not attain enlightenment until after he had given up this

practice.

The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened

through denying or fighting the body or through an out-ofthe-

body experience. Although such an experience can be

fascinating and can give you a glimpse of the state of

liberation from the material form, in the end you will always

have to return to the body, where the essential work of

transformation takes place. Transformation is through the

body, not away from it. This is why no true master has ever

advocated fighting or leaving the body, although their mindbased

followers often have.

Of the ancient teachings concerning the body, only

certain fragments survive, such as Jesus's statement that

"your whole body will be filled with light," or they survive

as myths, such as the belief that Jesus never relinquished his

body but remained one with it and ascended into "heaven"

with it. Almost no one to this day has understood those

fragments or the hidden meaning of certain myths, and the

"you are not your body" belief has prevailed universally,

leading to body denial and attempts to escape from the body.

Countless seekers have thus been prevented from attaining

spiritual realization for themselves and becoming finders.

Is it possible to recover the lost teachings on the significance

of the body or to reconstruct them from the existing

fragments?

There is no need for that. All spiritual teachings originate

from the same Source. In that sense, there is and always has

been only one master, who manifests in many different forms.

I am that master, and so are you, once you are able to access

the Source within. And the way to it is through the inner

body. Although all spiritual teachings originate from the

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same Source, once they become verbalized and written down

they are obviously no more than collections of words — and

a word is nothing but a signpost, as we talked about earlier.

All such teachings are signposts pointing the way back to the

Source.

I have already spoken of the Truth that is hidden within

your body, but I will summarize for you again the lost

teachings of the masters — so here is another signpost.

Please endeavor to feel your inner body as you read or listen.

SERMON ON THE BODY

What you perceive as a dense physical structure called the

body, which is subject to disease, old age, and death, is not

ultimately real — is not you. It is a misperception of your

essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to

the limitations of your mind, which, having lost touch with

Being, creates the body as evidence of its illusory belief in

separation and to justify its state of fear. But do not turn

away from the body, for within that symbol of

impermanence, limitation, and death that you perceive as the

illusory creation of your mind is concealed the splendor of

your essential and immortal reality. Do not turn your

attention elsewhere in your search for the Truth, for it is

nowhere else to be found but within your body.

Do not fight against the body, for in doing so you are

fighting against your own reality. You are your body. The

body that you can see and touch is only a thin illusory veil.

Underneath it lies the invisible inner body, the doorway into

Being, into Life Unmanifested. Through the inner body, you

are inseparably connected to this unmanifested One Life —

birthless, deathless, eternally present. Through the inner

body, you are forever one with God.

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HAVE DEEP ROOTS WITHIN

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with

your inner body — to feel it at all times. This will rapidly

deepen and transform your life. The more consciousness you

direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational

frequency becomes, much like a light that grows brighter as

you turn up the dimmer switch and so increase the flow of

electricity. At this higher energy level, negativity cannot

affect you anymore, and you tend to attract new

circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.

If you keep your attention in the body as much as

possible, you will be anchored in the Now. You won't lose

yourself in the external world, and you won’t lose yourself in

your mind. Thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, may

still be there to some extent, but they won't take you over.

Please examine where your attention is at this moment.

You are listening to me, or you are reading these words in a

book. That is the focus of your attention. You are also

peripherally aware of your surroundings, other people, and

so on. Furthermore, there may be some mind activity around

what you are hearing or reading, some mental commentary.

Yet there is no need for any of this to absorb all your

attention. See if you can be in touch with your inner body at

the same time. Keep some of your attention within. Don’t let

it all flow out. Feel your whole body from within, as a single

field of energy. It is almost as if you were listening or

reading with your whole body. Let this be your practice in

the days and weeks to come.

Do not give all your attention away to the mind and the

external world. By all means focus on what you are doing,

but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible.

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Stay rooted within. Then observe how this changes your state

of consciousness and the quality of what you are doing.

Whenever you are waiting, wherever it may be, use that

time to feel the inner body. In this way, traffic jams and lineups

become very enjoyable. Instead of mentally projecting

yourself away from the Now, go more deeply into the Now

by going more deeply into the body.

The art of inner-body awareness will develop into a

completely new way of living, a state of permanent

connectedness with Being, and will add a depth to your life

that you have never known before.

It is easy to stay present as the observer of your mind

when you are deeply rooted within your body. No matter

what happens on the outside, nothing can shake you anymore.

Unless you stay present — and inhabiting your body is

always an essential aspect of it — you will continue to be run

by your mind. The script in your head that you learned a long

time ago, the conditioning of your mind, will dictate your

thinking and your behavior. You may be free of it for brief

intervals, but rarely for long. This is especially true when

something "goes wrong" or there is some loss or upset. Your

conditioned reaction will then be involuntary, automatic, and

predictable, fueled by the one basic emotion that underlies

the mind-identified state of consciousness: fear.

So when such challenges come, as they always do,

make it a habit to go within at once and focus as much as you

can on the inner energy field of your body. This need not

take long, just a few seconds. But you need to do it the

moment that the challenge presents itself. Any delay will

allow a conditioned mental-emotional reaction to arise and

take you over. When you focus within and feel the inner

body, you immediately become still and present as you are

withdrawing consciousness from the mind. If a response is

required in that situation, it will come up from this deeper

level. Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame,

there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your

mind.

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As long as you are in conscious contact with your inner

body, you are like a tree that is deeply rooted in the earth, or

a building with a deep and solid foundation. The latter

analogy is used by Jesus in the generally misunderstood

parable of the two men who build a house. One man builds it

on the sand, without a foundation, and when the storms and

floods come, the house is swept away. The other man digs

deep until he reaches the rock, then builds his house, which

is not swept away by the floods.

BEFORE YOU ENTER THE BODY, FORGIVE

I felt very uncomfortable when I tried to put my attention on

the inner body. There was a feeling of agitation and some

nausea. So I haven't been able to experience what you are

talking about.

What you felt was a lingering emotion that you were

probably unaware of, until you started putting some attention

into the body. Unless you first give it some attention, the

emotion will prevent you from gaining access to the inner

body, which lies at a deeper level underneath it. Attention

does not mean that you start thinking about it. It means to

just observe the emotion, to feel it fully, and so to

acknowledge and accept it as it is. Some emotions are easily

identified: anger, fear, grief, and so on. Others may be much

harder to label. They may just be vague feelings of unease,

heaviness, or constriction, halfway between an emotion and a

physical sensation. In any case, what matters is not whether

you can attach a mental label to it but whether you can bring

the feeling of it into awareness as much as possible.

Attention is the key to transformation — and full attention

also implies acceptance. Attention is like a beam of light —

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the focused power of your consciousness that transmutes

everything into itself.

In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very

short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the

surface of your Being. When you are not in your body,

however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or

weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency

that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that

can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to

physical illness, and make your life miserable (see Chapter

2).

So place your attention on feeling the emotion, and

check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern

such as blame, self-pity, or resentment that is feeding the

emotion. If that is the case, it means that you haven't

forgiven. Nonforgiveness is often toward another person or

yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or

condition — past, present or future — that your mind refuses

to accept. Yes, there can be nonforgiveness even with regard

to the future. This is the mind's refusal to accept uncertainty,

to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control.

Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go

of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your

grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false

sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life —

to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain

and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in

many cases physical disease.

The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your

power from the mind. Nonforgiveness is the very nature of

the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot

survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive.

Only you can. You become present, you enter your body,

you feel the vibrant peace and stillness that emanate from

Being. That is why Jesus said: "Before you enter the temple,

forgive."

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YOUR LINK WITH THE UNMANIFESTED

What is the relationship between presence and the inner

body?

Presence is pure consciousness — consciousness that has

been reclaimed from the mind, from the world of form. The

inner body is your link with the Unmanifested, and in its

deepest aspect is the Unmanifested: the Source from which

consciousness emanates as light emanates from the sun.

Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering

its origin and returning to the Source.

Is the Unmanifested the same as Being?

Yes. The word Unmanifested attempts, by way of negation,

to express That which cannot be spoken, thought or imagined.

It points to what it is by saying what it is not. Being, on the

other hand, is a positive term. Please don't get attached to

either of these words or start believing in them. They are no

more than signposts.

You said that presence is consciousness that has been

reclaimed from the mind. Who does the reclaiming?

You do. But since in your essence you are consciousness, we

might as well say that it is an awakening of consciousness

from the dream of form. This does not mean that your own

form will instantly vanish in an explosion of light. You can

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continue in your present form yet be aware of the formless

and deathless deep within you.

I must admit that this is way beyond my comprehension, and

yet on some deeper level I seem to know what you are talking

about. It's more like a feeling than anything else. Am I

deceiving myself?

No, you are not. Feeling will get you closer to the truth of

who you are than thinking. I cannot tell you anything that

deep within you don't already know. When you have reached

a certain stage of inner connectedness, you recognize the

truth when you hear it. If you haven't reached that stage yet,

the practice of body awareness will bring about the

deepening that is necessary.

SLOWING DOWN THE AGING PROCESS

In the meantime, awareness of the inner body has other

benefits in the physical realm. One of them is a significant

slowing down of the aging of the physical body.

Whereas the outer body normally appears to grow old

and wither fairly quickly, the inner body does not change

with time, except that you may feel it more deeply and

become it more fully. If you are twenty years old now, the

energy field of your inner body will feel just the same when

you are eighty. It will be just as vibrantly alive. As soon as

your habitual state changes from being out-of-the-body and

trapped in your mind to being in-the-body and present in the

Now, your physical body will feel lighter, clearer, more alive.

As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular

structure actually becomes less dense. More consciousness

means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.

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When you become identified more with the timeless

inner body than with the outer body, when presence becomes

your normal mode of consciousness and past and future no

longer dominate your attention, you do not accumulate time

anymore in your psyche and in the cells of the body. The

accumulation of time as the psychological burden of past and

future greatly impairs the cells' capacity for self-renewal. So

if you inhabit the inner body, the outer body will grow old at

a much slower rate, and even when it does, your timeless

essence will shine through the outer form, and you will not

give the appearance of an old person.

Is there any scientific evidence for this?

Try it out and you will be the evidence.

STRENGTHENING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

Another benefit of this practice in the physical realm is a

great strengthening of the immune system which occurs

when you inhabit the body. The more consciousness you

bring into the body, the stronger the immune system

becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices. The

body loves your attention. It is also a potent form of selfhealing.

Most illnesses creep in when you are not present in

the body. If the master is not present in the house, all kinds

of shady characters will take up residence there. When you

inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to

enter.

It is not only your physical immune system that

becomes strengthened; your psychic immune system is

greatly enhanced as well. The latter protects you from the

negative mental-emotional force fields of others, which are

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highly contagious. Inhabiting the body protects you not by

putting up a shield, but by raising the frequency vibration of

your total energy field, so that anything that vibrates at a

lower frequency, such as fear, anger, depression, and so on,

now exists in what is virtually a different order of reality. It

doesn’t enter your field of consciousness anymore, or if it

does you don't need to offer any resistance to it because it

passes right through you. Please don't just accept or reject

what I am saying. Put it to the test.

There is a simple but powerful self-healing meditation

that you can do whenever you feel the need to boost your

immune system. It is particularly effective if used when you

feel the first symptoms of an illness, but it also works with

illnesses that are already entrenched if you use it at frequent

intervals and with an intense focus. It will also counteract

any disruption of your energy field by some form of

negativity. However, it is not a substitute for the moment-tomoment

practice of being in the body;, otherwise, its effect

will only be temporary. Here it is.

When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and

especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first

thing in the morning before getting up, "flood" your body

with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back.

Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention

on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest,

head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as

intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds

or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a

wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This

need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body

in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for

a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present

in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind

occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the

body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you

notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the

inner body.

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LET THE BREATH TAKE YOU INTO THE BODY

At times, when my mind has been very active, it has acquired

such momentum that I find it impossible to take my attention

away from it and feel the inner body. This happens

particularly when I get into a worry or anxiety pattern. Do

you have any suggestions?

If at any time you are finding it hard to get in touch with the

inner body, it is usually easier to focus on your breathing

first. Conscious breathing, which is a powerful meditation in

its own right, will gradually put you in touch with the body.

Follow the breath with your attention as it moves in and out

of your body. Breathe into the body, and feel your abdomen

expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and

exhalation. If you find it easy to visualize, close your eyes

and see yourself surrounded by light or immersed in a

luminous substance — a sea of consciousness. Then breathe

in that light. Feel that luminous substance filling up your

body and making it luminous also. Then gradually focus

more on the feeling. You are now in your body. Don't get

attached to any visual image.

CREATIVE USE OF MIND

If you need to use your mind for a specific purpose, use it in

conjunction with your inner body. Only if you are able to be

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conscious without thought can you use your mind creatively,

and the easiest way to enter that state is through your body.

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed,

stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your

inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness. When you

resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative. In any thought

activity, make it a habit to go back and forth every few

minutes or so between thinking and an inner kind of listening,

an inner stillness. We could say. don't just think with your

head, think with your whole body.

THE ART OF LISTENING

When listening to another person, don't just listen with your

mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of

your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from

thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly

listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other

person space — space to be. It is the most precious gift you

can give. Most people don't know how to listen because the

major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They

pay more attention to that than to what the other person is

saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of

the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of

course, you cannot feel someone else's Being except through

your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness,

which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one

with all that is.

Most human relationships consist mainly of minds

interacting with each other, not of human beings

communicating, being in communion. No relationship can

thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict

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in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict,

strife and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your

inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the

relationship can flower.

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Chapter Seven

PORTALS INTO THE

UNMANIFESTED

GOING DEEPLY INTO THE BODY

I can feel the energy inside my body, especially in my arms

and legs, but I don't seem to be able to go more deeply, as

you suggested earlier. Make it into a meditation. It needn't

take long. Ten to fifteen minutes of clock time should be

sufficient. Make sure first that there are no external

distractions such as telephones or people who are likely to

interrupt you. Sit on a chair, but don't lean back. Keep the

spine erect. Doing so will help you to stay alert.

