Please write your question in the comment section below.
Questions are a big part of the spiritual journey. Questions are more important than answers. When our mind is free of answers, it is open and clear like space. It is the beginners mind. And in the beginners mind all things are possible.
Before you awaken to your own completeness, it is very natural to have questions.
Your questions are just as beneficial to me as they are to you. Both of us are helped by your questions. I am grateful and honored that you would bring your question to me. You can ask me anything. Ask me about your spiritual practice, about Zen, about your life, about your relationships, about anything. I will do my best to allow an answer to come through that benefits both of us.
The human world is not as different as it may seem. So your question may be a question that many people are wondering about at exactly this moment. So both your question and the answer may help many people. We are not as separate as it may appear.
When I say that “I” will answer your question, it is not really the personal “I” that you might imagine. If the answer is a good one, an answer that helps you and I and many others, then this answer must come from a mind that is clear like space, a beginners mind that is open to a wisdom that is far beyond this person or any person. And this is why your question and the answer will help both of us very much.
I am grateful and honored for your question.
I lost my mother recently and am feeling lost without her presence in my life. I want to know that she is still with me, even though she’s no longer physically present. I understand that nothing is lost, energetically, only transformed. But I need more than just this idea or thought. Is there a way to connect with her again and know, without a doubt, that she is still with me? To feel her spiritual presence in my life? Thank you for any help you can offer on this.
Hi Barbara,
Nothing and no one is ever really separate. Can you feel the presence of your mother in you? Notice that the cells in your body are also her cells, The DNA in your body is also her DNA. The molecules that make up the cells are also her molecules. How do you think you are here without her? Would that really be possible? When your mother gave birth to you, do you think that suddenly you were separate from her? If your mother did not exist, how could you exist? This is true of everyone, but you want to focus on your mother now. Physically, your mother and you are one. That is just science. Also, every interaction you have ever had with your mother created an indelible impression on your being. The energy you both shared while you were in the womb created who you are. But this exchange of energy also continued after you left the womb. So, right now, just notice your mother in you as you. She has not gone anywhere. Her body is returning to soil as all bodies do. And she has never really ever been separate from the earth, just like you and me. Notice your mother in you as you, and you might speak to her if you like. If you become very quiet and listen, you can hear her response. As Thich Nhat Hanh used to teach us, “When you walk in peace, with every footstep your mother also walks in peace.” Walk peacefully. I think your mother will enjoy that.
Thank you so much for that reminder. Yes, I do see her in me, and also in my sisters, and my daughters and nephews. We all have some of her in us. I also see her all around my house, in her paintings and my own, the furniture she gave me, and the watch that I wear every day that was hers.
I have been talking to her at night, and sometimes I even hear her reply in my head.
When I miss her the most, I will try to keep your teaching in mind.
Hi Peter,
Do you have any advice for connecting with what it is we truly want? I’ve been a student of mindfulness for a few years now and I’m trying to discern between the difference of desire and resonance. Maybe not the best choice of words. Like the act of helping other people resonates with me. The desire to make people like me while I’m helping them or to solve all their problems is another. I’m 34 and 1/2 and kind of lost in what directions to take in life on all fronts. The fear of making the wrong choice haunts me daily. I know this doesn’t yield for good decision-making. So I ask you what advice would you give in know long what path to follow that will yield resonance and not just quench temporary desires that may be delusions. Thank you kindly for your help. I wish you well.
Trust your intuition, the felt sense of inner knowing, rather than your thoughts. The more you do this and pay attention to it, what you are calling resonance, the more you will be able to feel it. This is the best guidance. Learn to listen to it and trust it. The trust will follow when you realize it is always leading you where you need to go. And our mind, almost never.
Hi Peter,
I have a question concerning reality. Trying to put it short and hope it’s clear enough.
Would you say that the consciousness only model is somehow nearer to how we feel, perceive and act (then the concept of matter) when we first realize reality as one? But diving deeper it can be seen as another concept to be dropped on the way? In the end we have no idea what reality is, right?
Thank you so much for your help.
Warmly,
Joana
Hi Joana, Yes, that is good. No concept can accurately describe reality. Sometimes we call Reality the Self, sometimes God, sometimes Consciousness, sometimes just Reality, but any concept we attach to those things is not what it is. Any idea we have of Reality is just an idea, just a concept, and not Reality. It is often difficult for the mind to accept this complete Mystery, this complete Not Knowing. When we surrender fully into this Mystery, it is somehow no longer a mystery even if we know we can never make a concept out of it. This surrender into complete Not Knowing is the space of both Truth and freedom from illusion. It is wonderful once we do it. And as you may know, surrender is not a doing. Letting go happens by itself when we no longer resist it. All that is revealed has always been here.
Dear Peter,
I have only come across your videos and website in the past couple of days and wanted to thank you. I have been listening to you and meditating with you since. The videos really do emanate peace and love. I also wanted to connect with you in case you have any words for this place where I am currently at. I won’t go into a big back story as it doesn’t feel too relevant now. Just that I have been on the path to awakening since I was a child. Last November my dad died very unexpectedly. I faced some of my biggest fears and this accelerated the desire to wake up to who I am and let go of the identifications to the person I thought I was. In fact the me felt like it started dying after this, sometimes it feels physical even.
You speak about the people you have helped in the past and the healing they have had. Many of them seem to have had similar physical manifestations as I have. I have been very tired and felt unwell for almost all my adult life really. There are also pains in my body that can’t be explained with anything physiological. I have recently felt like I’ve dropped off something big. Some layer of the ‘me’ is gone. But the pain seems sharper and the tiredness even stronger than ever. I have been resisting these physical manifestations for so long but now I keep moving my full focus into the feelings and then giving them to God as my practice. But the thoughts keep on coming that say don’t go towards the pain/tiredness, because you have done this before and it will not go away. Am I following the right way here? I don’t understand the tiredness at all and it keeps drawing me back to trying to solve it as a problem. I would be very grateful if anything comes up for you about this and if you could share with me.
Many thanks,
Pia
Hi Pia. Thank you for writing. When you see something as a problem, it is natural to resist it. If we resist it we cannot find out what it really is and why it is here. That does not mean to dwell on it or become obsessed or focused on it. It just means to gently accept it as it is, realize that we don’t know what it really is, and then allow it to show you what it is and why it is here. There are two steps in this. The first is to be willing to accept it as it is and for a moment not wish for it to change. This can be challenging with strong physical pain, but it is possible and very worthwhile. The next step is to realize and accept that you do not really know what it is even though you think you do. For instance, the word pain creates a certain experience in the body that relates to that word more than what is actually happening. When you experience what we call physical pain if we can let go of that word and admit we don’t really know what is happening, the sensation of pain is greatly reduced as soon as we do this. At that point, we can begin to realize what is really happening beyond what our thoughts or the thoughts of other people tell us.
leda3333@yahoo.com Leda was organizing Lite Session‘s once a week, I think on Thursdays, in Sedona when I was there a few years ago. This is her email address. You can check with her to see what’s going on. She’s a very high Being!
Howard Love
Thank you, Howard.
Hi Peter,
I just meditated on your Deepest Realization video. Thank you for that. I truly enjoy everything you record. I feel a slight sense of frustration, if I could even call it that…..I feel like I am “right there”….and then I open my eyes and everything looks the same. What got me was the story of the boy who was watching his sister drink milk….He saw God, pouring God into God. I get this…All is God”……but is this REALLY what is seen or is it more of a perception/feeling. I can feel one with the birds and the trees and the universe and people I have never met…..but I still see “my sister drinking milk “. I get that she is one with God and that the milk and the glass are also one…..that feels more intellectual as I try to wrap my mind around it. I have FELT oneness as well…..many times……am I expecting to SEE things differently or is it just a complete shift in perspective? On one sense, I feel like I need a nudge, on another, I feel that I have been nudged every which way but loose. Any insight?
Hi Leanna,
You are correct Truth is a feeling/experience, not a thought. Feeling the Oneness is the Oneness. What you see are your physical senses and the thoughts that are programmed to interpret them in a certain way. That is my sister and she is drinking milk. When you feel Oneness, that is Oneness.
At some point you stop paying attention to your thoughts and you do also end up seeing things differently as well, more in alignment with your feeling/experiencing. But since it is not a thought, there is nothing I can say about that.