Alternatively, choose your own favorite position for

meditation.

Make sure the body is relaxed. Close your eyes. Take a

few deep breaths. Feel yourself breathing into the lower

abdomen, as it were. Observe how it expands and contracts

slightly with each in and out breath. Then become aware of

the entire inner energy field of the body. Don't think about it

— feel it. By doing this, you reclaim consciousness from the

mind. If you find it helpful, use the "light" visualization I

described earlier.

When you can feel the inner body clearly as a single

field of energy, let go, if possible, of any visual image and

focus exclusively on the feeling. If you can, also drop any

mental image you may still have of the physical body. All

that is left then is an all-encompassing sense of presence or

"beingness," and the inner body is felt to be without a

boundary. Then take your attention even more deeply into

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that feeling. Become one with it. Merge with the energy field,

so that there is no longer a perceived duality of the observer

and the observed, of you and your body. The distinction

between inner and outer also dissolves now, so there is no

inner body anymore. By going deeply into the body, you

have transcended the body.

Stay in this realm of pure Being for as long as feels

comfortable; then become aware again of the physical body,

your breathing and physical senses, and open your eyes.

Look at your surroundings for a few minutes in a meditative

way — that is, without labeling them mentally — and

continue to feel the inner body as you do so.

Having access to that formless realm is truly liberating. It

frees you from bondage to form and identification with form.

It is life in its undifferentiated state prior to its fragmentation

into multiplicity. We may call it the Unmanifested, the

invisible Source of all things, the Being within all beings. It

is a realm of deep stillness and peace, but also of joy and

intense aliveness. Whenever you are present, you become

"transparent" to some extent to the light, the pure

consciousness that emanates from this Source. You also

realize that the light is not separate from who you are but

constitutes your very essence.

THE SOURCE OF CHI

Is the Unmanifested what in the East is called chi, a kind of

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universal life energy?

No, it isn't. The Unmanifested is the source of chi. Chi is the

inner energy, field of your body. It is the bridge between the

outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the

manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi

can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the

focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you

are tracing the course of this river back to its Source. Chi is

movement; the Unmanifested is stillness. When you reach a

point of absolute stillness, which is nevertheless vibrant with

life, you have gone beyond the inner body and beyond chi to

the Source itself: the Unmanifested. Chi is the link between

the Unmanifested and the physical universe.

So if you take your attention deeply into the inner body,

you may reach this point, this singularity, where the world

dissolves into the Unmanifested and the Unmanifested takes

on form as the energy stream of chi, which then becomes the

world. This is the point of birth and death. When your

consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise.

When it is directed inward, it realizes its own Source and

returns home into the Unmanifested. Then, when your

consciousness comes back to the manifested world, you

reassume the form identity that you temporarily relinquished.

You have a name, a past, a life situation, a future. But in one

essential respect, you are not the same person you were

before: You will have glimpsed a reality within yourself that

is not "of this world," although it isn’t separate from it, just

as it isn't separate from you.

Now let your spiritual practice be this: As you go about

your life, don't give 1oo percent of your attention to the

external world and to your mind. Keep some within. I have

spoken about this already. Feel tile inner body even when

engaged in everyday activities, especially when engaged in

relationships or when you are relating with nature. Feel the

stillness deep inside it. Keep the portal open. It is quite

possible to be conscious of the Unmanifested throughout

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your life. You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in

the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter

what happens out here. You become a bridge between the

Unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the

world. This is the state of connectedness with the Source that

we call enlightenment.

Don’t get the impression that the Unmanifested is

separate from the manifested. How could it be? It is the life

within every form, the inner essence of all that exists. It

pervades this world. Let me explain.

DREAMLESS SLEEP

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when

you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with

the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains

you for a while when you return to the manifested, the world

of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food:

"Man does not live by bread alone." But in dreamless sleep,

you don't go into it consciously. Although the bodily

functions are still operating, "you" no longer exist in that

state. Can you imagine what it would be like to go into

dreamless sleep with full consciousness? It is impossible to

imagine it, because that state has no content.

The Unmanifested does not liberate you until you enter

it consciously. That’s why Jesus did not say:. the truth will

make you free, but rather: "You will know the truth, and the

truth will make you free." This is not a conceptual truth. It is

the truth of eternal life beyond form, which is known directly

or not at all. But don't attempt to stay conscious in dreamless

sleep. It is highly unlikely that you will succeed. At most,

you may remain conscious during the dream phase, but not

beyond that. This is called lucid dreaming, which may be

interesting and fascinating, but it is not liberating.

So use your inner body as a portal through which you

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enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you

stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no

difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether

your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The

inner body is timeless. If you are not yet able to feel the inner

body, use one of the other portals, although ultimately they

are all one. Some I have spoken about at length already, but

I'll mention them again briefly here.

OTHER PORTALS

The Now can be seen as the main portal. It is an essential

aspect of every other portal, including the inner body. You

cannot be in your body without being intensely present in the

Now.

Time and the manifested are as inextricably linked as

are the timeless Now and the Unmanifested. When you

dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment

awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both

directly and indirectly. Directly, you feel it as the radiance

and power of your conscious presence — no content, just

presence. Indirectly, you are aware of the Unmanifested in

and through the sensory realm. In other words, you feel the

God-essence in every creature, every flower, every stone,

and you realize: 'All that is, is holy." This is why Jesus,

speaking entirely from his essence or Christ identity, says in

the Gospel of Thomas: "Split a piece of wood; I am there.

Lift up a stone, and you will find me there."

Another portal into the Unmanifested is created through

the cessation of thinking. This can start with a very simple

thing, such as taking one conscious breath or looking, in a

state of intense alertness, at a flower, so that there is no

mental commentary running at the same time. There are

many ways to create a gap in the incessant stream of thought.

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This is what meditation is all about. Thought is part of the

realm of the manifested. Continuous mind activity keeps you

imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque

screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the

Unmanifested, conscious of the formless and timeless Godessence

in yourself and in all things and all creatures. When

you are intensely present, you don't need to be concerned

about the cessation of thinking, of course, because the mind

then stops automatically. That’s why I said the Now is an

essential aspect of every other portal.

Surrender — the letting go of mental-emotional

resistance to what is — also becomes a portal into the

Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance

cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the

world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness

on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the

feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the

manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are

bound to the world of form, the harder and more

impenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is

closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the

dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form

identity softens and becomes somewhat "transparent," as it

were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.

It’s up to you to open a portal in your life that gives you

conscious access to the Unmanifested. Get in touch with the

energy field of the inner body, be intensely present,

disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is; these are all

portals you can use — but you only need to use one.

Surely love must also be one of those portals?

No, it isn't. As soon as one of the portals is open, love is

present in you as the "feeling-realization" of oneness. Love

isn't a portal; ifs what comes through the portal into this

world. As long as you are completely trapped in your form

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identity, there can be no love. Your task is not to search for

love but to find a portal through which love can enter.

SILENCE

Are there any other portals apart from those you just

mentioned?

Yes, there are. The Unmanifested is not separate from the

manifested. It pervades this world, but it is so well disguised

that almost everybody misses it completely. If you know

where to look, you'll find it everywhere. A portal opens up

every moment.

Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that

car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence

of the Unmanifested in that? You can’t? Look for it in the

silence out of which the sounds come and into which they

return. Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds.

Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the

mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.

Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into

silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence.

Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but

unmanifested part 0fevery sound, every musical note, every

song, every word. The Unmanifested is present in this world

as silence. This is why it has been said that nothing in this

world is so like God as silence. All you have to do is pay

attention to it. Even during a conversation, become conscious

of the gaps between words, the brief silent intervals between

sentences. As you do that, the dimension of stillness grows

within you. You cannot pay attention to silence without

simultaneously becoming still within. Silence without,

stillness within. You have entered the Unmanifested.

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SPACE

Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist

without nothing, without the empty space that enables it to

be. Every physical object or body has come out of nothing, is

surrounded by nothing, and will eventually return to nothing.

Not only that, but even inside every physical body there is

far more "nothing" than "something." Physicists tell us that

the solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid

matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent

empty space — so vast are the distances between the atoms

compared to their size. What is more, even inside every atom

there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a

vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like

a musical note. Buddhists have known that for over 2,500

years. "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," states the

Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts.

The essence of all things is emptiness.

The Unmanifested is not only present in this world as

silence; it also pervades the entire physical universe as space

— from within and without. This is just as easy to miss as

silence. Everybody pays attention to the things in space, but

who pays attention to space itself?

You seem to be implying that "emptiness" or "nothing" is not

just nothing, that there is some mysterious quality to it. What

is this nothing?

You cannot ask such a question. Your mind is trying to make

nothing into something. The moment you make it into

something, you have missed it. Nothing — space — is the

appearance of the Unmanifested as an externalized

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phenomenon in a sense-perceived world. That’s about as

much as one can say about it, and even that is a kind of

paradox. It cannot become an object of knowledge. You can't

do a Ph.D. on "nothing." When scientists study space, they

usually make it into something and thereby miss its essence

entirely. Not surprisingly, the latest theory is that space isn't

empty at all, that it is filled with some substance. Once you

have a theory, ifs not too hard to find evidence to

substantiate it, at least until some other theory comes along.

"Nothing" can only become a portal into the

Unmanifested for you if you don't try to grasp or understand

it.

Isn't that what we are doing here ?

Not at all. I am giving you pointers to show you how you can

bring the dimension of the Unmanifested into your life. We

are not trying to understand it. There is nothing to understand.

Space has no "existence." "To exist" literally means "to

stand out." You cannot understand space because it doesn't

standout. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables

everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor

does the Unmanifested.

So what happens if you withdraw attention from the

objects in space and become aware of space itself.> What is

the essence of this room? The furniture, pictures, and so on

are in the room, but they are not the room. The floor, walls,

and ceiling define the boundary of the room, but they are not

the room either. So what is the essence of the room? Space,

of course, empty space. There would be no "room" without it.

Since space is "nothing," we can say that what is not there is

more important than what is there. So become aware of the

space that is all around you. Don't think about it. Feel it, as it

were. Pay attention to "nothing."

As you do that, a shift in consciousness takes place

inside you. Here is why. The inner equivalent to objects in

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space such as furniture, walls, and so on are your mind

objects: thoughts, emotions, and the objects of the senses.

And the inner equivalent of space is the consciousness that

enables your mind objects to be, just as space allows all

things to be. So if you withdraw attention from things —

objects in space — you automatically withdraw attention

from your mind objects as well. In other words: You cannot

think and be aware of space — or of silence, for that matter.

By becoming aware of the empty space around you, you

simultaneously become aware of the space of no-mind, of

pure consciousness: the Unmanifested. This is how the

contemplation of space can become a portal for you.

Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the

same nothing. They are an externalization of inner space and

inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb

of all existence. Most humans are completely unconscious of

this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They

are out of balance. In other words, they know the world, or

think they do, but they don’t know God. They identify

exclusively with their own physical and psychological form,

unconscious of essence. And because every form is highly

unstable, they live in fear. This fear causes a deep

misperception of themselves and of other humans, a

distortion in their vision of the world.

If some cosmic convulsion brought about the end of our

world, the Unmanifested would remain totally unaffected by

this. A Course in Miracles expresses this truth poignantly.

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God."

If you remain in conscious connection with the

Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the

manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the

One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is

destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out

here matters all that much. You have "overcome the world,"

in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have

"crossed over to the other shore."

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THE TRUE NATURE OF SPACE AND TIME

Now consider this: If there were nothing but silence, it

wouldn't exist for you; you wouldn't know what it is. Only

when sound appears does silence come into being. Similarly,

if there were only space without any objects in space, it

wouldn't exist for you. Imagine yourself as a point of

consciousness floating in the vastness of space — no stars,

no galaxies, just emptiness. Suddenly, space wouldn't be vast

anymore; it would not be there at all. There would be no

speed, no movement from here to there. At least two points

of reference are needed for distance and space to come into

being. Space comes into being the moment the One becomes

two, and as "two" become the "ten thousand things," as Lao

Tse calls the manifested world, space becomes more and

more vast. So world and space arise simultaneously.

Nothing could be without space, yet space is nothing.

Before the universe came into being, before the "big bang" if

you like, there wasn't a vast empty space waiting to be filled.

There was no space, as there was no thing. There was only

the Unmanifested — the One. When the One became "the

ten thousand things," suddenly space seemed to be there and

enabled the many to be. Where did it come from? Was it

created by God to accommodate the universe? Of course not.

Space is no-thing, so it was never created.

Go out on a clear night and look up at the sky. The

thousands of stars you can see with the naked eye are no

more than an infinitesimal fraction of what is there. Over 100

billion galaxies can already be detected with the most

powerful telescopes, each galaxy an "island universe" with

billions of stars. Yet what is even more awe-inspiring is the

infinity of space itself, the depth and stillness that allows all

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of that magnificence to be. Nothing could be more aweinspiring

and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and

stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast

emptiness.

What appears to us as space in our universe perceived

through the mind and the senses is the Unmanifested itself,

externalized. It is the "body" of God. And the greatest

miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the

universe to be, is not just out there in space — it is also

within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you

encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you,

it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is

ultimately a misperception of infinite depth — an attribute of

the one transcendental reality.

According to Einstein, space and time are not separate. I

don't really understand it, but I think he is saying that time is

the fourth dimension of space. He calls it the "space-time

continuum. "

Yes. What you perceive externally as space and time are

ultimately illusory, but they contain a core of truth. They are

the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity,

perceived as if they had an external existence outside you.

Within you, both space and time have an inner equivalent

that reveals their true nature, as well as your own. Whereas

space is the still, infinitely deep realm of no-mind, the inner

equivalent of time is presence, awareness of the eternal Now.