Peter
Hi Peter, I recently read on your website that to awaken we must go into isolation for a time, away from conditioned minds. What if that’s not possible? For example in my case I have a teenager and parent to look after (both heavily invested in the dream)
Hi Gem,
Find as much time throughout the day that you can have moments of isolation from other people and from your own thoughts. This is meditation practice. If your day is very hectic and filled with demands, then it might only be a few minutes where you can simply breathe deeply, relax, and let your thoughts go. It is important and healing to do this if for nothing else but your health and sanity.
If you have a half-hour or an hour before everyone wakes up, use this time. If you can stay up after everyone has gone to sleep, use that time.
It is usually not convenient for anyone to take this time for themselves. There are always some demands. If it’s possible attend a one day, three day, or week long retreat. Today many of these are online and you can arrange them around your schedule to some degree.
It is extremely helpful to spend even more time in isolation, but that is not practical for most people. It took a lot of work and the agreement of many people before they agreed to give me this time initially. After some time they became used to it, but I did not have day to day caretaker duties then. Also I was already a spiritual teacher so asking this of my students and family was no longer so strange.
It is very good to do this, but if you cannot in your case, I suggest finding the time in places throughout your day. There is always some time. Often people fill their time with social media, the news, movies, etc. when they are not actively taking care of others. In that case, you make a choice. When you find the deep peace that is your True Nature undisturbed by thought, you will realize how valuable this is and it will be easier to find the time. Even five minutes a day of true peace undisturbed by thoughts is incredibly beneficial and nourishing.
It is not that important if those you live with are heavily invested in the dream. The important thing is that you find the peace free of that. Your peace, without you having to say a word about it to them, will have a very positive affect on them. All of us are transmitting. The only difference is what we are transmitting. When you transmit the peace, happiness, and love of your True Nature, you not only benefit yourself but everyone around you.
I wish you well on your journey. The discoveries are endless.
Thank you for writing.
Peter
Good day Peter. Am new here, and i’m glad to be added to this community. i would like to know what to do know the real me, like knowing where i belong or the guardian angels around me, as i hear that everybody belong to some certain path,or has got some guardian angels working with or for them…….kind help or guide.
Thanks.
Hi Richy, discovering the real you is a path and journey everyone is on. You might try self-inquiry, which is to continually ask this question throughout your day every day, “Who am I?” or “What is this I?” When you experience anything ask, “Who is experiencing this?” “Who is seeing this?” “Who is tasting this?” Continue asking and do not settle for any answer. This can eventually lead to the direct experience. An even better inquiry is “What is aware of this?” or “What is aware?” Understand that whatever you are aware of is an object of awareness and not awareness itself. Awareness is the subject that is aware. When there are no more objects of awareness and all you are experiencing is pure, radiant being itself, you have discovered the real you. It is not a self, not a person. It is nothing you can describe, name, or imagine. But you have come Home to the real you. The closest most people have come to saying what it is is the infinite field of awareness. But even that is far too much. It is beyond all thought. As you might imagine body, thought, and experience are all objects of awareness and not awareness itself. That should be a good start. But you must do it, consistently and constantly for it to lead you Home. When the desire is strong enough, it will happen.
Hi Peter,
First of all, thank you very much for everything you are doing (or is being done through you 🙂 )
I have some doubts regarding this statement ” an enlightened person is the supreme “. I would really appreciate it if you can clear these doubts.
When I say ” an enlightened person is the supreme ” is not that an exaggeration?
I understand that the enlightened person can be likened to a sun ray and the supreme/absolute is likened to the sun. However, it is unfortunately way out there for me to think that all entities (or at least the enlightened beings) are the sun itself. The reason why I am saying this is:
1- I expect the supreme/absolute to be all-knowing. However, enlightened people don’t claim to know everything. Instead, they do the exact opposite; they lose their habitual certainty which they once had. In addition to, They encourage us to become comfortable with not knowing. Is there anything that the Supreme doesn’t know of?
2- I expect the supreme/absolute to be all-powerful. However, I hear many enlightened people say something to the effect “you are not doing anything; you are being done”. It is commonly accepted fact that enlightened people can’t do everything they want. How do I reconcile the two previous statements?
Thanks in advance for your answers
Much love
Ihab
An enlightened person is not a person. An enlightened person is nobody. That is why only the totality is present in enlightenment. The person is out of the way. There is no longer an illusion of separation. So an enlightened “person” is not a person, is not separate from anyone or anything. Only the totality is left.
1. The mind cannot grasp that not knowing opens us to true knowing. For an enlightened “being”, we realize that the human mind of thoughts is extremely limited. Anything the human mind “knows” is nothing more than thoughts which can only be relatively true at best. So we understand that our mind knows nothing. But the totality knows everything, it’s just not in the form of a limited thought. It is unlimited in its knowing. When we no longer believe any of our thoughts are true, we open to a far greater truth that is entirely beyond the ability of thought. It is a very different type of knowing. If you ask what I know, I cannot reply with words. What I know is entirely beyond words and thoughts. Although I also have relative knowledge based on learning, experience, reading, thinking, etc. I have this too. But I realize how limited this is so do not put a lot of attention to thoughts.
2. The enlightened person is not a person. There is no separate person to do anything. There is only the non-separate totality. So an enlightened person is not doing anything because there is no person to do anything. There is just the totality. And in the totality things happen and have causes, etc. including the actions of a particular body/mind. But the totality (supreme, etc.) is also not a person and is also not separate from anything in all existence. So it is more accurate to say that “things happen”. And even more so that “reality is” but it is not what we think it is. 🙂
So an enlightened person is not separate from the totality, or supreme. Nothing and nobody is separate from the totality. How could they be? An enlightened “person” realizes this. That is the only difference. An enlightened person no longer experiences themselves as a separate person. That illusion has dissolved and been replaced by no-separation or nonduality, no duality, or oneness. Nonduality has always been here, but when we experience ourself and the world through thoughts we are conditioned to perceive it is as dual and separate.
So we also experience God, the supreme, the totality as being separate. But God is not God that we think of. God has no separate personage. God is the totality. And we cannot be separate from the totality, otherwise how could we exist? So all is this one. And this one is all. This realization is not available to the limited mind. The mind has to let go, to surrender to not knowing, to allow us to realize directly this experience I am speaking of. When you do this, you will no longer have any questions. Before this many questions can arise. The mind can get very confused trying to understand truth because, in the end, that is impossible. But the good news is that truth is always here, always available, and we have never been apart from it. It is in “not knowing”, that we finally discover it because we have let go of the mind for a moment.
I hope this helps you to let go for a moment and experience this deep and profound truth that has always been here for you and as you.
Yes, your answer definitely helped me a lot!
Thanks a lot, Peter, for your enlightening reply! and for giving me the space to be myself and to express my doubts in a judgement-free zone!
I am completely aware of the fact that the limited mind is unable to comprehend this Truth. For this reason I allowed your answer to bypass my analytical mind and to touch a deeper dimension within me. It took me four hours to absorb your reply totally without letting the mind get in the way, but it was totally worth it :).
Some great spiritual teachers speak from heart, but you speak from God.
I am getting closer to realizing the Truth that is already here, now, and I (Self).
One of truths that I realized is that “I” have no independent existence and “I” can’t be seperate from God. It is like “my perception” can’t be seperate from “me”. There is no such thing as “my perception” without the “me”.
“My perception” just doesn’t exist independently by itself and it can never be seperate from “me” that is aware of it. Likewise, the little “I”/person/God’s-expression can’t exist independently by itself and it can never be seperate from God.
Please comment on the following statements (would you agree to the followong statements):
1- The seeker who hasn’t realized yet (like the person Ihab) might say: Yes, reality is one. The expression of God can’t be seperate from God (you can’t draw a line between God and its expression). However, that doesn’t make expression of God EQUALS God.
2- The realized person, will not have a self/mind to let this doubt arise (for him/her there is Reality Only and Reality IS and there is no such thing as expression of reality.
3- (this is related to your response). In order for the Absolute to experience the relative knowledge (through thoughts), It would need to enter a dream state and forget temporarily that it is all knowing. This is the reason why it expressed itself as humans?. In other words, the absolute is incapable of attaining relative /thought-based knowledge in its original/changeless state?
Thanks a lot!
Much love and I look forward to my individual sessions as well as group sessions with you
-Ihab
Hi Ihab, Wonderful questions. When we awaken we live as it were in two worlds at once. One is the absolute truth of our True Nature which is undivided totality. The other is the dream of names and forms with which we function in this common dream. It is a bit like lucid dreaming. We perceive names and forms just as everyone does, but we also are aware of something else, the underlying reality of all of it. So we see both separation and no separation, both duality and non-duality. And somehow there is no discrepancy. Just as in lucid dreaming, we don’t really believe the dream because we know it is a dream, but still we function in the dream more or less as if it were real. And occasionally we can get pulled into the dream. We can forget. But hopefully not for long. It adds a little spice to the adventure. 🙂 It’s why we continue practicing and even more than before. Not to get anywhere or attain anything, simply not to forget. Thank you for your questions.
Thanks a lot Peter for your reply! That clarifies a lot.
Awakening was experienced through the “person” Ihab!
Practicing will continue here for the same “goal” (not to forget).
I am going to switch now to the ” relative language ” 🙂
When I saw the questions I posted a about 7 months ago I realized how long I have come!
The concept “Absolute” and “Reality” I had them mixed up. That was the source of my confusion.
The concept ” Absolute ” is not Reality. The Absolute is the opposite of the Relative. Reality has no opposite. Reality is neither Absolute nor Relative. The Absolute is known through the Relative and the Relative is known through the Absolute. In other words, the changeless aspect of Reality is known through awareness of the always-changing aspect of Reality and the always-changing aspect of Reality is known through the changeless aspect of it.
Neither Absolute or Relative can exist or can have a meaning without the other and they are only pointers/concepts which they don’t have independent existence.
Reality is Reality 🙂
Thanks a lot, Peter (a loving expression of Reality) for helping this expression of reality clear up.
– Ihab
Wonderful realization, Ihab. Keep in mind that words are just words, just concepts. No words or concepts can describe reality. The word “absolute” really points to what you are calling “reality”, which cannot be conceived, yet is. Both reality and “absolute” have no opposites. So what the word “absolute” points to is not the opposite of relative, it is beyond opposites and concepts, just as reality is. And both “absolute” and “reality” are words. When we are free of all concepts about them we understand their true meaning.
You have found a good use for the word “Reality” as a pointer, so stick with that. “Reality is reality.” Yes, there is nothing more that can be said about it than that. Very good. All words can only accurately be used as pointers to something beyond all words and concepts. When all words and concepts fall away, we realize reality as it is. And then we if we say anything, we say, “Reality is Reality.” And this is true of all other words, “God is God.” “Love is Love.” In the end, we are always and only Realizing Consciousness or the Self (just more words). It is Consciousness Realizing Consciousness or God Realizing God. That is all that is ever going on.
And what an amazing and incredible dream it is that it ever appears other than This. How wonderful!!! It is something to truly enjoy, both the dream and the awakening from it. How wonderful!!!
Dear Peter,
You have guided me many times, and I am really grateful to you.
You have written in your book that time is not linear, and we have already achieved all our aspirations and dreams. What does that mean? Could you please elaborate a bit. It means I don’t have to suffer anymore and look for my worth in my aspirations and dreams. I am confused. I have started to go beyond words, although I still suffer due to resistance to your teaching, despite the fact I want it.
Regards
Rashmi
I don’t think it is possible for the mind to really understand what is beyond time. Yet you can directly experience this and probably have many times in your life. The experience of the nonlinearity of time is more rare. Einstein developed his theory that all times are happening simultaneously. This is a conceptual picture of what past life experiences are. When you have a “past” life experience, that experience is happening at exactly the same time as this “present” experience is happening. Your attention is riveted to the “past” life because initially it comes as such a surprise. But you are simultaneously aware of the present time and life. This may be more confusing for the mind than it helps.
Rashmi, if you understand your True Nature as pure beingness, just the direct experience of pure beingness without being distracted by any thoughts, including any you get from me, you will not experience any suffering at all. It has nothing to do with your aspirations or dreams as these are also thoughts. It is just pure, naked, stripped to the most basic beingness. You realize that you are being. You may not know what this beingness is. Nobody does. But you cannot deny that there is this basic beingness. It is a direct experience, but you can experience this. Your thoughts distract you, but you can shift your attention to just this pure beingness and leave your thoughts alone for a bit.
You are aware of your resistance. This is very good. Most people resist life but are unaware they are doing this. Try fully accepting this resistance. Embrace this resistance. When you stop resisting even resistance, then there is no longer resistance. Whatever you don’t want, whatever you resist, instead of resisting, embrace it. If you suffer, embrace suffering. Don’t resist it, embrace it. In this way you will learn what it is really about. You will see the illusions and thoughts that create suffering and you will naturally let them go. not resist them, simply let them go because you understand them and realize you don’t need them.
Your growth comes from direct experience, not understanding these thoughts or any thoughts. So these are things you must do and then pay attention. What happens? Where there once was suffering, now no suffering. Okay, that works. Keep trying. Keep paying attention. Accept everything. Resist nothing. Learn from this through direct experience. Your direct experience is far more useful than your thoughts about it, and far more true.
I hope this helps, My Friend.
Love,
Peter
Hello Peter,
what do you truly need to find peace and happiness and meaning in life, I wonder?
Current society as well as psychology tell you that you need to find a good partner (married people are happier), that life is pretty much meaningless without kids (especially for women), that you need to create your own meaning in life, that you need to have social support and true friendship, that you need to have a fulfilling job and at least reach a basic level of income to help you fulfill your most urgent needs, …
I have none of this. Due to physical and mental illness I don’t even have a own home or can support myself on my own. My life is very, very empty and I’m lonely. I don’t feel okay. I don’t feel like I fit in at all and I never have. I don’t think that others (sociey) regard me as “okay”. I’ve tried so much – especially in the area of spirituality – but I’m still suffering a lot. Can I, too, find peace and freedom from suffering – and maybe even happiness?
In a reply to someone else’s question you wrote that life knows what is in our best interest and that it would be a good idea to listen to what life wants to tell us. If find it hard to accept that 30 years of anxiety, stress and struggling is what life thinks is in my best interest. How can that be so? Somehow I struggle to find reconciliation with that thought.
Also, how do you listen to what life wants to tell you? I’d love to do that but all I seem to get are the same old answers that have never worked for me in the past. I feel pretty much trapped and clueless at the moment.
I’d love to hear what you think and I’d very much appreciate any kind of advice you could share with me.
Thank you!
Mia (from Germany)
Hi Mia,
Thank you for writing. You know suffering. You experience suffering. But you don’t realize where suffering comes from or its purpose. Suffering occurs when truth comes into conflict with your thoughts and beliefs. The primary illusory belief is the belief in me as a separate, individual person. This self is believed in and so experienced by almost all of humankind. And this is why suffering exists. Although it may not seem like it, it is the ONLY reason suffering exists. Do you imagine you could experience suffering without any sense of a separate, individual person to experience suffering? You don’t. There is no suffering in reality, nor is there this separate self that most of humanity has been conditioned to believe who is suffering. There are simply things happening. These are not good things and bad things and neutral things. That is also just thoughts. There is just life happening in all the myriad ways it happens.
Imagine for just a moment, Mia, what life would feel like without the story of you. Just imagine for a moment that you could simply let go of the entire story of you and your life. What would be left would simply be life as it is. No good or bad. No right or wrong. No thoughts you believe in. Just life happening in each moment exactly as it is, without thoughts or interpretations about what that is. That is Truth. That is also freedom from all suffering.
If there is ill health, that is just something that is happening. If there is poverty, that is just something that is happening. If there is no story of a separate self, then there is also no loneliness, as you realize that you are not separate from anyone or anything. All of this is experienced without the belief in a separate you. That is the end of suffering.
You may now believe that if you had wealth, a wonderful relationship, and great health, you would be happy and it would be the end of suffering. But nobody has ever experienced freedom from suffering from these things. Not billions of dollars, not multiple Acadamy Awards, not the most loving partner and friends. These things are nice, but they do not end suffering. Suffering still exists with all of these things.
To find freedom from suffering, we must wake up from the dream we have all been conditioned to believe is reality. People go to psychiatrists because they are suffering so much. But these psychiatrists are also suffering. In fact, psychiatrists have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. We cannot find freedom from suffering in a dream that is not true and is in conflict with reality. When we let go of this dream, then suffering no longer exists.
The good news, although it may not seem like it now, is that you experience suffering. You know what suffering feels like. You are not in denial about it. What you don’t know yet is where suffering comes from. But suffering itself can show you this if you open to it and stop listening to your thoughts and beliefs about it.