Remember that there is no distinction between them. When

space and time are realized within as the Unmanifested —

no-mind and presence — external space and time continue to

exist for you, but they become much less important. The

world, too, continues to exist for you, but it will not bind you

anymore.

Hence, the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within

the world but in transcendence of the world. Just as you

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would not be conscious of space if there were no objects in

space, the world is needed for the Unmanifested to be

realized. You may have heard the Buddhist saying: "If there

were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment." It is

through the world and ultimately through you that the

Unmanifested knows itself. You are here to enable the divine

purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you

are!

CONSCIOUS DEATH

Apart from dreamless sleep, which I mentioned already,

there is one other involuntary portal. It opens up briefly at

the time of physical death. Even if you have missed all the

other opportunities for spiritual realization during your

lifetime, one last portal will open up for you immediately

after the body has died.

There are countless accounts by people who had a

visual impression of this portal as radiant light and then

returned from what is commonly known as a near-death

experience. Many of them also spoke of a sense of blissful

serenity and deep peace. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it

is described as "the luminous splendor of the colorless light

of Emptiness," which it says is "your own true self." This

portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have

already encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested in

your lifetime, you will likely miss it. Most people carry too

much residual resistance, too much fear, too much

attachment to sensory experience, too much identification

with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn away

in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens

after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will

be another round of birth and death. Their presence wasn't

strong enough yet for conscious immortality.

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So going through this portal does not mean annihilation?

As with all the other portals, your radiant true nature remains,

but not the personality. In any case, whatever is real or of

true value in your personality is your true nature shining

through. This is never lost. Nothing that is of value, nothing

that is real, is ever lost.

Approaching death and death itself, the dissolution of

the physical form, is always a great opportunity for spiritual

realization. This opportunity is tragically missed most of the

time, since we live in a culture that is almost totally ignorant

of death, as it is almost totally ignorant of anything that truly

matters.

Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false

self. When you go through it, you cease to derive your

identity from your psychological, mind-made form. You then

realize that death is an illusion, just as your identification

with form was an illusion. The end of illusion — that’s all

that death is. It is painful only as long as you ding to illusion.

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Chapter Eight

ENLIGHTENED RELATIONSHIPS

ENTER THE NOW FROM WHEREVER YOU ARE

I always thought that true enlightenment is not possible

except through love in a relationship between a man and a

woman. Isn't this what makes us whole again? How can

one's life be fulfilled until that happens?

Is that true in your experience? Has this happened to you?

Not yet, but how could it be otherwise? I know that it will

happen.

In other words, you are waiting for an event in time to save

you. Is this not the core error that we have been talking about?

Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and

now.

What does that statement mean, "salvation is here and now"?

I don't understand it. I don't even know what salvation means.

Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of

psychological gratification because they believe that those

things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of

fear or lack. Happiness may be perceived as a heightened

sense of aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or a

more secure and more complete sense of self attained

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through some form of psychological gratification. This is the

search for salvation from a state of unsatisfactoriness or

insufficiency. Invariably, any satisfaction that they obtain is

short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction or fulfillment is

usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away

from the here and now. "When I obtain this or am free of that

— then I will be okay." This is the unconscious mind-set that

creates the illusion of salvation in the future.

True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its

fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good

that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on

nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience

but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to

"know God" — not as something outside you but as your

own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as

an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life

from which all that exists derives its being. True salvation is

a state of freedom — from fear, from suffering, from a

perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from

all wanting, needing, grasping, and dinging. It is freedom

from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all

from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is

telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something

needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before

you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you

need time — that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve,

acquire, become, or understand something before you can be

free or complete. You see time as the means to salvation,

whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You

think that you can't get there from where and who you are at

this moment because you are not yet complete or good

enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point

from where you can get there. You "get' there by realizing

that you are there already. You find God the moment you

realize that you don't need to seek God. So there is no only

way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no

particular condition is needed. However, there is only one

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point of access: the Now: There can be no salvation away

from this moment. You are lonely and without a partner?

Enter the Now from there. You are in a relationship? Enter

the Now from there.

There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get

you closer to salvation than it is at this moment. This may be

hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that

everything worthwhile is in the future. Nor can anything that

you ever did or that was done to you in the past prevent you

from saying yes to what is and taking your attention deeply

into the Now. You cannot do this in the future. You do it

now or not at all.

LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIPS

Unless and until you access the consciousness frequency of

presence, all relationships, and particularly intimate

relationships, are deeply flawed and ultimately dysfunctional.

They may seem perfect for a while, such as when you are

"in love," but invariably that apparent perfection gets

disrupted as arguments, conflicts, dissatisfaction, and

emotional or even physical violence occur with increasing

frequency. It seems that most "love relationships" become

love/hate relationships before long. Love can then turn into

savage attack, feelings of hostility, or complete withdrawal

of affection at the flick of a switch. This is considered

normal. The relationship then oscillates for a while, a few

months or a few years, between the polarities of "love" and

hate, and it gives you as much pleasure as it gives you pain.

It is not uncommon for couples to become addicted to those

cycles. Their drama makes them feel alive. When a balance

between the positive/negative polarities is lost and the

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negative, destructive cycles occur with increasing frequency

and intensity, which tends to happen sooner or later, then it

will not be long before the relationship finally collapses.

It may appear that if you could only eliminate the

negative or destructive cycles, then all would be well and the

relationship would flower beautifully — but alas, this is not

possible. The polarities are mutually interdependent. You

cannot have one without the other. The positive already

contains within itself the as yet unmanifested negative. Both

are in fact different aspects of the same dysfunction. I am

speaking here of what is commonly called romantic

relationships — not of true love, which has no opposite

because it arises from beyond the mind. Love as a

continuous state is as yet very rare — as rare as conscious

human beings. Brief and elusive glimpses of love, however,

are possible whenever there is a gap in the stream of mind.

The negative side of a relationship is, of course, more

easily recognizable as dysfunctional than the positive one.

And it is also easier to recognize the source of negativity in

your partner than to see it in yourself. It can manifest in

many forms: possessiveness, jealousy, control, withdrawal

and unspoken resentment, the need to be right, insensitivity

and self-absorption, emotional demands and manipulation,

the urge to argue, criticize, judge, blame, or attack, anger,

unconscious revenge for past pain inflicted by a parent, rage

and physical violence.

On the positive side, you are "in love" with your partner.

This is at first a deeply satisfying state. You feel intensely

alive. Your existence has suddenly become meaningful

because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel

special, and you do the same for him or her. When you are

together, you feel whole. The feeling can become so intense

that the rest of the world fades into insignificance.

However, you may also have noticed that there is a

neediness and a clinging quality to that intensity. You

become addicted to the other person. He or she acts on you

like a drug. You are on a high when the drug is available, but

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even the possibility or the thought that he or she might no

longer be there for you can lead to jealousy, possessiveness,

attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail,

blaming and accusing — fear of loss. If the other person does

leave you, this can give rise to the most intense hostility or

the most profound grief and despair. In an instant, loving

tenderness can turn into a savage attack or dreadful grief.

Where is the love now? Can love change into its opposite in

an instant? Was it love in the first place, or just an addictive

grasping and clinging?

ADDICTION AND THE SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS

Why should we become addicted to another person?

The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an

intense and universally sought-after experience is that it

seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear,

need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human

condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state. There is

a physical as well as a psychological dimension to this state.

On the physical level, you are obviously not whole, nor

will you ever be: You are either a man or a woman, which is

to say, one-half of the whole. On this level, the longing for

wholeness — the return to oneness — manifests as malefemale

attraction, man's need for a woman, woman's need for

a man. It is an almost irresistible urge for union with the

opposite energy polarity. The root of this physical urge is a

spiritual one: the longing for an end to duality, a return to the

state of wholeness. Sexual union is the closest you can get to

this state on the physical level. This is why it is the most

deeply satisfying experience the physical realm can offer.

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But sexual union is no more than a fleeting glimpse of

wholeness, an instant of bliss. As long as it is unconsciously

sought as a means of salvation, you are seeking the end of

duality on the level of form, where it cannot be found. You

are given a tantalizing glimpse of heaven, but you are not

allowed to dwell there, and find yourself again in a separate

body.

On the psychological level, the sense of lack and

incompleteness is, if anything, even greater than on the

physical level. As long as you are identified with the mind,

you have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say,

you get your sense of who you are from things that

ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social

role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures,

belief systems, and so on. This false, mind-made self, the

ego, feels vulnerable, insecure, and is always seeking new

things to identify with to give it a feeling that it exists. But

nothing is ever enough to give it lasting fulfillment. Its fear

remains; its sense of lack and neediness remains.

But then that special relationship comes along. It seems

to be the answer to all the ego's problems and to meet all its

needs. At least this is how it appears at first. All the other

things that you derived your sense of self from before, now

become relatively insignificant. You now have a single focal

point that replaces them all, gives meaning to your life, and

through which you define your identity: the person you are

"in love" with. You are no longer a disconnected fragment in

an uncaring universe, or so it seems. Your world now has a

center: the loved one. The fact that the center is outside you

and that, therefore, you still have an externally derived sense

of self does not seem to matter at first. What matters is that

the underlying feelings of incompleteness, of fear, lack and

unfulfillment so characteristic of the egoic state are no longer

there — or are they? Have they dissolved, or do they

continue to exist underneath the happy surface reality?

If in your relationships you experience both "love" and

the opposite of love — attack, emotional violence, and so on

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— then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and

addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner

one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no

opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love

but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense

of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is

the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it

almost does feel like salvation.

But there comes a point when your partner behaves in

ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego.

The feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part

of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the "love

relationship" now resurface. Just as with every other

addiction, you are on a high when the drug is available, but

invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works

for you. When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them

even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now

perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This

means that you project them outward and attack the other

with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. This

attack may awaken the partner's own pain, and he or she may

counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still

unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at

manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your

partner to change their behavior, so that it can use them again

as a cover-up for your pain.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to

face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts

with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you

are addicted to — alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a

person — you are using something or somebody to cover up

your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed,

there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate

relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They

bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.

Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point

where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel

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the pain more intensely than ever.

This is one reason why most people are always trying to

escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind

of salvation in the future, The first thing that they might

encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their

own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how

easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that

dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the

illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own

reality, how dose to God.

Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain

is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three

failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force

you into awakening than three years on a desert island or

shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense

presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.

FROM ADDICTIVE TO ENLIGHTENED RELATIONSHIPS

Can we change an addictive relationship into a true one ?

Yes. Being present and intensifying your presence by taking

your attention ever more deeply into the Now:. Whether you

are living alone or with a partner, this remains the key. For

love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong

enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or

the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know

yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness

underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the

pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To disidentify

from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and

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thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be the

silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the

repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the

ego.

If you stop investing it with "selfness," the mind loses

its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to

judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama,

and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops

through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You

have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop

judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The

greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete

acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to

judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes

you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging

are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators

anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all

codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's

unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You

will then either separate — in love — or move ever more

deeply into the Now together — into Being. Can it be that

simple? Yes, it is that simple.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is

deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave

you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external

form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own

formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that

animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life

deep within every other human and every other creature. You

look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the

realization of oneness. This is love.

What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the

forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One

Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it.

Therefore, all love is the love of God.

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Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not

selective. It does not make one person special. It is not

exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love"

of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt

can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love

back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and

if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that

you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that

connects you with that person is the same bond that connects

you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a

bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which

it is felt differs.

Even in an otherwise addictive relationship, there may

be moments when something more real shines through,

something beyond your mutual addictive needs. These are

moments when both your and your partner's mind briefly

subside and the pain-body is temporarily in a dormant state.

This may sometimes happen during physical intimacy, or

when you are both witnessing the miracle of childbirth, or in

the presence of death, or when one of you is seriously ill —

anything that renders the mind powerless. When this happens,

your Being, which is usually buried underneath the mind,

becomes revealed, and it is this that makes true

communication possible.

True communication is communion — the realization of

oneness, which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again,

unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the

mind and its old patterns. As soon as the mind and mind

identification return, you are no longer yourself but a mental

image of yourself, and you start playing games and roles

again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind

again, pretending to be a human being, interacting with

another mind, playing a drama called "love."

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Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot

flourish unless you are permanently free of mind

identification and your presence is intense enough to have

dissolved the pain-body — or you can at least remain present

as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and

so become destructive of love.

RELATIONSHIPS AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

As the egoic mode of consciousness and all the social,

political, and economic structures that it created enter the

final stage of collapse, the relationships between men and

women reflect the deep state of crisis in which humanity now

finds itself. As humans have become increasingly identified

with their mind, most relationships are not rooted in Being

and so turn into a source of pain and become dominated by

problems and conflict.

Millions are now living alone or as single parents,

unable to establish an intimate relationship or unwilling to

repeat the insane drama of past relationships. Others go from

one relationship to another, from one pleasure-and-pain cycle

to another, in search of the elusive goal of fulfillment

through union with the opposite energy polarity. Still others

compromise and continue to be together in a dysfunctional

relationship in which negativity prevails, for the sake of the

children or security, through force of habit, fear of being

alone, or some other mutually "beneficial" arrangement, or

even through the unconscious addiction to the excitement of

emotional drama and pain.

However, every crisis represents not only danger but

also opportunity. If relationships energize and magnify egoic

mind patterns and activate the pain-body, as they do at this

time, why not accept this fact rather than try to escape from

it? Why not cooperate with it instead of avoiding

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relationships or continuing to pursue the phantom of an ideal

partner as an answer to your problems or a means of felling

fulfilled? The opportunity that is concealed within every

crisis does not manifest until all the facts of any given

situation are acknowledged and fully accepted. As long as

you deny them, as long as you try to escape from them or

wish that things were different, the window of opportunity

does not open up, and you remain trapped inside that

situation, which will remain the same or deteriorate further.