Let’s take the experience of fear for example. When we call this experience fear, it feels like fear. It affects our body and hormonal systems as fear. But if we let go of this word “fear” and simply realize that we don’t really know what this experience is, suddenly we experience it very differently. If we let go of all words we have associated with this feeling, then eventually we realize it is just energy. It is neither bad nor good. It is just is. And this energy is an experience of a living body. Living bodies have a lot of energy. If we do this simple practice, we come to realize that our experiences have a lot to do with our thoughts. Eventually, we realize that our suffering also has a lot to do with our thoughts. If we stop believing these thoughts, we don’t seem to suffer. If we develop a practice of questioning all of our thoughts and beliefs, we become freer and freer and suffer less and less. It’s not the situations, it turns out to be the thoughts about the situations. All situations are neutral (cancer, poverty, accidents, birth, death, hurricanes, marriage, divorce, etc.) They just are. Life is just happening. Only our thoughts say these are good or bad. Only our thoughts create our suffering.
The primary thought that creates suffering is the thought of me and the story of me. We have been conditioned to believe this self-identity from the moment our parents gave us a name. We never question if it is real. Is there really this separate self and this story of me I have believed all of my life and everyone I know believes? Perhaps it is time to question this. See if any of these thoughts and beliefs are actually true.
Thoughts are only a symbolic representation of reality. They are not reality and they cannot become reality. When we begin to experience reality without the intermediary and filter of thoughts, we open to an entirely new and amazing world – the world as it is. This is freedom from suffering. And suffering can be the first step in realizing this. 1. Suffering gives us the incentive and motivation to discover reality beyond our thoughts because suffering feels so terrible. 2. Suffering gives us the courage from desperation to let go of what we have been conditioned to cling to. 3. If we open to suffering instead of resisting it, it can teach us where the suffering comes from and how to be free of it.
So, whether you know it or not, you have already taken the first step in acknowledging your suffering. Now you have to stop paying attention to and believing your thoughts and allow the experience of suffering itself to show you what it is, where it comes from, and how to be free of it.
I hope this is helpful.
Hello Peter,
thank you so much for taking the time to reply to my question, I truly appreciate it!
Sometimes I feel like the most stupid and un-enlightened person ever because I try so very hard to understand this but it seems I don’t. I’ve read so much about the (non-existent) separate self and I even know from personal experience how much suffering my thoughts cause me – yet, I don’t seem to really *get* it, I don’t seem to feel it or embody it. Does this make sense?
Maybe I have a too theoretical understanding of things but I can’t translate this into living, it doesn’t seem to help me in a practical way.
I’ve read a lot about trauma and our innate human survival system – I wonder if it might be my survival system that overrides all of my attempts to find peace? There’s always that panic-stricken, frantic voice inside me urging me to *do* something, to find solutions, to change my situation, etc. It says things like: “This practice might work for others but they’re not in *your* situation, your situation is much worse!” (Those are also just thoughts, right?)
You wrote about experiencing fear (or other emotions) as just energy. I’ve often tried this, yet most of the time I feel overwhelmed by my emotions – even if I sort of “step back” from thinking, the pure emotion, the energy itself, seems too much for me to deal with. It just feels too “bad”, to put it in very simple terms.
What am I doing wrong?
Thank you for your help and guidance!
Mia
Hi Mia,
Feeling stupid and unenlightened is good. It shows humility. Even after awakening, we realize our conditioned minds of knowledge know nothing. We become completely humble. In fact, we don’t think of ourselves as enlightened or wise or anything. We simply ARE, like everything else. What you are experiencing is actually humility or moving toward humility and this moves toward actual wisdom. Actual wisdom is the realization that we know nothing. In this way, our mind is empty to experience life as it is moment to moment.
Right now you still trust your thoughts. Feeling stupid and unenlightened is the beginning of not trusting your thoughts. Not trusting your thoughts IS freedom from conditioning. Freedom from conditioning is enlightenment. I would embrace this feeling of being stupid and unenlightened and take it further instead of trying to be intelligent, informed, and enlightened. How stupid and unenlightened can you be? When stupid and unenlightened becomes an empty and open mind where no thought is trusted as truth, then you are awake from this dream of thoughts.
Sometimes people will tell me they are so insecure and feel like the stupidest person on earth. I say, “Not insecure enough. Not stupid enough.”The individual separate self we believe we are does not even exist. You can’t get more insecure than not existing. In one of the biggest breakthroughs in my spiritual unfolding, I laughed for an entire day as I realized I had been the stupidest person on earth not realizing what was now so obvious no matter how obvious it had always been. This is also the situation that all of humankind is in because of our conditioning. I didn’t feel badly that I had been so stupid for all of my life up until that moment. I felt wonderful. I felt free. Because now I could see what had always been so obvious. That’s why I was laughing instead of crying.
There is nothing to understand. Your body is brimming with energy. When you begin to become aware of this it often feels overwhelming because your conditioned thoughts have distracted your from it for so long. Now you’re aware of it and WOW!. When your thoughts say, “This is bad.” or “This is overwhelming.” then that is what you experience, “bad” and “overwhelming”. When you don’t listen to these thoughts then it feels absolutely wonderful. This energy is what a living body feels like. And no matter what your level of health is, you are experiencing a living body. And a living body is filled with energy. Without thoughts about this experience, it feels like bliss.
Our conditioned thoughts, our ego, always looks to change the external situation. This is neither bad nor good. But it will never free us from suffering. We suffer because we live in a dream of our conditioned thoughts. When we try to change the external situation, we are distracted from where the real source of our suffering is. The source of the suffering is our thoughts. Thoughts are symbolic representations of reality. They are superficial and not true. No symbolic representation (thought) can be the reality itself, life itself, the thing it is representing itself. As we stop trusting our thoughts, we become free of this conditioning and we begin to experience life as it actually is. We no longer rely on our “knowledge” to tell us what life is. We let life do that. In each moment, we let life show us what it is. We no longer trust our conditioned thoughts so we consider our conditioned mind as “stupid”, “limited”, “a dream” or simply “not knowing”. We now receive the wisdom and truth of life itself in each moment without trying to interpret or understand it. And that is wonderful!
So the feeling of being “stupid” or “unenlightened” can be a beautiful beginning to this realization and humility. When our thoughts tell us that “stupid” and “unenlightened” are “bad”, our mind is still too full of conditioning and we are too full of believing it. When our mind is seen as completely stupid and unenlightened, we can experience the great freedom of realizing that our mind knows nothing. And this is the beginning of true enlightened wisdom.
You are doing nothing wrong. You are simply in the process of waking up. Allow it to happen. Pay attention to what happens. Try not to judge it, as that would only be your conditioned thoughts doing the judging. Just let it be. Think of yourself as a scientist objectively observing your experiences without any pre-conceived knowledge or expectations. Think of it as a great adventure in discovery.
I hope this helps.
Thank you, Peter, this is helpful! It feels good to hear that I might even be on the right path, this is encouraging for me and makes me feel better about my situation.
I also appreciate what you write about “being stupid” or not knowing. I’ve read a lot about the Zen teaching of “Don’t Know Mind” and also watched your video on “The Limitless Wisdom of Not Knowing”.
I find this very interesting and I do feel that it makes me more open and free to acknowledge that I don’t in fact know anything. It’s kind of liberating after having tried to accumulate knowledge for so many years of my life.
However, I still wonder how you would apply this technique to find direction and answers to the practical questions in life. Sometimes, like in my case, you *do* need to know, you have to make a decision or solve a practical problem – here I’m still struggling, I guess …
In your video you make it sound so easy and natural, yet for me it doesn’t seem to be like that. You might say I feel a little stuck in not knowing. 🙂
I’m not sure how to put this (especially since English is not my mother tongue), so please excuse me if it sounds confusing: I’m very much interested in the spiritual practices you write about but I still find myself being a little doubtful: Can those practices really prove themselves in everyday life, help me relieve (or get free of) suffering even in what you might conventionally call “difficult” circumstances?
For example, you wrote that without the belief in a separate self I couldn’t feel lonely. Truth is that I live a pretty isolated life, much more so than most other people, I think. Theoretically, you say, even I could find relief from loneliness and suffering.
I know that many spiritual teachers say the same thing, however, they are usually not in my situation at all. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone in my situation actually accomplishing this, so I guess it seems like quite a superhuman achievement to me – and this is sort of discouraging. Especially since I have tried many times before and so far haven’t been able to find much relief.
I hope this makes at least a little sense, I don’t know how I could explain it in a better way. This “belief” in the “impossibility of my situation”, if you might call it that, still seems to hold me back, I think. (Is this still the trance of thought that I’m not able to free myself from?)
Thank you for that interesting conversation and the insights you share!
Mia
Hi Mia,
About ten years ago I did my first year-long solo silent retreat. I had zero contact with people other than buying groceries once a week. I did not experience a moment of loneliness. Instead, I felt continuous bliss and a love that I seemed to be submerged in. That’s why it lasted as long as it did. After that almost every year I would spend at least three months without any contact with people. So it is definitely possible to have zero contact with another human being and not feel a single moment of loneliness. During this time I felt connected to and not separate from all existence. It has often occurred to me that I would prefer spending the rest of my life in this situation. The only reason I don’t is for the benefit of others. Before I began my first such retreat, I had no idea how I would feel. I had always been with people and was very happily married for over twenty years. So that first year of being completely alone was an experiment. I had no concept of how wonderful it would be.
When we have thoughts about being alone and lonely and how this is not how things are supposed to be we will most certainly suffer. But this suffering comes from our thoughts about the situation, not the situation itself. I had no such thoughts, so I had no suffering. Instead, I experienced a profound bliss and unconditional love for all existence. After ten years of such experiences, the life of a hermit is extremely attractive to me, and, as I said, the only reason I don’t simply go off deep into the woods is because I benefit others with my presence and teaching.
As I have been writing to you about, if you have no thoughts about a situation, it feels wonderful. When we have no thoughts about a situation, we are present to life as it is, and that always feels wonderful. Our thoughts are what create our suffering, not the situation. I would prefer living as a hermit, but I also enjoy serving and benefiting people just as much. Whatever life presents in each moment is my true preference. If I had any thoughts or opinions about what each moment brought, I would probably not be so happy with it. Since I have none and don’t trust whatever my mind says about it, I am happy with what is. This is true even of being sick or in pain. Sickness and pain have especially sticky conditioned thoughts (thoughts we believe) attached to them. That is the only reason these situations are more challenging than a beautiful sunny day.
No thoughts; no suffering. It doesn’t mean our thoughts are somehow erased. It just means we no longer believe them or give them any attention. Instead, we live by feeling, instinct, and intuition. All the time you are believing your thoughts, you are still experiencing life as it really is. Your attention is simply distracted by your thoughts so you are not paying attention to your direct experience. You imagine that your thoughts and perceptions are your direct experience.
I recommend looking into Byron Katie’s The Work to practice learning how to be free of the trap of thoughts.
I hope this helps.
Dear Peter,
I “intellectually” know that all suffering comes from thoughts.
Just so soften I am still caught in the worries and fear from all the unpredictable scary uncontrollable symptoms from MS.
I know it sounds strange.. but I feel I do need some permission from someone who I trust. Could You please kindly confirm for me that.. it is OK.. absolutely OK if the body is feeling not comfortable.. if i couldn’t get it healed.. if i feel i don’t have the ability to get it back to its healthy state..? I don’t know why I need somebody to tell me that it is ok if i fail my body.. but it seems very important for me to hear it.
So I can relax.. and let go..
Thank You very much.
Marga
Hi Marga,
Thank you for your post. Whatever happens is always okay. If we feel it is not okay, then we suffer. Isn’t this so. This is what you experience. If we’re driving our car in the rain and suddenly we get four flat tires at once, the mind will say this is not okay and we will be very upset. But it happened. So it is okay. Life does not make mistakes. When our thoughts conflict with life by saying life should be different, we have a big problem. When we go along with life, when we align with life as it is in each moment, then we don’t have a problem. We don’t have suffering. Life is simply happening as it happens.
So it is with your symptoms and experiences in the body. They are simply happening. Life is simply happening. If you let go of your thoughts about what is happening and your desire for it to be different than it is in the moment, you will be in alignment with life. You will be in alignment with truth. Instead of problems, you will have curiosity and even, dare I say, gratitude for whatever is happening.
So it is very much okay, whatever it is. Life is simply life. Things are happening. To imagine they are good or bad is just the conditioned trick of the mind. Life never says “good” or “bad”. Life simply is. Your nature also is this pure beingness. This pure beingness is not affected in any way by the experiences of the body. It may be a little more challenging to become aware of this pure beingness. It is always here. You cannot deny you are being. It is simply hidden beneath the layers of thoughts that say, “I am being this or that.” This pure beingness is before any of these thoughts that say, “I am this or that.” It is just pure beingness itself. It is like life. It simply is. There is nothing more that can be said about it. And yet here you will experience the greatest freedom, peace, and love any human can experience. And it has nothing to do with the experiences of the body. The experiences of the body do not affect it at all. Yet when there is extreme pain, they can distract our attention from pure being. But that is all that has happened. Our attention has become distracted. Pure being remains unaffected. Pure being remains pure being. You remain pure being, no matter what your body is experiencing. If you can let go of your thoughts and return attention to your essence, you will experience this great freedom. And you have a wonderful incentive to do this.
So yes, absolutely, it is okay. It is all wonderfully okay. It is an interesting human world we live in where the mind can make heaven seem like hell. This is the most common human experience. To the conditioned mind nothing is ever perfectly okay. Only in truth is this so.
I hope this helps.
Dear Peter,
Thank You very much for compassionately saying all these words to me. They are very important to me. From now on, whenever the desperation comes or the sorry feeling of becoming a burden to family arises, when all those.. suffering emotions and feelings overwhelm me, I will read these words over and over again.
Thank You very much. I am really grateful that somebody around me can say these to me with absolute peace and certainty.
I bow to You, Peter.
All the Very Best.
Marga
Dear Peter,
I have not had anything resembling the spontaneous enlightenment experiences I’ve seen described by others. I am isolated by financial circumstances and by chronic fear and Anxiety. I have not met (and cannot afford) a Teacher. I do not have a physical Sangha. I can’t afford to go on retreats or move to a location where there are many others practicing.
In actuality, although I have no doubt that I am Aware – I simply can’t remember it most of the time. I remain caught up in my loneliness and Anxiety. I very much want to experience some profound, life altering experience so I can quit trying so hard! Just kidding (sort of). I know that learning and practicing prepare me for Awakening but that Awakening happens with no effort, or through release of effort. It may be dramatic as a thunderstorm or as peaceful as a flowing stream.
But will this ever happen for me on my own? Can personal Enlightenment happen with books and online resources? How do I move past the chronic Anxiety, isolation and loneliness, into a life of Connection, Love, Compassion, and Service?
Thank, you,
Sharon
Hi Sharon,
Thank you for your beautiful posting. Something in you already knows you are trying too hard. And it is not kidding. Your True Nature is always here, even though you are not yet aware of it. Your thoughts are distracting you. Because your attention is focused on your thoughts, you experience loneliness, anxiety, and suffering.
Your thoughts are of anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. You listen to these thoughts and you believe these thoughts are true. That is why you experience this anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. Yet all this time your True Nature does not experience this.
When we awaken what we awaken from is a belief in our thoughts. Our belief in our thoughts is what we call a dream, illusion, Samsara. Your suffering is only caused by your belief in these thoughts. This is true for all of us. Imagine for just one moment if you did not have these thoughts, or having them you did not believe them. What do you think that would feel like? You’re right. You would be free. You would no longer experience the suffering you are now. We have been conditioned all of our lives to believe the thoughts in our head represent reality. Yet they never have. Thoughts are abstract symbolic representations of reality. They NOT reality. They are very useful as tools for communication. But when we believe them more than we believe reality itself, which can never be reduced to a thought, we experience suffering. This suffering is a wonderful and accurate sign that we are believing something that is not true. Every time we suffer, we are believing a thought that is not true.
So what is true? We cannot experience what is true while we still believe our thoughts. So what if, for just a moment, you accept that not a single thought you have ever had or will ever have is true? Why not try this for just a moment. If thoughts are not true, there’s no need to pay so much attention to them. What else is here in this moment that is not a thought? Is there air in your room? What does that feel like? Is there energy in your body? What does that feel like? Is there space in your room? What does this space feel like? Don’t answer with more thoughts. Just feel it. You don’t need to understand it with your mind. Keep your attention on what is not a thought. Feel life, stop thinking it. When you do this, notice if there are still any problems in this moment. When you experience that there are no problems, that there is just a sense of peace, connection, love, contentment for no reason at all, you will directly experience that all these problems and suffering only arose because you believed your thoughts that said, “This is not right.” “This is a problem.” “I feel lonely.” “I’m anxious.” etc. Without those thoughts were is the problem? Without those thoughts where is the suffering? Without those thoughts who is suffering? Can you even find this who? Is there really anything here but this great freedom, peace, contentment, and love? Has this not always been here the whole time we were distracted by these thoughts, by this dream of the story of me and my life?