With the acknowledgment and acceptance of the facts

also comes a degree of freedom from them. For example,

when you know there is disharmony and you hold that

"knowing," through your knowing a new factor has come in,

and the disharmony cannot remain unchanged. When you

know you are not at peace, your knowing creates a still space

that surrounds your nonpeace in a loving and tender embrace

and then transmutes your nonpeace into peace. As far as

inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can

do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly

cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can

do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace

and love to enter.

So whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it

brings out the "madness" in you and in your partner, be glad.

What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is

an opportunity for salvation. Every moment, hold the

knowing of that moment, particularly of your inner state. If

there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy,

defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right, an

inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain

of any kind — whatever it is, know the reality of that

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moment and hold the knowing. The relationship then

becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice. If you observe

unconscious behavior in your partner, hold it in the loving

embrace of your knowing so that you won't react.

Unconsciousness and knowing cannot coexist for long —

even if the knowing is only in the other person and not in the

one who is acting out the unconsciousness. The energy form

that lies behind hostility and attack finds the presence of love

absolutely intolerable. If you react at all to your partner's

unconsciousness, you become unconscious yourself. But if

you then remember to know your reaction, nothing is lost.

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is

our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every

aspect of your life and close relationships in particular.

Never before have relationships been as problematic and

conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed,

they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you

continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a

relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if

you accept that the relationship is here to make you

conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer

you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the

higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.

For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be

increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

I suppose that it takes two to make a relationship into a

spiritual practice, as you suggest. For example, my partner

is still acting out his old patterns of jealousy and control. I

have pointed this out many times, but he is unable to see it.

How many people does it take to make your life into a

spiritual practice? Never mind if your partner will not

cooperate. Sanity — consciousness — can only come into

this world through you. You do not need to wait for the

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world to become sane, or for somebody else to become

conscious, before you can be enlightened. You may wait

forever. Do not accuse each other of being unconscious. The

moment you start to argue, you have identified with a mental

position and are now defending not only that position but

also your sense of self. The ego is in charge. You have

become unconscious. At times, it may be appropriate to point

out certain aspects of your partner's behavior. If you are very

alert, very present, you can do so without ego involvement

— without blaming, accusing, or making the other wrong.

When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish

all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone's

unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your

own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that

for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that

you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when

you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being

the reaction" and the judge. You will then either be totally

free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing,

the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be.

Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light.

Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at

the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a

clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all

people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for

transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner

cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.

If you both agree that the relationship will be your

spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express

your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they

occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not

create a time gap in which an unexpressed or

unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow.

Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming.

Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way.

Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be

present. Accusing, defending, attacking — all those patterns

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that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its

needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to

others — and to yourself— is vital. Love cannot flourish

without it. When you have removed the two factors that are

destructive of relationships: When the pain-body has been

transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and

mental positions, and if your partner has done the same, you

will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship.

Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your

unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive

ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that

you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization

of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no

opposite.

If your partner is still identified with the mind and the

pain-body while you are already free, this will represent a

major challenge — not to you but to your partner. It is not

easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy

that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that

the ego needs problems, conflict, and "enemies" to

strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity

depends. The unenlightened partner's mind will be deeply

frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which

means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even

the "danger" that they may collapse altogether, resulting in

loss of self. The pain-body is demanding feedback and not

getting it. The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not

being met. But beware: Some people who are unresponsive,

withdrawn, insensitive, or cut off from their feelings may

think and try to convince others that they are enlightened, or

at least that there is "nothing wrong" with them and

everything wrong with their partner. Men tend to do that

more than women. They may see their female partners as

irrational or emotional. But if you can feel your emotions,

you are not far from the radiant inner body just underneath.

If you are mainly in your head, the distance is much greater,

and you need to bring consciousness into the emotional body

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before you can reach the inner body.

If there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete

presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not

enlightenment. Another indicator is how a person behaves in

difficult or challenging situations or when things "go wrong."

If your "enlightenment" is egoic self-delusion, then life will

soon give you a challenge that will bring out your

unconsciousness in whatever form — as fear, anger,

defensiveness, judgment, depression, and so on. If you are in

a relationship, many of your challenges will come through

your partner. For example, a woman may be challenged by

an unresponsive male partner who lives almost entirely in his

head. She will be challenged by his inability to hear her, to

give her attention and space to be, which is due to his lack of

presence. The absence of love in the relationship, which is

usually more keenly felt by a woman than a man, will trigger

the woman's pain-body, and through it she will attack her

partner — blame, criticize, make wrong, and so on. This in

turn now becomes his challenge. To defend himself against

her pain-body's attack, which he sees as totally unwarranted,

he will become even more deeply entrenched in his mental

positions as he justifies, defends himself or counterattacks.

Eventually, this may activate his own pain-body. When both

partners have thus been taken over, a level of deep

unconsciousness has been reached, of emotional violence,

savage attack and counterattack. It will not subside until both

pain-bodies have replenished themselves and then enter the

dormant stage. Until the next time.

This is only one of an endless number of possible

scenarios. Many volumes have been written, and many more

could be written, about the ways in which unconsciousness is

brought out in male-female relationships. But, as I said

earlier, once you understand the root of the dysfunction, you

do not need to explore its countless manifestations.

Let's briefly look again at the scenario I have just

described. Every challenge that it contains is actually a

disguised opportunity for salvation. At every stage of the

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unfolding dysfunctional process, freedom from

unconsciousness is possible. For example, the woman's

hostility could become a signal for the man to come out of

his mind-identified state, awaken into the Now, become

present — instead of becoming even more identified with his

mind, even more unconscious. Instead of "being" the painbody,

the woman could be the knowing that watches the

emotional pain in herself, thus accessing the power of the

Now and initiating the transmutation of the pain. This would

remove the compulsive and automatic outward projection of

it. She could then express her feelings to her partner. There is

no guarantee, of course, that he will listen, but it gives him a

good chance to become present and certainly breaks the

insane cycle of the involuntary acting out of old mind

patterns. If the woman misses that opportunity, the man

could watch his own mental-emotional reaction to her pain,

his own defensiveness, rather than being the reaction. He

could then watch his own pain-body being triggered and thus

bring consciousness into his emotions. In this way, a clear

and still space of pure awareness would come into being —

the knowing, the silent witness, the watcher. This awareness

does not deny the pain and yet is beyond it. It allows the pain

to be and yet transmutes it at the same time. It accepts

everything and transforms everything. A door would have

opened up for her through which she could easily join him in

that space.

If you are consistently or at least predominantly present

in your relationship, this will be the greatest challenge for

your partner. They will not be able to tolerate your presence

for very long and stay unconscious. If they are ready, they

will walk through the door that you opened for them and join

you in that state. If they are not, you will separate like oil and

water. The light is too painful for someone who wants to

remain in darkness.

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WHY WOMEN ARE CLOSER TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Are the obstacles to enlightenment the same for a man as for

a woman?

Yes, but the emphasis is different. Generally speaking, it is

easier for a woman to feel and be in her body, so she is

naturally closer to Being and potentially closer to

enlightenment than a man. This is why many ancient cultures

instinctively chose female figures or analogies to represent or

describe the formless and transcendental reality. It was often

seen as a womb that gives birth to everything in creation and

sustains and nourishes it during its life as form. In the Tao Te

Ching, one of the most ancient and profound books ever

written, the Tao, which could be translated as Being, is

described as "infinite, eternally present, the mother of the

universe." Naturally, women are closer to it than men since

they virtually "embody" the Unmanifested. What is more, all

creatures and all things must eventually return to the Source.

'All things vanish into the Tao. It alone endures." Since the

Source is seen as female, this is represented as the light and

dark sides of the archetypal feminine in psychology and

mythology. The Goddess or Divine Mother has two aspects:

She gives life, and she takes life.

When the mind took over and humans lost touch with

the reality of their divine essence, they started to think of

God as a male figure. Society became male dominated, and

the female was made subordinate to the male.

I am not suggesting a return to earlier female

representations of the divine. Some people now use the term

Goddess instead of God. They are redressing a balance

between male and female that was lost a long time ago, and

that is good. But it is still a representation and a concept,

perhaps temporarily useful, just as a map or a signpost is

temporarily useful, but more a hindrance than a help when

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you are ready to realize the reality beyond all concepts and

images. What does remain true, however, is that the energy

frequency of the mind appears to be essentially male. The

mind resists, fights for control, uses, manipulates, attacks,

tries to grasp and possess, and so on. This is why the

traditional God is a patriarchal, controlling authority figure,

an often angry man who you should live in fear of, as the Old

Testament suggests. This God is a projection of the human

mind. To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper

reality of Being, very different qualities are needed:

surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be

instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the

loving embrace of your knowing. All these qualifies are

much more closely related to the female principle. Whereas

mind-energy is hard and rigid, Being-energy is soft and

yielding and yet infinitely more powerful than mind. The

mind runs our civilization, whereas Being is in charge of all

life on our planet and beyond. Being is the very Intelligence

whose visible manifestation is the physical universe.

Although women are potentially closer to it, men can also

access it within themselves.

At this time, the vast majority of men as well as women

are still in the grip of the mind: identified with the thinker

and the pain-body. This, of course, is what prevents

enlightenment and the flowering of love. As a general rule,

the major obstacle for men tends to be the thinking mind, and

the major obstacle for women the pain-body, although in

certain individual cases the opposite may be true, and in

others the two factors may be equal.

DISSOLVING THE COLLECTIVE FEMALE PAIN-BODY

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Why is the pain-body more of an obstacle for women?

The pain-body usually has a collective as well as a personal

aspect. The personal aspect is the accumulated residue of

emotional pain suffered in one's own past. The collective one

is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over

thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder,

cruelty, madness, and so on. Everyone's personal pain-body

also partakes of this collective pain-body. There are different

strands in the collective pain-body. For example, certain

races or countries in which extreme forms of strife and

violence occur have a heavier collective pain-body than

others. Anyone with a strong pain-body and not enough

consciousness to disidentify from it will not only

continuously or periodically be forced to relive their

emotional pain but may also easily become either the

perpetrator or the victim of violence, depending on whether

their pain-body is predominantly active or passive. On the

other hand, they may also be potentially closer to

enlightenment. This potential isn't necessarily realized, of

course, but if you are trapped in a nightmare you will

probably be more strongly motivated to awaken than

someone who is just caught in the ups and downs of an

ordinary dream.

Apart from her personal pain-body, every woman has

her share in what could be described as the collective female

pain-body — unless she is fully conscious. This consists of

accumulated pain suffered by women partly through male

subjugation of the female, through slavery, exploitation, rape,

childbirth, child loss, and so on, over thousands of years.

The emotional or physical pain that for many women

precedes and coincides with the menstrual flow is the painbody

in its collective aspect that awakens from its dormancy

at that time, although it can be triggered at other times too. It

restricts the free flow of life energy through the body, of

which menstruation is a physical expression. Let's dwell on

this for a moment and see how it can become an opportunity

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for enlightenment.

Often a woman is "taken over" by the pain-body at that

time. It has an extremely powerful energetic charge that can

easily pull you into unconscious identification with it. You

are then actively possessed by an energy field that occupies

your inner space and pretends to be you — but, of course, is

not you at all. It speaks through you, acts through you, thinks

through you. It will create negative situations in your life so

that it can feed on the energy. It wants more pain, in

whatever form. I have described this process already. It can

be vicious and destructive. It is pure pain, past pain — and it

is not you.

The number of women who are now approaching the

fully conscious state already exceeds that of men and will be

growing even faster in the years to come. Men may catch up

with them in the end, but for some considerable time there

will be a gap between the consciousness of men and that of

women. Women are regaining the function that is their

birthright and, therefore, comes to them more naturally than

it does to men: to be a bridge between the manifested world

and the Unmanifested, between physicality and spirit. Your

main task as a woman now is to transmute the pain-body so

that it no longer comes between you and your true self, the

essence of who you are. Of course, you also have to deal

with the other obstacle to enlightenment, which is the

thinking mind, but the intense presence you generate when

dealing with the pain-body will also free you from

identification with the mind.

The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make

an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become

free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in

your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or

sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why?

Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and

the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an

unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to

make it conscious.

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To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to

your pain can be quite a shocking realization. The moment

you realize this, you have broken the attachment. The painbody

is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has

become temporarily lodged in your inner space. It is life

energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer

flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain

things that happened in the past. It/s the living past in you,

and if you identify with it, you identify with the past. A

victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful

than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the

belief that other people and what they did to you are

responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or

your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only

power there is, is contained within this moment: It is the

power of your presence. Once you know that, you also

realize that you are responsible for your inner space now —

nobody else is — and that the past cannot prevail against the

power of the Now.

So identification prevents you from dealing with the painbody.

Some women who are already conscious enough to

have relinquished their victim identity on the personal level

are still holding on to a collective victim identity: "what men

did to women." They are right — and they are also wrong.

They are right inasmuch as the collective female pain-body

is in large part due to male violence inflicted on women and

repression of the female principle throughout the planet over

millennia. They are wrong if they derive a sense of self from

this fact and thereby keep themselves imprisoned in a

collective victim identity. If a woman is still holding on to

anger, resentment, or condemnation, she is holding on to her

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pain-body. This may give her a comforting sense of identity,

of solidarity with other women, but it is keeping her in

bondage to the past and blocking full access to her essence

and true power. If women exclude themselves from men, that

fosters a sense of separation and therefore a strengthening of

the ego. And the stronger the ego, the more distant you are

from your true nature.

So do not use the pain-body to give you an identity. Use

it for enlightenment instead. Transmute it into consciousness.

One of the best times for this is during menses. I believe that,

in the years to come, many women will enter the fully

conscious state during that time. Usually, it is a time of

unconsciousness for many women, as they are taken over by

the collective female pain-body. Once you have reached a

certain level of consciousness, however, you can reverse this,

so instead of becoming unconscious you become more

conscious. I have described the basic process already, but let

me take you through it again, this time with special reference

to the collective female pain-body.