Let go of thoughts and see what life feels like without them. Try it and see.
Thank you for your reply. I think I was able to see at least some of what you are pointing to. When I realize that there is no problem in this moment it is true that I am not suffering. This has occurred for me during meditation, by reading a book, or comments such as yours. When I stop reading your comment, stop sitting here in my chair experiencing this freedom from problems, and begin moving and doing, I forget. I forget to the point that I often do not remember until the next time I’m reading something that reminds me. Although I more often spontaneously remember in moments of doing than in the past, I find that my life is still mostly lived from a place of forgetfulness. Must I meditate more? Read more? Practice more patience? ?
I do apologize if I’m using this space inappropriately as I realize that most of your readers do not have Mental Illness and thus may not find this relevant. But a bit of background: I was a Scientist but became Disabled by Anxiety and Depression – a profound illness that led to my inability to work and function in the world. About 10 years ago (I’m 60, so only in my fifties), I first learned that my thoughts are not true. I began meditating, eventually seeing a Buddhist therapist, reading books and online articles. I participate in the online WorldwideInsight.org Sangha. I was fortunate to be able to go on retreat twice with Caverly Morgan and once at Deerpark Monastery. I found your website through the Being & Doing Summit and hope to read much more of your writings.
So, even though my life has greatly improved since that time 10 years ago, I currently live alone (with my dog and cat), participate in few outside activities, and do not work. It is true that I think this is “not right” and a problem that must be fixed. Is the “problem” my dissatisfaction with and view that this is a restricted life? Is it false to see my illness and lifestyle as separating me from others and life? I really want to contribute something and I want to live an engaged life.
We all forget. That is why we practice. Even being awake does not end our practice. It just means we are always practicing, even if it has become automatic. So you experience moments of freedom. That is wonderful!
These moments are freedom from your conditioned thoughts. And we all have conditioned thoughts. All of our thoughts are conditioned. Because of conditioning it is easy to be distracted by these thoughts. We call this distraction of our attention back into thoughts forgetting. We forget our freedom, peace, happiness and love.
Those moments of freedom are moments when you are not distracted. Realizing you are forgetting or distracted by thoughts is wonderful. That is a sign of your inherent awareness. Keep paying attention. When you are anxious, what thoughts are going on? Do you believe them. I have found that the experience of fear or anxiety is actually just energy at its essence. It feels like fear or anxiety because we are interpreting this natural energy of the body as fear or anxiety through our conditioned thoughts. If you let go of these thoughts, you will see that it is just energy and remarkably, it’s actually very pleasant. It is the energy of aliveness. The energy of a living body. But when the mind says, “Uh Oh! That’s fear!” Then it feels like fear. Body and mind are not separate. If the mind says fear, then it feels like fear.
See if you can experience these body sensations without being distracted by your thoughts about them. See if you can let your thoughts go and simply be curious about a sensation that you don’t know what it is. It no longer has any name or label. It is completely new in this moment. You have never experienced it before. And this is true. You haven’t. Each moment is new. So this experience is also completely new. Your mind creates a story that you’ve experience it before and you know what it is. But this is not true. You don’t know what this experience of energy is. Even to call it energy is too much. In truth it has no name. It simply is. In this moment it is. See if you can find the curiosity in this. The exploration. The adventure, as if you were an infant who has just discovered your fingers. See the amazement of it. Feel the amazement of it. Life is a complete mystery. It is an ongoing adventure. These stories we believe that we think give us control over life are only a conditioned dream. We really know nothing. When we realize this, we are, for the first time, living in truth. Now things become really interesting.
Thank you!
Two things really struck me in reading your answers.
Firstly, that NONE of my thoughts are true. While I understood that I did not need to believe my thoughts willy nilly, I had the notion I must discern which thoughts were false. What a relief to finally understand that they are ALL conditioned, relative views subject to change without notice and thus can safely be disregarded.
Secondly, the instructions for applying ‘Beginner’s Mind’, particularly to the bodily sensations I have habitually labeled as “Anxiety”. Another concept I am just beginning to grasp. It seemed to me that it meant to look with fresh eyes or to cultivate a sense of awe or wonder. I believe you are saying that, since no experience has ever existed before, I can only ever be a beginner. Therefore, thoughts do not apply.
You haven’t convinced me that this particular bodily sensation is or will be pleasant, but I’m quite willing to stop labeling it other than as “energy” and see what happens.
Let me know if I’m getting warm!
As you have mentioned “Love has no pain or suffering in it.” Then, what’s your take on grief? Grief usually accompanies deep sorrow and pain. I would greatly appreciate your insight on grief. Thank you in advance.
What a wonderful question. Thank you. Wherever there is suffering, there is a resistance to life as it is. Often people feel grief when a loved one dies or leaves them. The grief is experienced because we are resisting life as it is. People do die and leave us. This is part of life. When we resist this, we experience suffering. A major cause of our suffering is the attachment to being a separate self. This is also a resistance to life as it is. Nothing is separate. There is no separate self in reality. When we cling to this illusion, we will always experience suffering at some point. So suffering is a wonderful way to know if we are living in reality or in a dream. Whenever we experience suffering, we are always living in a dream. We are resisting truth. Love is our natural state. Love means no separation. This is truth. So love has no suffering because it is truth. The pain of heartbreak because someone dies or leaves us is illusion because we feel a sense of separation between me and the person who died or left us. In reality no such separation has ever existed. When we realize this, all we experience is love.
Compassion is an aspect of our true nature. We feel compassion because we experience the suffering of others because we are not separate from them. At the same time, we deeply realize and experience that there is no suffering because there is no separation. Compassion is the experience of both these experiences at the same time, both wisdom of non-separation and the empathy of feeling the pain of those lost in a dream. That is why compassion does no overwhelm us. It is not like grief, which is suffering. It experiences both the illusion (suffering) and the wisdom (no suffering, no separation) at the same time. Because of compassion, we can relate to those who are suffering without becoming overwhelmed by their suffering and in this way we can truly help. If we only experienced freedom from suffering, we would not be able to understand their suffering and be of no help to them.
Suffering feels very real, completely real, when we are still under the conditioned illusion of separation. Grief is part of that. As I mentioned, compassion is different. The true experience of love and peace are also like this. We experience true love and peace, when we no longer believe in separation. This is also what we call nonduality. Nonduality simply means the illusion of duality has been seen through and surrendered.
I hope this helps.
Your wisdom is invaluable and I thank you from the bottom of my heart! I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind answering. I would love to gain more of your insight on grief & death please.
1. Even if someone dies, we are still not separate because we are not this physical body? I recall your animal cookies/biscuits analogy. Can you elaborate more on that regarding after-death as well?
2. I understand feeling compassion for those who are grieving but what about for those who passed away? Should we feel compassionate towards deceased too (instead of feeling grief) since grief is suffering?
Thank you a million in advance.
Love,
Sophie
Hi Sophie,
Since we are not separate, everything is interconnected. You could not exist without your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. All of them would have to exist for your body to exist. You could also not exist without food, water, sun, earth, etc. Even your thoughts depend completely on others, language, etc. So there has never been the separation that the eyes perceive because our minds have been conditioned (programmed) to see this separation, which could never exist. This also means that what we perceive as death is not really what death actually is. If nobody and nothing is separate, what is death really? Bodies do “die”. They experience both birth and death. All bodies do this. But if there is no separation, what does this mean? Your great grandparent’s bodies have died a long time ago. But here you are. You could not exist if they never existed. So can you be separate from your great grandparents? Can you be separate from your parents? If your beloved friend’s body dies, does that mean you are now separate from your beloved friend. Your friend continues living in you. Your parents continue living in you. Your great grandparents continue living in you. After death is not really so different from before death. Life continues, so we continue. We are not separate form the totality of all life.
2. People feel grief when a loved one dies because of our conditioned thoughts. After someone dies, their physical brain is no longer functioning so that conditioning is no longer functioning. They are not suffering. Energy remains. Energy cannot be destroyed. It just transforms. This energy is no longer used for conditioned thoughts. What does it transform into? You could say it transforms into love. But this is not the love that we understand through conditioned thoughts. After someone dies, this energy is in a much purer form. This purer form is our essence and is with us while we are alive too. But our attention is distracted and focused on our conditioned thoughts so most people do not realize this. When we wake up while still in a living body, we realize this. We call this our True Self. It is impersonal and not separate from all existence. And there is a feeling of great peace, contentment and unconditional love. So this is some of the purity that is this energy when it is no longer distracted by conditioned thoughts. No reason to feel compassion for those after they have passed, but love certainly. Love is our essential nature, now and after passing.
I hope this helps.
Hello Peter,
My question is about the void experience, which happened to me spontaneously about twenty years ago. I suddenly felt alone in a vast nothingness, the great Unknown, which I also somehow knew was God. I was overcome with terror, not so much a fear of death or annihilation but a fear that if I took one step further I would be irrevocably changed and unable to ‘come back’ to my ‘normal’ self. Having scrambled back to the safety of the familiar, I also felt that I had failed in a test by giving in to the fear.
About five years prior to this void experience I had an experience of the ‘Presence of God’ brought on by the thoughts ‘I am nothing without You’ and ‘I cannot know who I am unless I know who You (God) are’ accompanied by a deep feeling of emptiness. In the next instant, the Presence of unconditional love, joy and peace was there, but experienced as a seperate Being, i.e. God. This Presence also seemed to speak to me through causing thoughts to arise in my mind, namely that it has always been in my life, and in the lives of all, and always will be, and that through suffering It is drawing all to Itself. It also told me everything is unfolding as it should and with the power that moves and animates everything with me and behind me, there is nothing or no one to fear.
I realize that the fear of the void I experienced was due to my lack of understanding and since then I have been studying Buddhist and advaita teachings about the non dual nature of reality and the illusion of seperateness. However, I’m wondering why I had the void experience at all, and if it’s going to happen again. In both these experiences there was ‘the Presence’, except the second was terrifying, causing me to withdraw. I understand that its the sense of seperateness which has to be transcended, but how can we ‘surrender’ to anything but Love? Is the void experience due to a lack of devotion/love and can the fear of it be overcome by concentrating on devotional practices?
I would be very grateful for your comments and advice Peter, especially as I noticed you said the void experience is something we have all to pass through and I’ve not been able to find much information on it though it was a major experience in my life.
Thank you, Claire. Your experience of the Presence of God is very well described. Yes, all of this is true. And this came from your True Self. It is wonderful you are open to this and paying attention. Fear came because of your thoughts and resistance. You are opening to something that is beyond your mind’s ability to understand. Truth / Reality is beyond your mind, beyond your thoughts and the thoughts of everyone. What we fear most is the unknown. You are coming face to face with the unknown. To the mind this is frightening. To the True Self, this is simply reality. The illusion of life as our conditioned mind experiences it is known and knowable. Reality is not. When we wake up, we wake up to what is unknowable through the conditioned mind, and yet it is completely known by the True Self or the Presence of God. It is just not known through the mind and never can be. Once you surrender this attachment to the mind, let go of the need to know and understand, and simply relax into the Presence of God as it is in each moment, you will no longer experience this fear. You will be grateful for not knowing, because the mind’s not knowing is openness to Truth as it is, to the continuous Presence of God. The more you experience this, the more you will relax into it and no longer seek to understand it.
The second experience was only terrifying because you resisted it. Your mind was afraid of what it cannot understand. The more you let go of attachment to the mind, the more you realize the mind can never know anything of actual reality as it only knows its own conditioning, the more you will directly experience reality and no longer experience fear. It is a process. It is all a process. And this process is continuous. Freedom from attachment to the mind and concepts is a big step on this process. But the process does not end here. Deeper levels of Truth are continuously being revealed. When we no longer believe in our own thoughts and let go into life as it is, this process accelerates greatly. It is no longer experienced through the mind, through thoughts and concepts and beliefs. It is experienced directly through being itself. It is like God speaking to God, if that makes any sense.
The unfolding of awakening has most definitely begun for you. Many more experiences are to come. Eventually, you will no longer find these experiences special. They will simply be exeperiences in this continuous process. There will still be some fear as you still trust your mind, as most of humanity does. Eventually you will naturally and without effort trust Truth / Reality / God more. Will this change you? Not outwardly. You are simply becoming more you, more of your True Self. As this happens the false, ego, limited, insecure, separate self will not longer interest you or be of use to you. You will experience more and more peace, confidence, happiness, love and wisdom. Things that used to upset you no longer will. No matter what experiences you have, these changes will not be instantaneous. They will happen gradually over time. All of them will be entirely beneficial and they will happen naturally without any effort on your part. You are already your True Being. You always have been. But there are many layers of conditioned thoughts and beliefs about yourself, the world, and life that are in the way. As your True Self presents itself more and more, the layers of illusion will begin to fall away by themselves as they are no longer needed nor believed.
Don’t worry about fear. It will still come from time to time with new experiences. But it will come less and less and it will be less and less intense. Eventually, when you are more free of attachment to thoughts you will simply notice, “Oh, there’s a fear thought.” and it will have no effect on you at all. At that point, you will experience your True Self / Truth / Reality / the Presence of God all the time.
It is a wonderful journey / process. The more you let go of attachment to thoughts, the easier and more wonderful it is.
Thank you so much Peter -its wonderful to be able to talk about these experiences with you. Although the first experience of the Presence was dualistic in the sense of God as a seperate Being, I have come to feel the same Presence within as the Self, albeit under layers of mental conditioning. I’ve been studying the teachings of Ramana, and trying to practice self-enquiry, but I’m tired of the struggle. The sense of seperateness persists, even though I feel the pull of the Self quite strongly at times.
I just don’t understand the resistance, why I can’t just let go and relax into it, even though I know intuitively that suffering is due to the sense of seperateness from the (true) Self/God. I long to experience It fully and uninteruptedly, which brings me to my next question: as long as we are subject to the ego illusion, do we need a transmission of grace from a living teacher?
The most important Grace is already and always with you. It is your True Being. If a living teacher can help you discover this, then that is wonderful and the true teacher’s only real purpose. Already and always you are what you are seeking. The more you let go of the illusion of a separate self, the more you will realize your True Being. Relax. Let go. Let go of all thoughts and beliefs, just as you do every night when you fall asleep. When you let go of everything the mind contains, what is left is your True Being. That is always here. It is here right now. That True Being is the only Grace you will ever need. That is also your True living teacher. It is always with you. Not for a single moment throughout your life have you ever been separate from it. Let go of this world of dreams and you will see this is true.
Thank you again Peter. It’s been a nagging doubt.
Questioner: Will Bhagavan give us some teaching to follow? Otherwise, how can I get help living 600 miles away?
Ramana: The true teacher is within.
Q: Sadguru is necessary to guide me to understand it.
R: The Sadguru is within
Q: I want a visible guru
R: That visible guru says he is within.
I suppose the problem I have is how exactly to “let go” of the dream of being a seperate self/body in a world. It’s been our experience since birth, and realizing it is an illusion has to be experiential rather than merely theoretical. How can we know for sure our true nature experientially, eliminating all doubt?
Hey Peter,
I have been on the path for years and some of what I have been through echoes the quick bit that I have read about your own journey. I also had a large awakening experience when I was young, it lasted a couple of years, but then fell away into what seems to be a “dark night of the soul” where I felt that “God” had turned his back on me. I couldn’t receive any consolation in life either in the material world or the spiritual world. I was stuck between two worlds. This was the most excruciating period of my life and I felt that through spirituality I had “perverted” my soul and now I was lost. This is basically the “dark night of the soul” and the main change, as I gather it, is that “God” no longer will work with you through meditations or through efforts of your own imagination. And that is literally what happened. I couldn’t meditate or contact “God” in any way of my own effort from that time forward.
In order to deal with this I threw myself back into the world and have lived a relatively worldly life since then. It has been over 12 years. I have never forgot about my experiences and I think about spirituality 24/7, searching, reading, meditating praying, etc. All of these efforts over the years have resulted in relatively few “consolations” but they increase slowly in intensity.
Recently I had quite a crazy experience. I started to feel anxiety creeping in whenever I would sit for a bit and contemplate. I didn’t realize it at the time but it was just incoming energy. One day when I was at home alone I was basically struck with a terrible “light” of some kind that showed me that there were many things wrong in my current living situation, basically, I was in a bad relationship. I fought with it, wanting to stay in my current living condition and it eventually overwhelmed me with panic and fear and crippling sadness, etc. Once I finally obeyed I spent the next two weeks in a depression. However during this depression I realized that there was TONS of energy at work in me clearing out many things. I would even feel fatigued to the point of feeling pain all over my body, but upon “dying” to that pain and sinking into it, I found that it was actually energy from “above” that put me into a much higher state once I integrated it. Overall this experience has been a blessing and I am now only a month into it. Things are generally evening out but I don’t want it to stop, if that makes sense. I want it to keep working on me. Also I wake up at night with intense burning sensations in certain parts of my body. Last night it was my throat and a certain vertebrae in my spine in the lower part of my chest. The intense burning kind of shifts around where it afflicts me from time to time.