When you know that the menstrual flow is approaching,

before you feel the first signs of what is commonly called

premenstrual tension, the awakening of the collective female

pain-body, become very alert and inhabit your body as fully

as possible. When the first sign appears, you need to be alert

enough to "catch" it before it takes you over. For example,

the first sign may be a sudden strong irritation or a flash of

anger, or it may be a purely physical symptom. Whatever it

is, catch it before it can take over your thinking or behavior.

This simply means putting the spotlight of your attention on

it. If it is an emotion, feel the strong energy charge behind it.

Know that it is the pain-body. At the same time, be the

knowing; that is to say, be aware of your conscious presence

and feel its power. Any emotion that you take your presence

into will quickly subside and become transmuted. If it is a

purely physical symptom, the attention that you give it will

prevent it from turning into an emotion or a thought. Then

continue to be alert and wait for the next sign of the pain168

body. When it appears, catch it again in the same way as

before.

Later, when the pain-body has fully awakened from its

dormant state, you may experience considerable turbulence

in your inner space for a while, perhaps for several days.

Whatever form this takes, stay present. Give it your complete

attention. Watch the turbulence inside you. Know it is there.

Hold the knowing, and be the knowing. Remember: do not

let the pain-body use your mind and take over your thinking.

Watch it. Feel its energy directly, inside your body. As you

know, full attention means full acceptance.

Through sustained attention and thus acceptance, there

comes transmutation. The pain-body becomes transformed

into radiant consciousness, just as a piece of wood, when

placed in or near a fire, itself is transformed into fire.

Menstruation will then become not only a joyful and

fulfilling expression of your womanhood but also a sacred

time of transmutation, when you give birth to a new

consciousness. Your true nature then shines forth, both in its

female aspect as the Goddess and in its transcendental aspect

as the divine Being that you are beyond male and female

duality.

If your male partner is conscious enough, he can help

you with the practice I have just described by holding the

frequency of intense presence particularly at this time. If he

stays present whenever you fall back into unconscious

identification with the pain-body, which can and will happen

at first, you will be able to quickly rejoin him in that state.

This means that whenever the pain-body temporarily takes

over, whether during menses or at other times, your partner

will not mistake it for who you are. Even if the pain-body

attacks him, as it probably will, he will not react to it as if it

were "you," withdraw, or put up some kind of defense. He

will hold the space of intense presence. Nothing else is

needed for transformation. At other times, you will be able to

do the same for him or help him reclaim consciousness from

the mind by drawing his attention into the here and now

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whenever he becomes identified with his thinking.

In this way, a permanent energy field of a pure and high

frequency will arise between you. No illusion, no pain, no

conflict, nothing that is not you, and nothing that is not love

can survive in it. This represents the fulfillment of the divine,

transpersonal purpose of your relationship. It becomes a

vortex of consciousness that will draw in many others.

GIVE UP THE RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF

When one is fully conscious, would one still have a need for

a relationship? Would a man still feel drawn to a woman?

Would a woman still feel incomplete without a man?

Enlightened or not, you are either a man or a woman, so on

the level of your form identity you are not complete. You are

one-half of the whole. This incompleteness is felt as malefemale

attraction, the pull toward the opposite energy

polarity, no matter how conscious you are. But in that state

of inner connectedness, you feel this pull somewhere on the

surface or periphery of your life. Anything that happens to

you in that state feels somewhat like that. The whole world

seems like waves or ripples on the surface or a vast and deep

ocean. You are that ocean and, of course, you are also a

ripple, but a ripple that has realized its true identity as the

ocean, and compared to that vastness and depth, the world of

waves and ripples is not all that important.

This does not mean that you don't relate deeply to other

people or to your partner. In fact, you can relate deeply only

if you are conscious of Being. Coming from Being, you are

able to focus beyond the veil of form. In Being, male and

female are one. Your form may continue to have certain

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needs, but Being has none. It is already complete and whole.

If those needs are met, that is beautiful, but whether or not

they are met makes no difference to your deep inner state. So

it is perfectly possible for an enlightened person, if the need

for the male or female polarity is not met, to feel a sense of

lack or incompleteness on the outer level of his or her being,

yet at the same time be totally complete, fulfilled, and at

peace within.

In the quest for enlightenment, is being gay a help or a

hindrance, or does it not make any difference?

As you approach adulthood, uncertainty about your sexuality

followed by the realization that you are "different" from

others may force you to disidentify from socially conditioned

patterns of thought and behavior. This will automatically

raise your level of consciousness above that of the

unconscious majority, whose members unquestioningly take

on board all inherited patterns. In that respect, being gay can

be a help. Being an outsider to some extent, someone who

does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for

whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at

an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes

you out of unconsciousness almost by force.

On the other hand, if you then develop a sense of

identity based on your gayness, you have escaped one trap

only to fall into another. You will play roles and games

dictated by a mental image you have of yourself as gay. You

will become unconscious. You will become unreal.

Underneath your ego mask, you will become very unhappy.

If this happens to you, being gay will have become a

hindrance. But you always get another chance, of course.

Acute unhappiness can be a great awakener.

Is it not true that you need to have a good relationship with

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yourself and love yourself before you can have a fulfilling

relationship with another person ?

If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone,

you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You

can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other

form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your

partner responsible for it.

All you really need to do is accept this moment fully.

You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with

yourself.

But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at

all? Why can't you just be yourself? When you have a

relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two:

"I" and "myself," subject and object. That mind-created

duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all

problems and conflict in your life. In the state of

enlightenment, you are yourself — "you" and "yourself"

merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel

sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not

love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split

caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse

removed. There is no "self" that you need to protect, defend,

or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one

relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with

yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other

relationships will be love relationships.

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Chapter Nine

BEYOND HAPPINESS AND

UNHAPPINESS

THERE IS PEACE

THE HIGHER GOOD BEYOND GOOD AND BAD

Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace?

Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as

positive; inner peace does not.

Is it not possible to attract only positive conditions into our

life? If our attitude and our thinking are always positive, we

would manifest only positive events and situations, wouldn't

we?

Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do

you have the total picture? There have been many people for

whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever

form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to

let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals

and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It

made them more real.

Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a

deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it

at the time. Even a brief illness or an accident can show you

what is real and unreal in your life, what ultimately matters

and what doesn’t.

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Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always

positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor

negative. They are as they are. And when you live in

complete acceptance of what is — which is the only sane

way to live — there is no "good" or "bad" in your life

anymore. There is only a higher good — which includes the

"bad." Seen from the perspective of the mind, however, there

is good-bad, like-dislike, love-hate. Hence, in the Book of

Genesis, it is said that Adam and Eve were no longer allowed

to dwell in "paradise" when they "ate of the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil."

This sounds to me like denial and self-deception. When

something dreadful happens to me or someone close to me —

accident, illness, pain of some kind or death — I can pretend

that it isn't bad, but the fact remains that it is bad, so why

deny it?

You are not pretending anything. You are allowing it to be as

it is, that’s all. This "allowing to be" takes you beyond the

mind with its resistance patterns that create the positivenegative

polarities. It is an essential aspect of forgiveness.

Forgiveness of the present is even more important than

forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment —

allow it to be as it is — then there will be no accumulation of

resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.

Remember that we are not talking about happiness

here. For example, when a loved one has just died, or you

feel your own death approaching, you cannot be happy. It is

impossible. But you can be at peace. There may be sadness

and tears, but provided that you have relinquished resistance,

underneath the sadness you will feel a deep serenity, a

stillness, a sacred presence. This is the emanation of Being,

this is inner peace, the good that has no opposite.

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What if it is a situation that I can do something about? How

can I allow it to be and change it at the same time?

Do what you have to do. In the meantime, accept what is.

Since mind and resistance are synonymous, acceptance

immediately frees you from mind dominance and thus

reconnects you with Being. As a result, the usual ego

motivations for "doing" — fear, greed, control, defending or

feeding the false sense of self— will cease to operate. An

intelligence much greater than the mind is now in charge,

and so a different quality of consciousness will flow into

your doing.

"Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of

your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?" This

was written 2,000 years ago by Marcus Aurelius, one of

those exceedingly rare humans who possessed worldly

power as well as wisdom.

It seems that most people need to experience a great

deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and

accept — before they will forgive. As soon as they do, one of

the greatest miracles happens: the awakening of Beingconsciousness

through what appears as evil, the

transmutation of suffering into inner peace. The ultimate

effect of all the evil and suffering in the world is that it will

force humans into realizing who they are beyond name and

form. Thus, what we perceive as evil from our limited

perspective is actually part of the higher good that has no

opposite. This, however, does not become true for you

except through forgiveness. Until that happens, evil has not

been redeemed and therefore remains evil.

Through forgiveness, which essentially means

recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the

present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation

happens not only within but also without. A silent space of

intense presence arises both in you and around you. Whoever

or whatever enters that field of consciousness will be

affected by it, sometimes visibly and immediately,

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sometimes at deeper levels with visible changes appearing at

a later time. You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel

unconsciousness — without doing anything — simply by

being and holding that frequency of intense presence.

THE END OF YOUR LIFE DRAMA

In that state of acceptance and inner peace, even though you

may not call it "bad,' can anything still come into your life

that would be called "bad" from a perspective of ordinary

consciousness?

Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives

are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather

ego-created. I sometimes refer to those things as "drama."

When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into

your life anymore. Let me remind you briefly how the ego

operates and how it creates drama.

Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when

you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the

watcher. The ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a

hostile universe, with no real inner connection to any other

being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a

potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own

ends. The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own

deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance,

control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego's

strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any

of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.

When egos come together, whether in personal

relationships or in organizations or institutions, "bad" things

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happen sooner or later: drama of one kind or another, in the

form of conflict, problems, power struggles, emotional or

physical violence, and so on. This includes collective evils

such as war, genocide, and exploitation — all due to massed

unconsciousness. Furthermore, many types of illness are

caused by the ego's continuous resistance, which creates

restrictions and blockages in the flow of energy through the

body. When you reconnect with Being and are no longer run

by your mind, you cease to create those things. You do not

create or participate in drama anymore.

Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of

one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone,

you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for

yourself, that’s drama. When you feel guilty or anxious,

that’s drama. When you let the past or future obscure the

present, you are creating time, psychological time — the

stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not

honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are

creating drama.

Most people are in love with their particular life drama.

Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They

have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their —

usually unsuccessful — search for an answer, a solution, or

for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most

is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind,

what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.

When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is

the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an

argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You

cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An

argument implies identification with your mind and a mental

position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other

person's position. The result is that the polar opposites

become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of

unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and

firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no

defense or attack. So it won't turn into drama. When you are

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fully conscious, you cease to be in conflict. "No one who is

at one with himself can even conceive of conflict," states A

Course in Miracles. This refers not only to conflict with

other people but more fundamentally to conflict within you,

which ceases when there is no longer any clash between the

demands and expectations of your mind and what is.

IMPERMANENCE AND THE CYCLES OF LIFE

However, as long as you are in the physical dimension and

linked to the collective human psyche, physical pain —

although rare — is still possible. This is not to be confused

with suffering, with mental-emotional pain. All suffering is

ego-created and is due to resistance. Also, as long as you are

in this dimension, you are still subject to its cyclical nature

and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you no

longer perceive this as "bad" — it just is.

Through allowing the "isness" of all things, a deeper

dimension underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to

you as an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an

uncaused joy beyond good and bad. This is the joy of Being,

the peace of God.

On the level of form, there is birth and death, creation

and destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly

separate forms. This is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle

of a star or a planet, a physical body, a tree, a flower; in the

rise and fall of nations, political systems, civilizations; and in

the inevitable cycles of gain and loss in the life of an

individual.

There are cycles of success, when things come to you

and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or

disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make

room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen.

If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing

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to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.

It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down

cycle bad, except in the mind's judgment. Growth is usually

considered positive, but nothing can grow forever. If growth,

of whatever kind, were to go on and on, it would eventually

become monstrous and destructive. Dissolution is needed for

new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual

realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or

experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the

spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became

empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure.

Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every

failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form,

everybody "fails" sooner or later, of course, and every

achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are

impermanent.

You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and

creating new forms and circumstances, but you won't be

identified with them. You do not need them to give you a

sense of self. They are not your life — only your life

situation.

Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot

always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as

high energy. There will be periods when you are highly

active and creative, but there may also be times when

everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not

getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last

for anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large

cycles and small cycles within these large ones. Many

illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of

low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion

to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth

and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an

inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.

This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low

cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the

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organism may take over as a self-protective measure and

create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the

necessary regeneration can take place.

The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked

with the impermanence of all things and situations. The

Buddha made this a central part of his teaching. All

conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux, or, as he

put it, impermanence is a characteristic of every condition,

every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It will

change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you. Impermanence is

also central to Jesus's teaching: "Do not lay up for yourselves

treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where

thieves break in and steal . . . ."

As long as a condition is judged as "good" by your

mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role,

a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it

and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel

good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are

or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where

moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may

undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good

yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into

bad. The same condition that made you happy, then makes

you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty

consumerism of tomorrow. The happy wedding and

honeymoon become the unhappy divorce or the unhappy

coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence makes

you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind as

attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears,

the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing

condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were

being torn off your body.

We sometimes hear of people who have lost all their

money or whose reputation has been ruined committing

suicide. Those are the extreme cases. Others, whenever a

major loss of one kind or another occurs, just become deeply

unhappy or make themselves ill. They cannot distinguish

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between their life and their life situation. I recently read

about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her

beauty started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she

grew desperately unhappy and became a recluse. She, too,

had identified with a condition: her external appearance.

First, the condition gave her a happy sense of self, then an

unhappy one. If she had been able to connect with the

formless and timeless life within, she could have watched

and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of

serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have

become increasingly transparent to the light shining through

from her ageless true nature, so her beauty would not really

have faded but simply become transformed into spiritual

beauty. However, nobody told her that this is possible. The

most essential kind of knowledge is not yet widely accessible.

The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha — a

Pali word meaning "suffering" or "unsatisfactoriness." It is

inseparable from its opposite. This means that your

happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion

of time separates them.

This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the

nature of things, so that you don't pursue an illusion for the

rest of your life. Nor is it saying that you should no longer

appreciate pleasant or beautiful things or conditions. But to

seek something through them that they cannot give — an

identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment — is a recipe

for frustration and suffering. The whole advertising industry

and consumer society would collapse if people became

enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity

through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the

more it will elude you. Nothing out there will ever satisfy

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you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need

to experience many disillusionments before you realize that

truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they

will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you

pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you

joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of

Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the

state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural

state, not something that you need to work hard for or

struggle to attain.

Many people never realize that there can be no

"salvation" in anything they do, possess, or attain. Those

who do realize it often become world-weary and depressed:

if nothing can give you true fulfillment, what is there left to

strive for, what is the point in anything? The Old Testament

prophet must have arrived at such a realization when he

wrote "I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and

behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. " When you

reach this point, you are one step away from despair — and

one step away from enlightenment.

A Buddhist monk once told me: "All I have learned in

the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one

sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know." What he

meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no

resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present

moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all

things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace,

ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent

upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems

almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form

is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms,

tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that

you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you

with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to

enjoy and appreciate them — while they last. All those

things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and

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go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss

anymore. Life flows with ease.

The happiness that is derived from some secondary

source is never very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the

joy of Being, the vibrant peace that you find within as you

enter the state of nonresistance. Being takes you beyond the

polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency

on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all

around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace.

You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.

USING AND RELINQUISHING NEGATIVITY

All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form

or another. All negativity is resistance. In this context, the

two words are almost synonymous. Negativity ranges from

irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed

mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes the

resistance triggers the emotional pain-body, in which case

even a minor situation may produce intense negativity, such

as anger, depression, or deep grief.

The ego believes that through negativity it can

manipulate reality and get what it wants. It believes that

through it, it can attract a desirable condition or dissolve an

undesirable one. A Course in Miracles rightly points out that,

whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief

that the unhappiness "buys" you what you want. If "you" —

the mind — did not believe that unhappiness works, why

would you create it? The fact is, of course, that negativity

does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it

stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one,

it keeps it in place. Its only "useful" function is that it

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strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.

Once you have identified with some form of negativity,

you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level,

you do not want positive change. It would threaten your

identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You

will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life.

This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.

Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant,

and there is a deep link between the poisoning and

destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has

accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life

form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no

other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.

Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree?

Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a

problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird

that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that

may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or

show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close

contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its

insanity.

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you

acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you

Being. Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one,

to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and

how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a

problem.

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.

Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just

watching them is a meditation. How peacefully they float

along, at ease with themselves, totally present in the Now,

dignified and perfect as only a mindless creature can be.

Occasionally, however, two ducks will get into a fight —

sometimes for no apparent reason, or because one duck has

strayed into another's private space. The fight usually lasts

only for a few seconds, and then the ducks separate, swim

off in opposite directions, and vigorously flap their wings a

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few times. They then continue to swim on peacefully as if

the fight had never happened. When I observed that for the

first time, I suddenly realized that by flapping their wings

they were releasing surplus energy, thus preventing it from

becoming trapped in their body and turning into negativity.

This is natural wisdom, and it is easy for them because they

do not have a mind that keeps the past alive unnecessarily

and then builds an identity around it.

Couldn't a negative emotion also contain an important

message? For example, if I often feel depressed, it may be a

signal that there is something wrong with my life, and it may

force me to look at my life situation and make some changes.

So I need to listen to what the emotion is telling me and not

just dismiss it as negative.

Yes, recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a

message, as do illnesses. But any changes that you make,

whether they have to do with your work, your relationships,

or your surroundings, are ultimately only cosmetic unless

they arise out of a change in your level of consciousness.

And as far as that is concerned, it can only mean one thing:

becoming more present. When you have reached a certain

degree of presence, you don't need negativity anymore to tell

you what is needed in your life situation. But as long as

negativity is there, use it. Use it as a kind of signal that

reminds you to be more present.

How do we stop negativity from arising, and how do we get

rid of it once it is there?

As I said, you stop it from arising by being fully present. But

don't become discouraged. There are as yet few people on

the planet who can sustain a state of continuous presence,

although some are getting dose to it. Soon, I believe, there

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will be many more.

Whenever you notice that some form of negativity has

arisen within you, look on it not as a failure, but as a helpful

signal that is telling you: "Wake up. Get out of your mind.

Be present."

There is a novel by Aldous Huxley called Island,

written in his later years when he became very interested in

spiritual teachings. It tells the story of a man shipwrecked on

a remote island cut off from the rest of the world. This island

contains a unique civilization. The unusual thing about it is

that its inhabitants, unlike those of the rest of the world, are

actually sane. The first thing that the man notices are the

colorful parrots perched in the trees, and they seem to be

constantly croaking the words "Attention. Here and Now.

Attention. Here and Now." We later learn that the islanders

taught them these words in order to be reminded

continuously to stay present.

So whenever you feel negativity arising within you,

whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even

nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a

voice saying "Attention. Here and Now. Wake up." Even the

slightest irritation is significant and needs to be

acknowledged and looked at; otherwise, there will be a

cumulative build-up of unobserved reactions. As I said

before, you may be able to just drop it once you realize that

you don't want to have this energy field inside you and that it

serves no purpose. But then make sure that you drop it

completely. If you cannot drop it, just accept that it is there

and take your attention into the feeling, as I pointed out

earlier.

As an alternative to dropping a negative reaction, you

can make it disappear by imagining yourself becoming

transparent to the external cause of the reaction. I

recommend that you practice it with little, even trivial, things

first. Let’s say that you are sitting quietly at home. Suddenly,

there is the penetrating sound of a car alarm from across the

street. Irritation arises. What is the purpose of the irritation?

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None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didn't. The

mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why

did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious

belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity

or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the

undesirable condition. This, of course, is a delusion. The

resistance that it creates, the irritation or anger in this case, is

far more disturbing than the original cause that it is

attempting to dissolve.

All this can be transformed into spiritual practice. Feel

yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the

solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever

causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no

longer hitting a solid "wall" inside you. As I said, practice

with little things first. The car alarm, the dog barking, the

children screaming, the traffic jam. Instead of having a wall

of resistance inside you that gets constantly and painfully hit

by things that "should not be happening," let everything pass

through you.

Somebody says something to you that is rude or

designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction

and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you

let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if

there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is

forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can

still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable,

if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer

has the power to control your inner state. You are then in

your power — not in someone else's, nor are you run by your

mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an

earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance

mechanism is the same.

I have been practicing meditation, I have been to workshops,

I have read many books on spirituality, I try to be in a state

of nonresistance — but if you ask me whether I have found

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true and lasting inner peace, my honest answer would have

to be "no. " Why haven't I found it? What else can I do?

You are still seeking outside, and you cannot get out of the

seeking mode. Maybe the next workshop will have the

answer, maybe that new technique. To you I would say.

Don't look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the

one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner

conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not

being at peace. The moment you completely accept your nonpeace,

your nonpeace becomes transmuted into peace.

Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you

into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.

You may have heard the phrase "turn the other cheek," which

a great teacher of enlightenment used 2,000 years ago. He

was attempting to convey symbolically the secret of

nonresistance and nonreaction. In this statement, as in all his

others, he was concerned only with your inner reality, not

with the outer conduct of your life.

Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a

great Zen master, he spent many years in the pursuit of

enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then one day, as he was

walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation

between a butcher and his customer. "Give me the best piece

of meat you have," said the customer. And the butcher

replied, "Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no

piece of meat here that is not the best." Upon hearing this,

Banzan became enlightened.

I can see you are waiting for some explanation. When

you accept what is, every piece of meat — every moment —

is the best. That is enlightenment.

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THE NATURE OF COMPASSION

Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become

like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and

whatever happens there, is the surface of the lake.

Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to

the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is

always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the

surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which

remains absolutely still. You don't resist change by mentally

clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend

on it. You abide in Being — unchanging, timeless, deathless

— and you are no longer dependent for fulfillment or

happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms.

You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms,

appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to

attach yourself to any of it.

When you become this detached, does it not mean that you

also become remote from other human beings?

On the contrary. As long as you are unaware of Being, the

reality of other humans will elude you, because you have not

found your own. Your mind will like or dislike their form,

which is not just their body but includes their mind as well.

True relationship becomes possible only when there is an

awareness of Being. Coming from Being, you will perceive

another person's body and mind as just a screen, as it were,

behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours.

So, when confronted with someone else's suffering or

unconscious behavior, you stay present and in touch with

Being and are thus able to look beyond the form and feel the

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other person's radiant and pure Being through your own. At

the level of Being, all suffering is recognized as an illusion.

Suffering is due to identification with form. Miracles of

healing sometimes occur through this realization, by

awakening Being-consciousness in others — if they are

ready.

Is that what compassion is?

Yes. Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between

yourself and all creatures. But there are two sides to

compassion, two sides to this bond. On the one hand, since

you are still here as a physical body, you share the

vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every

other human and with every living being. Next time you say

"I have nothing in common with this person," remember that

you have a great deal in common: A few years from now —

two years or seventy years, it doesn’t make much difference

— both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles

of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling

realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative

thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that

sense, there is total equality between you and every other

creature.

One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to

meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including

your own. This is called: Die before you die. Go into it

deeply. Your physical form is dissolving, is no more. Then a

moment comes when all mind-forms or thoughts also die.

Yet you are still there — the divine presence that you are.

Radiant, fully awake. Nothing that was real ever died, only

names, forms, and illusions.

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The realization of this deathless dimension, your true nature,

is the other side of compassion. On a deep feeling-level, you

now recognize not only your own immortality but through

your own that of every other creature as well. On the level of

form, you share mortality and the precariousness of existence.

On the level of Being, you share eternal, radiant life. These

are the two aspects of compassion. In compassion, the

seemingly opposite feelings of sadness and joy merge into

one and become transmuted into a deep inner peace, This is

the peace of God. It is one of the most noble feelings that

humans are capable of, and it has great healing and

transformative power. But true compassion, as I have just

described it, is as yet rare. To have deep empathy for the

suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of

consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It

is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or

sympathy. It does not happen until sadness merges with joy,

the joy of Being beyond form, the joy of eternal life.

TOWARD A DIFFERENT ORDER OF REALITY

I don't agree that the body needs to die. I am convinced that

we can achieve physical immortality. We believe in death

and that’s why the body dies.

The body does not die because you believe in death. The

body exists, or seems to, because you believe in death. Body

and death are part of the same illusion, created by the egoic

mode of consciousness, which has no awareness of the

Source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under

threat. So it creates the illusion that you are a body, a dense,

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physical vehicle that is constantly under threat.

To perceive yourself as a vulnerable body that was born

and a little later dies — that’s the illusion. Body and death:

one illusion. You cannot have one without the other. You

want to keep one side of the illusion and get rid of the other,

but that is impossible. Either you keep all of it or you

relinquish all of it.

However, you cannot escape from the body, nor do you

have to. The body is an incredible misperception of your true

nature. But your true nature is concealed somewhere within

that illusion, not outside it, so the body is still the only point

of access to it.

If you saw an angel but mistook it for a stone statue, all

you would have to do is adjust your vision and look more

closely at the "stone statue," not start looking somewhere

else. You would then find that there never was a stone statue.

If belief in death creates the body, why does an animal have

a body? An animal doesn't have an ego, and it doesn't

believe in death . . . .

But it still dies, or seems to.

Remember that your perception of the world is a

reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not

separate from it, and there is no objective world out there.

Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that

you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of

modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and

the observed: the person conducting the experiment — the

observing consciousness — cannot be separated from the

observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes

the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe,

on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival,

then you see that belief reflected all around you and your

perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of

death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each

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other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you

create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very

imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you

perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream.

It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the

molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the

raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms

of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival.

An infinite number of completely different interpretations,

completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists —

all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being

is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point

creates its own world, although all those worlds are

interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a

dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose

consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you

are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours.

Highly conscious beings who are aware of their

connectedness with the Source and with each other would

inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm

— and yet all worlds are ultimately one.

Our collective human world is largely created through

the level of consciousness we call mind. Even within the

collective human world there are vast differences, many

different "sub-worlds," depending on the perceivers or

creators of their respective worlds. Since all worlds are

interconnected, when collective human consciousness

becomes transformed, nature and the animal kingdom will

reflect that transformation. Hence the statement in the Bible

that in the coming age "The lion shall lie down with the

lamb." This points to the possibility of a completely different

order of reality.

The world as it appears to us now is, as I said, largely a

reflection of the egoic mind. Fear being an unavoidable

consequence of egoic delusion, it is a world dominated by

fear. Just as the images in a dream are symbols of inner

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states and feelings, so our collective reality is largely a

symbolic expression of fear and of the heavy layers of

negativity that have accumulated in the collective human

psyche. We are not separate from our world, so when the

majority of humans become free of egoic delusion, this inner

change will affect all of creation. You will literally inhabit a

new world. It is a shift in planetary consciousness. The

strange Buddhist saying that every tree and every blade of

grass will eventually become enlightened points to the same

truth. According to St. Paul, the whole of creation is waiting

for humans to become enlightened. That is how I interpret

his saying that "The created universe is waiting with eager

expectation for God's sons to be revealed." St. Paul goes on

to say that all of creation will become redeemed through this:

"Up to the present . . . the whole created universe in all its

parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth."

What is being born is a new consciousness and, as its

inevitable reflection, a new world. This is also foretold in the

New Testament Book of Revelation: "Then I saw a new

heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first

earth had passed away."

But don't confuse cause and effect. Your primary task is

not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to

awaken out of identification with form. You are then no

longer bound to this world, this level of reality. You can feel

your roots in the Unmanifested and so are free of attachment

to the manifested world. You can still enjoy the passing

pleasures of this world, but there is no fear of loss anymore,

so you don't need to cling to them. Although you can enjoy

sensory pleasures, the craving for sensory experience is gone,

as is the constant search for fulfillment through

psychological gratification, through feeding the ego. You are

in touch with something infinitely greater than any pleasure,

greater than any manifested thing.

In a way, you then don't need the world anymore. You

don't even need it to be different from the way it is.

It is only at this point that you begin to make a real

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contribution toward bringing about a better world, toward

creating a different order of reality. It is only at this point

that you are able to feel true compassion and to help others at

the level of cause. Only those who have transcended the

world can bring about a better world.

You may remember that we talked about the dual nature

of true compassion, which is awareness of a common bond

of shared mortality and immortality. At this deep level,

compassion becomes healing in the widest sense. In that state,

your healing influence is primarily based not on doing but

on being. Everybody you come in contact with will be

touched by your presence and affected by the peace that you

emanate, whether they are conscious of it or not. When you

are fully present and people around you manifest

unconscious behavior, you won't feel the need to react to it,

so you don't give it any reality. Your peace is so vast and

deep that anything that is not peace disappears into it as if it

had never existed. This breaks the karmic cycle of action and

reaction. Animals, trees, flowers will feel your peace and

respond to it. You teach through being, through

demonstrating the peace of God. You become the "light of

the world," an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you

eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate

unconsciousness from the world.

This doesn't mean that you may not also teach through doing

— for example, by pointing out how to disidentify from the

mind, recognize unconscious patterns within oneself, and so

on. But who you are is always a more vital teaching and a

more powerful transformer of the world than what you say,

and more essential even than what you do. Furthermore, to

recognize the primacy of Being, and thus work on the level

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of cause, does not exclude the possibility that your

compassion may simultaneously manifest on the level of

doing and of effect, by alleviating suffering whenever you

come across it. When a hungry person asks you for bread and

you have some, you will give it. But as you give the bread,

even though your interaction may only be very brief, what

really matters is this moment of shared Being, of which the

bread is only a symbol. A deep healing takes place within it.

In that moment, there is no giver, no receiver.

But there shouldn't be any hunger and starvation in the first

place. How can we create a better world without tackling

evils such as hunger and violence first?

All evils are the effect of unconsciousness. You can alleviate

the effects of unconsciousness, but you cannot eliminate

them unless you eliminate their cause. True change happens

within, not without.

If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the

world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to

focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter

frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human

consciousness, the world's suffering is a bottomless pit. So

don’t let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with

someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be

balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all

life and the ultimate illusion of all pain. Then let your peace

flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the

levels of effect and cause simultaneously.

This also applies if you are supporting a movement

designed to stop deeply unconscious humans from

destroying themselves, each other, and the planet, or from

continuing to inflict dreadful suffering on other sentient

beings. Remember. Just as you cannot fight the darkness, so

you cannot fight unconsciousness. If you try to do so, the

polar opposites will become strengthened and more deeply

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entrenched. You will become identified with one of the

polarities, you will create an "enemy," and so be drawn into

unconsciousness yourself. Raise awareness by disseminating

information, or at the most, practice passive resistance. But

make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no

negativity. "Love your enemies," said Jesus, which, of course,

means "have no enemies."

Once you get involved in working on the level of effect,

it is all too easy to lose yourself in it. Stay alert and very,

very present. The causal level needs to remain your primary

focus, the teaching of enlightenment your main purpose, and

peace your most precious gift to the world.

Chapter Ten

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THEMEANING OF SURRENDER

ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOW

You mentioned "surrender" a few times. I don't like that idea.

It sounds somewhat fatalistic. If we always accept the way

things are, we are not going to make any effort to improve

them. It seems to me what progress is all about, both in our

personal lives and collectively, is not to accept the

limitations of the present but to strive to go beyond them and

create something better. If we hadn't done this, we would still

be living in caves. How do you reconcile surrender with

changing things and getting things done?

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations,

implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of

life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however,

is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively

put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do

nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or

initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of

yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only

place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now,

so to surrender is to accept the present moment

unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish

inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say "no" to

what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity.

It becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong,"

which means that there is a gap between the demands or

rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain

gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that

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things "go wrong" quite often. It is precisely at those times

that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate

pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of What is

immediately frees you from mind identification and thus

reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not

mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and

change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that

you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny

segment called the Now.

For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere,

you wouldn't say. "Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in

the mud." Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to

accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you

need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong

with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that

you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention

down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in

any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now.

Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity.

You accept the "isness" of this moment. Then you take

action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such

action I call positive action. It is far more effective than

negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or

frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue

to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.

Let me give you a visual analogy to illustrate the point

I am making. You are walking along a path at night,

surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful

flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, dear

space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which

includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious

presence; the dear space is the Now.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the

shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness.

The world around you and people in particular come to be

perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to

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destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to

compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy

and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear.

The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly

more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of

consciousness.

Not only your psychological form but also your

physical form — your body — becomes hard and rigid

through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the

body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life

energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy

functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain

forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this

flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life,

those things can only give temporary symptom relief since

the cause — the resistance pattern — has not been dissolved.

There is something within you that remains unaffected

by the transient circumstances that make up your life

situation, and only through surrender do you have access to it.

It is your life, your very Being — which exists eternally in

the timeless realm of the present. Finding this life is "the one

thing that is needed" that Jesus talked about.

If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even

intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break

the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that

situation.

Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action,

initiating change or achieving goals. But in the surrendered

state a totally different energy, a different quality, flows into

your doing. Surrender reconnects you with the source-energy

of Being, and if your doing is infused with Being, it becomes

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a joyful celebration of life energy that takes you more deeply

into the Now. Through nonresistance, the quality of your

consciousness and, therefore, the quality of whatever you are

doing or creating is enhanced immeasurably. The results will

then look after themselves and reflect that quality. We could

call this "surrendered action." It is not work as we have

known it for thousands of years. As more humans awaken,

the word work is going to disappear from our vocabulary,

and perhaps a new word will be created to replace it.

It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment

that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will

experience, so to surrender is the most important thing you

can do to bring about positive change. Any action you take is

secondary. No truly positive action can arise out of an

unsurrendered state of consciousness.

I can see that if I am in a situation that is unpleasant or

unsatisfactory and I completely accept the moment as it is,

there will be no suffering or unhappiness. I will have risen

above it. But I still can't quite see where the energy or

motivation for taking action and bringing about change

would come from if there isn't a certain amount of

dissatisfaction.

In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to

be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and

focusing on one thing at a time. Learn from nature: See how

everything gets accomplished and how the miracle of life

unfolds without dissatisfaction or unhappiness. That’s why

Jesus said: "Look at the lilies, how they grow; they neither

toil nor spin."

If your overall situation is unsatisfactory or unpleasant,

separate out this instant and surrender to what is. That’s the

flashlight cutting through the fog. Your state of

consciousness then ceases to be controlled by external

conditions. You are no longer coming from reaction and

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resistance.

Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself,

"Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it,

or remove myself from it?" If so, you take appropriate action.

Focus not on the 100 things that you will or may have to do

at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now.

This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may

well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But

make sure you don't start to run "mental movies," project

yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you

take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does — do not

resist what is. If there is no action you can take, and you

cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the

situation to make you go more deeply into surrender, more

deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being. When you

enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often

comes about in strange ways without the need for a great

deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and

cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt, or inertia

prevented you from taking action, they will dissolve in the

light of your conscious presence.

Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of "I can't be

bothered anymore" or "I just don't care anymore." If you

look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted

with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is

not surrender at all but masked resistance. As you surrender,

direct your attention inward to check if there is any trace of

resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you do so;

otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in

some dark corner in the form of a thought or an

unacknowledged emotion.

FROM MIND ENERGY TO SPIRITUAL ENERGY

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Letting go of resistance is easier said than done. I still don't

see clearly how to let go. If you say it is by surrendering, the

question remains: "How?"

Start by acknowledging that there is resistance. Be there

when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how

your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself, or

others. Look at the thought process involved. Feel the energy

of the emotion. By witnessing the resistance, you will see

that it serves no purpose. By focusing all your attention on

the Now, the unconscious resistance is made conscious, and

that is the end of it. You cannot be conscious and unhappy,

conscious and in negativity. Negativity, unhappiness, or

suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and

resistance is always unconscious.

Surely I can be conscious of my unhappy feelings?

Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it,

how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive?

You say that you are conscious of your unhappy feelings,

but the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the

process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is

unconscious. If you were conscious, that is to say totally

present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost

instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only

survive in your absence. Even the pain-body cannot survive

for long in your presence. You keep your unhappiness alive

by giving it time. That is its lifeblood. Remove time through

intense present-moment awareness and it dies. But do you

want it to die? Have you truly had enough? Who would you

be without it?

Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is

something you read about, talk about, get excited about,

write books about, think about, believe in — or don't, as the

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case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender

does it become a living reality in your life. When you do, the

energy that you emanate and which then runs your life is of a

much higher vibrational frequency than the mind energy that

still runs our world — the energy that created the existing

social, political, and economic structures of our civilization,

and which also continuously perpetuates itself through our

educational systems and the media. Through surrender,

spiritual energy comes into this world. It creates no suffering

for yourself, for other humans, or any other life form on the

planet. Unlike mind energy, it does not pollute the earth, and

it is not subject to the law of polarities, which dictates that

nothing can exist without its opposite, that there can be no

good without bad. Those who run on mind energy, which is

still the vast majority of the Earth's population, remain

unaware of the existence of spiritual energy. It belongs to a

different order of reality and will create a different world

when a sufficient number of humans enter the surrendered

state and so become totally free of negativity. If the Earth is

to survive, this will be the energy of those who inhabit it.

Jesus referred to this energy when he made his famous

prophetic statement in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed

are the gentle; they shall have the earth for their possession."

It is a silent but intense presence that dissolves the

unconscious patterns of the mind. They may still remain

active for a while, but they won't run your life anymore. The

external conditions that were being resisted also tend to shift

or dissolve quickly through surrender. It is a powerful

transformer of situations and people. If conditions do not

shift immediately, your acceptance of the Now enables you

to rise above them. Either way, you are free.

SURRENDER IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

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What about people who want to use me, manipulate or

control me? Am I to surrender to them?

They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt

to get energy and power from you. It is true that only an

unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but

it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used

and manipulated. If you resist or fight unconscious behavior

in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender

doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by

unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say

"no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a

situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at

the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation,

let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear

realization of what is right or not right for you at that

moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no," a high-quality "no," a

"no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further

suffering.

I am in a situation at work that is unpleasant. I have tried to

surrender to it, but I find it impossible. A lot of resistance

keeps coming up.

If you cannot surrender, take action immediately. Speak up

or do something to bring about a change in the situation —

or remove yourself from it. Take responsibility for your life.

Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant inner Being nor the

Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form

whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.

If you cannot take action, for example if you are in

prison, then you have two choices left: resistance or

surrender. Bondage or inner freedom from external

conditions. Suffering or inner peace.

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Is nonresistance also to be practiced in the external conduct

of our lives, such as nonresistance to violence, or is it

something that just concerns our inner life?

You only need to be concerned with the inner aspect. That is

primary. Of course, that will also transform the conduct of

your outer life, your relationships, and so on.

Your relationships will be changed profoundly by

surrender. If you can never accept what is, by implication

you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You

will judge, criticize, label, reject, or attempt to change people.

Furthermore, if you continuously make the Now into a

means to an end in the future, you will also make every

person you encounter or relate with into a means to an end.

The relationship — the human being — is then of secondary

importance to you, or of no importance at all. What you can

get out of the relationship is primary — be it material gain, a

sense of power, physical pleasure, or some form of ego

gratification.

Let me illustrate how surrender can work in

relationships. When you become involved in an argument or

some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone

close to you, start by observing how defensive you become

as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your

own aggression as you attack the other person's position.

Observe the attachment to your views and opinions. Feel the

mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and

make the other person wrong. That’s the energy of the egoic

mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by

feeling it as fully as possible. Then one day, in the middle of

an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a

choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction —

just to see what happens. You surrender. I don't mean

dropping the reaction just verbally by saying "Okay, you are

right," with a look on your face that says, "I am above all this

childish unconsciousness." That’s just displacing the

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resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge,

claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the

entire mental-emotional energy field inside you that was

fighting for power.

The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very

present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you

have truly relinquished your identification with a mental

position and so freed yourself from your mind. If you

suddenly feel very light, clear and deeply at peace, that is an

unmistakable sign that you have truly surrendered. Then

observe what happens to the other person's mental position

as you no longer energize it through resistance. When

identification with mental positions is out of the way, true

communication begins.

What about nonresistance in the face of violence, aggression,

and the like?

Nonresistance doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing. All it

means is that any "doing" becomes nonreactive. Remember

the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial

arts: don't resist the opponent’s force. Yield to overcome.

Having said that, "doing nothing" when you are in a

state of intense presence is a very powerful transformer and

healer of situations and people. In Taoism, there is a term

called wu wei, which is usually translated as "actionless

activity" or "sitting quietly doing nothing." In ancient China,

this was regarded as one of the highest achievements or

virtues. It is radically different from inactivity in the ordinary

state of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, which

stems from fear, inertia, or indecision. The real "doing

nothing" implies inner nonresistance and intense alertness.

On the other hand, if action is required, you will no

longer react from your conditioned mind, but you will

respond to the situation out of your conscious presence. In

that state, your mind is free of concepts, including the

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concept of nonviolence. So who can predict what you will do?

The ego believes that in your resistance lies your

strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being,

the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear

masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is

your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees

as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous

resistance-mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your

"weakness," which in truth is your power.

Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing

constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender,

you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You

become very simple, very real. "That’s dangerous," says the

ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable." What the

ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting

go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you

discover your true and essential invulnerability.

TRANSFORMING ILLNESS INTO ENLIGHTENMENT

If someone is seriously ill and completely accepts their

condition and surrenders to the illness, would they not have

given up their will to get back to health? The determination

to fight the illness would not be there any more, would it?

Surrender is inner acceptance of what is without any

reservations. We are talking about your life — this instant —

not the conditions or circumstances of your life, not what I

call your life situation. We have spoken about this already.

With regard to illness, this is what it means. Illness is

part of your life situation. As such, it has a past and a future.

Past and future form an uninterrupted continuum, unless the

redeeming power of the Now is activated through your

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conscious presence. As you know, underneath the various

conditions that make up your life situation, which exists in

time, there is something deeper, more essential: your Life,

your very Being in the timeless Now.

As there are no problems in the Now, there is no illness

either. The belief in a label that someone attaches to your

condition keeps the condition in place, empowers it, and

makes a seemingly solid reality out of a temporary

imbalance. It gives it not only reality and solidity but also a

continuity in time that it did not have before. By focusing on

this instant and refraining from labeling it mentally, illness is

reduced to one or several of these factors: physical pain,

weakness, discomfort, or disability. That is what you

surrender to — now. You do not surrender to the idea of

"illness." Allow the suffering to force you into the present

moment, into a state of intense conscious presence. Use it for

enlightenment.

Surrender does not transform what is, at least not

directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are

transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the

world is only a reflection. We spoke about this earlier.

If you looked in the mirror and did not like what you

saw, you would have to be mad to attack the image in the

mirror. That is precisely what you do when you are in a state

of nonacceptance. And, of course, if you attack the image, it

attacks you back. If you accept the image, no matter what it

is, if you become friendly toward it, it cannot not become

friendly toward you. This is how you change the world.

Illness is not the problem. You are the problem — as

long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or

disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not

feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do

not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a

major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything "bad" that

happens in your life — use it for enlightenment. Withdraw

time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it

force you into intense present-moment awareness — and see

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what happens.

Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold,

suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.

Are you seriously ill and feeling angry now about what

I have just said? Then that is a clear sign that the illness has

become part of your sense of self and that you are now

protecting your identity — as well as protecting the illness.

The condition that is labeled "illness" has nothing to do with

who you truly are.

WHEN DISASTER STRIKES

As far as the still unconscious majority of the population is

concerned, only a critical limit-situation has the potential to

crack the hard shell of the ego and force them into surrender

and so into the awakened state. A limit-situation arises when

through some disaster, drastic upheaval, deep loss, or

suffering your whole world is shattered and doesn't make

sense anymore. It is an encounter with death, be it physical

or psychological. The egoic mind, the creator of this world,

collapses. Out of the ashes of the old world, a new world can

then come into being.

There is no guarantee, of course, that even a limitsituation

will do it, but the potential is always there. Some

people's resistance to what is even intensifies in such a

situation, and so it becomes a descent into hell. In others,

there may only be partial surrender, but even that will give

them a certain depth and serenity that were not there before.

Parts of the ego shell break off, and this allows small

amounts of the radiance and peace that lie beyond the mind

to shine through.

Limit-situations have produced many miracles. There

have been murderers in death row waiting for execution who,

in the last few hours of their lives, experienced the egoless

210

state and the deep joy and peace that come with it. The inner

resistance to the situation they found themselves in became

so intense as to produce unbearable suffering, and there was

nowhere to run and nothing to do to escape it, not even a

mind-projected future. So they were forced into complete

acceptance of the unacceptable. They were forced into

surrender. In this way, they were able to enter the state of

grace with which comes redemption: complete release from

the past. Of course, it is not really the limit-situation that

makes room for the miracle of grace and redemption but the

act of surrender.

So whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something

goes seriously "wrong" — illness, disability, loss of home or

fortune or of a socially defined identity, break-up or a close

relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own

impending death — know that there is another side to it, that

you are just one step away from something incredible: a

complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain

and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender.

I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such

a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become

transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a

very deep place — from the Unmanifested itself. It is "the

peace of God, which passes all understanding." Compared to

that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant

peace comes the realization — not on the level of mind but

within the depth of your Being — that you are indestructible,

immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that

needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary

source.

TRANSFORMING SUFFERING INTO PEACE

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I read about a stoic philosopher in ancient Greece who,

when he was told that his son had died in an accident,

replied, "I knew he was not immortal." Is that surrender? If

it is, I don't want it. There are some situations in which

surrender seems unnatural and inhuman.

Being cut off from your feelings is not surrender. But we

don't know what his inner state was when he said those

words. In certain extreme situations, it may still be

impossible for you to accept the Now. But you always get a

second chance at surrender.

Your first chance is to surrender each moment to the

reality of that moment. Knowing that what is cannot be

undone — because it already is — you say yes to what is or

accept what isn't. Then you do what you have to do,

whatever the situation requires. If you abide in this state of

acceptance, you create no more negativity, no more suffering,

no more unhappiness. You then live in a state of

nonresistance, a state of grace and lightness, free of struggle.

Whenever you are unable to do that, whenever you miss

that chance — either because you are not generating enough

conscious presence to prevent some habitual and

unconscious resistance pattern from arising, or because the

condition is so extreme as to be absolutely unacceptable to

you — then you are creating some form of pain, some form

of suffering. It may look as if the situation is creating the

suffering, but ultimately this is not so — your resistance is.

Now here is your second chance at surrender: If you

cannot accept what is outside, then accept what is inside. If

you cannot accept the external condition, accept the internal

condition. This means: Do not resist the pain. Allow it to be

there. Surrender to the grief, despair, fear, loneliness, or

whatever form the suffering takes. Witness it without

labeling it mentally. Embrace it. Then see how the miracle of

surrender transmutes deep suffering into deep peace. This is

your crucifixion. Let it become your resurrection and

ascension.

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I do not see how one can surrender to suffering. As you

yourself pointed out, suffering is non-surrender. How could

you surrender to non-surrender?

Forget about surrender for a moment. When your pain is

deep, all talk of surrender will probably seem futile and

meaningless anyway.

When your pain is deep, you will likely have a strong

urge to escape from it rather than surrender to it. You don't

want to feel what you feel. What could be more normal? But

there is no escape, no way out. There are many pseudo

escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression,

and so on — but they don't free you from the pain. Suffering

does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious.

When you deny emotional pain, everything you do or think

as well as your relationships become contaminated with it.

You broadcast it, so to speak, as the energy you emanate, and

others will pick it up subliminally. If they are unconscious,

they may even feel compelled to attack or hurt you in some

way, or you may hurt them in an unconscious projection of

your pain. You attract and manifest whatever corresponds to

your inner state.

When there is no way out, there is still always a way

through. So don't turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it

fully. Feel it — don't think about it! Express it if necessary,

but don't create a script in your mind around it. Give all your

attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation

that seems to have caused it. Don't let the mind use the pain

to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry

for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck

in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the

feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it;

otherwise, nothing will shift. So give your complete attention

to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As

you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may

213

seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to

turn away from it comes, observe it but don't act on it. Keep

putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the

fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay

present — present with your whole Being, with every cell of

your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this

darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.

At this stage, you don't need to be concerned with

surrender anymore. It has happened already. How? Full

attention is full acceptance, is surrender. By giving full

attention, you use the power of the Now, which is the power

of your presence. No hidden pocket of resistance can survive

in it. Presence removes time. Without time, no suffering, no

negativity, can survive.

The acceptance of suffering is a journey into death.

Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into

it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this

death, you realize that there is no death — and there is

nothing to fear. Only the ego dies. Imagine a ray of sunlight

that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and

deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and

create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would the

death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating?

Do you want an easy death? Would you rather die

without pain, without agony? Then die to the past every

moment, and let the light of your presence shine away the

heavy, time-bound self you thought of as "you."

THE WAY OF THE CROSS

214

There are many accounts of people who say they have found

God through their deep suffering, and there is the Christian

expression "the way of the cross, " which I suppose points to

the same thing.

We are concerned with nothing else here.

Strictly speaking, they did not find God through their

suffering, because suffering implies resistance. They found

God through surrender, through total acceptance of what is,

into which they were forced by their intense suffering. They

must have realized on some level that their pain was selfcreated.

How do you equate surrender with finding God?

Since resistance is inseparable from the mind, relinquishment

of resistance — surrender — is the end of the mind as your

master, the impostor pretending to be "you," the false god.

All judgment and all negativity dissolve. The realm of Being,

which had been obscured by the mind, then opens up.

Suddenly, a great stillness arises within you, an

unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is

great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the

innermost core, there is the sacred, the immeasurable, That

which cannot be named.

I don't call it finding God, because how can you find

that which was never lost, the very life that you are? The

word God is limiting not only because of thousands of years

of misperception and misuse, but also because it implies an

entity other than you. God is Being itself, not a being. There

can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you

and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is.

The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can

become conscious of God but that you are not conscious of

God.

The way of the cross that you mentioned is the old way

to enlightenment, and until recently it was the only way. But

don't dismiss it or underestimate its efficacy. It still works.

The way of the cross is a complete reversal. It means

that the worst thing in your life, your cross, turns into the

215

best thing that ever happened to you, by forcing you into

surrender, into "death," forcing you to become as nothing, to

become as God — because God, too, is no-thing.

At this time, as far as the unconscious majority of

humans is concerned, the way of the cross is still the only

way. They will only awaken through further suffering, and

enlightenment as a collective phenomenon will be

predictably preceded by vast upheavals. This process reflects

the workings of certain universal laws that govern the growth

of consciousness and thus was foreseen by some seers. It is

described, among other places, in the Book of Revelation or

Apocalypse, though cloaked in obscure and sometimes

impenetrable symbology. This suffering is inflicted not by

God but by humans on themselves and on each other as well

as by certain defensive measures that the Earth, which is a

living, intelligent organism, is going to take to protect herself

from the onslaught of human madness.

However, there is a growing number of humans alive

today whose consciousness is sufficiently evolved not to

need any more suffering before the realization of

enlightenment. You may be one of them.

Enlightenment through suffering — the way of the cross

— means to be forced into the kingdom of heaven kicking

and screaming. You finally surrender because you can't stand

the pain anymore, but the pain could go on for a long time

until this happens. Enlightenment consciously chosen means

to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make

the Now the main focus of your life. It means choosing to

dwell in the state of presence rather than in time. It means

saying yes to what is. You then don't need pain anymore.

How much more time do you think you will need before you

are able to say "I will create no more pain, no more

suffering?" How much more pain do you need before you

can make that choice?

If you think that you need more time, you will get more

time — and more pain. Time and pain are inseparable.

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THE POWER TO CHOOSE

What about all those people who, it seems, actually want to

suffer? I have a friend whose partner is physically abusive

toward her, and her previous relationship was of a similar

kind. Why does she choose such men, and why is she refusing

to get out of that situation now? Why do so many people

actually choose pain?

I know that the word choose is a favorite New Age term, but

it isn't entirely accurate in this context. It is misleading to say

that somebody "chose" a dysfunctional relationship or any

other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies

consciousness — a high degree of consciousness. Without it,

you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you

disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the

moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you

are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you

are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways

according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why

Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of

the word. I have met many' highly intelligent and educated

people who were also completely unconscious, which is to

say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental

development and increased knowledge are not

counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness,

the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great.

Your friend is stuck in a relationship with an abusive

partner, and not for the first time. Why? No choice. The

mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to recreate

what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful,

at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known.

217

The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.

That’s why the mind dislikes and ignores the present

moment. Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only

in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum.

Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world

except through that gap, that clear space of infinite

possibility.

So your friend, being identified with her mind, may be

re-creating a pattern learned in the past in which intimacy

and abuse are inseparably linked. Alternatively, she may be

acting out a mind pattern learned in early childhood

according to which she is unworthy and deserves to be

punished. It is possible, too, that she lives a large part of her

life through the pain-body, which always seeks more pain on

which to feed. Her partner has his own unconscious patterns,

which complement hers. Of course her situation is selfcreated,

but who or what is the self that is doing the creating?

A mental-emotional pattern from the past, no more. Why

make a self out of it? If you tell her that she has chosen her

condition or situation, you are reinforcing her state of mind

identification. But is her mind pattern who she is? Is it her

self? Is her true identity derived from the past? Show your

friend how to be the observing presence behind her thoughts

and her emotions. Tell her about the pain-body and how to

free herself from it. Teach her the art of inner-body

awareness. Demonstrate to her the meaning of presence. As

soon as she is able to access the power of the Now, and

thereby break through her conditioned past, she will have a

choice.

Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody

chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough

presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to

dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not

quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is

running your life.

Similarly, if you are one of the many people who have

an issue with their parents, if you still harbor resentment

218

about something they did or did not do, then you still believe

that they had a choice — that they could have acted

differently. It always looks as if people had a choice, but that

is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned

patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what

choice do you have? None. You are not even there. The

mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of

insanity. Almost everyone is suffering from this illness in

varying degrees. The moment you realize this, there can be

no more resentment. How can you resent someone's illness?

The only appropriate response is compassion.

So that means nobody is responsible for what they do? I

don't like that idea.

If you are run by your mind, although you have no choice

you will still suffer the consequences of your

unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You

will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain.

The suffering thus created will eventually force you out of

your unconscious state.

What you say about choice also applies to forgiveness, I

suppose. You need to be fully conscious and surrender before

you can forgive.

"Forgiveness" is a term that has been in use for 2,000 years,

but most people have a very limited view of what it means.

You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you

derive your sense of self from the past. Only through

accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power,

can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless,

and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was

ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant

essence of who you are. The whole concept of forgiveness

219

then becomes unnecessary.

And how do I get to that point of realization?

When you surrender to what is and so become fully present,

the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it

anymore. Presence is the key. The Now is the key.

How will I know when I have surrendered?

When you no longer need to ask the question.

—— END ——

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