I guess my main question is regarding what kind of efforts I need to make. I am very confused. Meditation doesn’t work for me at all unless I am already in a state where I know it will be effective (if that makes sense), and it has been this way for over 12 years. I’m not sure if there is even any effort that can help me as it isn’t really up to me. If there energy or state is there, it’s there, and I can literally close my eyes in a room full of people and feel a completely still mind, and all sorts of other experiences, but if the state isn’t there, there isn’t much I can do! Does any of this make sense?!
Hi Jim,
Thanks for writing. In some ways, you have answered your own question. It is not up to you. Trying to connect with God is too much you, as if you have the power to do this. When you are already in this state of freedom and to some degree not you, then it happens naturally. That is because you are connecting with your True Natural Being that is always here. That is also why you are experiencing energy in different parts of your body. This is natural healing. When you were depressed over seeing the unhealthiness of your relationship and lifestyle, it is just as you said. The depression and suffering came about because of your clinging to what is not of benefit to you. Your seeing this as unhealthy was the healing. And after a while you realized this was true and felt the freedom.
Your awareness of energy is a sign of your growing awareness beyond the limitations of your conditioned thoughts. The world we call real is actually just a very limited conditioned filter we are taught to place over the world. This filter hides the world from us. For various reasons, those filters are falling away and what is real is beginning to emerge. Part of this is the extraordinary energy of a living body and the energy (Chi) that is everywhere.
You are also beginning to realize that the more efforts you make, the less effective the results. The more you do nothing but observe, the more effective the results. This is a wonderful lesson. So this energy and state are always here and always available. You have stumbled upon them many times. It is not your doing. Your doing can only interfere with what is always here. Simply be quiet. Let go. Relax. Observe what is happening in this very moment. Everything is here.
Yes, this makes perfect sense. More and more you will find that reality does not make sense to the conditioned mind and yet it is far more real than what the mind can make sense of. It’s okay. That’s reality. That is truth. Just relax. Let go. Observe. You don’t need to understand it. It’s happening. You are waking up. What do you do to wake up from a sleeping dream? Nothing. You simply wake up. what do you do to fall asleep at night. Nothing. It just happens. Trying to fall asleep only guarantees you won’t fall asleep. It is the same with waking up. You don’t need to do anything. It is as natural as falling asleep and waking up. This is already happening. Simply allow it to happen and pay attention. What you can do is find places in your life where there are few or no distractions. Walking and sitting by yourself in nature. A quiet undistracted time in your room without books, music, people, or social media. Just quiet. Then simply pay attention to what is in this moment that is not a thought. This will allow you to bring your attention to what is here beyond the limitations of thought. It is that simple. It is a wonderful journey. It will keep teaching you as you continue opening up to it.
The only challenges are what your mind is interpreting. When you ignore your thoughts, you will see things as they are. And this is already happening. Your only job is to pay attention. Naturally, if there are a lot of distractions, other people, media, your own thoughts, you will not be able to pay attention to the quieter more subtle things that are beyond thought. Arrange time in your life when you can do this. And, as you say, even in a room full of people with a lot of distractions, you can simply close your eyes and experience what is always here beyond those distractions. And that only takes your attention.
Thank you very much for your reply. I am actually finding that the choice to go into my room and meditate already reeks of desire and I almost start out on the wrong foot. I will try more and more to just sit. I am very clingy right now and trying to justify my suffering by seeking consolation in spirituality because I am hoping that all of my suffering is related to waking up. One of the hardest things is that when I do experience and “opening” as a result of entering into the silence I immediately become covetous of it and when it disappears I feel disappointed. It’s really an unhealthy cycle. The “ego” immediately tries to take every step I take on this path. Thanks again for the inspiration and the guidance!
This is very normal, Jim. Your wisdom is showing. You are becoming aware that suffering is related to your attachment to the egoic sense of a separate self. In fact, this belief in a separate self is the ONLY cause of all suffering. The experience of suffering can become more intense in the process of awakening from this dream of separation. You are beginning to realize the consequences of this belief for yourself and also all of humanity.
You are also becoming aware that grasping for enlightenment is a primary obstacle to the experience of enlightenment. The reason for this is that enlightenment is simply truth. It is always here. While we are lost in a dream, we do not notice this. While we are lost in a dream, we have suffering. This is to show you that it IS a dream and not reality.
It is very natural to attach to our awakening experiences because they feel so good, better than anything we have ever experienced in the dream. But you are also becoming aware that attachment is the perfect recipe for obscuring our natural state of enlightenment (or simply being awake). It is like trying to catch a feather by waving a fan at it. This only pushes the feather further away from us. Grasping and attachment to enlightenment do the same thing. Enlightenment is our natural state. It is the natural state of all existence. Few people ever realize it other than briefly, but still it is always here. Just as you are sleeping in bed while having a sleeping dream no matter what is happening in the dream, so you are always your True Self, not separate from anything in all existence, no matter how it seems from the perspective of the conditioned human mind.
Awakening is not something that we do or cause. It is always here. Just as you do nothing to fall asleep at night nor to wake up in the morning. It simply happens. Trying to fall asleep at night will only prevent you from falling asleep. Simply letting go of the day and your thoughts and you naturally fall asleep. Sometimes you may fall asleep in the middle of reading a book although that was clearly not your intention. So awakening is not something we do. It simply happens. Some people have said that awakening is an accident and that spiritual practices make you accident prone. That is a wise way of seeing it. It is not an accident because it is always present. But the separate ego self does nothing for it to happen. The ego does not wake up. The ego is an illusion. You wake up from the ego.
This wisdom that is coming through in you is not yours either. It is always here in all beings, even plants and rocks. And yet it is a wisdom infinitely more than anything any human mind can lay claim to.
What you are experiencing and now aware of about the ego is a necessary part of the process. You need to truly see the ego to finally realize it is not real. It’s attempts to take control will little by little cease the more you become aware of it and aware of something more. That something more is found in the silence you speak of. It is not a silence we think of with the conditioned mind. It is only the absence of our thoughts interference and the opening to truth far more than the mind can comprehend.
Hi Peter,
I have been struggling with this issue for some time, and maybe you could tell me what you think?
My awakening began 3 years ago. Obviously, it is so beautiful to discover it, but I have given up a lot in exchange. 3 years ago I ended my romantic relationship and I didn’t have one since. 3 years ago I quit collage and I had only ‘meaningless’ part-time jobs since. 3 years ago I gave up most of my friendships and basically have become a hermit.
All of this was very important as I see it, but for some time now I’ve had the feeling that this avoidance of my outer life cannot go on for ever. I am a 23 year old man and I live a life of a loner, with no career ahead of me, no social life whatsoever.
In one way, this is so beautiful. I have a lot of time to myself and I love spending hours and hours meditating. This is so easy and joyful, I seem to have no other need. However, every now and then, I realize that there is a part of me that deeply desires to come back to society, be creative, serve and live with others.
But when I think about turning my attention towards career or relationships, a voice inside of me says: “No! That is a distraction from awakening! Go back to your cushion! It’s not over yet!” This voice makes a lot of sense, but I am afraid I might be fooling myself and avoiding the necessary.
So, you see, I am split like this. I want to come back to the world, but I can’t seem to do it as solitary meditation is so tempting, easy and, I believe, very much needed. When I am out in the world, I find that I cannot express the understanding that I have inside and end up acting in a way that is not true. This confirms to me that I have to go back to my cave for more meditation.
Could you give me some advice?
Thank you!
Hi Vojtech,
Your awakening is strong. Please try to think of it not so much as what you have given up for this great freedom and truth, but what you have naturally let go because you are discovering where true happiness and truth are. This is wonderful, as you already experience.
In the world of illusion, the conditioned dream that most of humanity lives in, we believe that the right job, relationship, success, entertainment or material possessions will bring us happiness, peace, and love. We believe that the right knowledge will bring us truth. When we begin to wake up we realize that none of this is true. The truth, happiness, peace, and love we were seeking are already here and always have been. We also realize that none of these external things can bring us this truth, happiness, peace, and love that are always already present.
You are struggling with the natural tendency of the mind to look for suffering. It is a conditioned habit that takes some time to wear away. The world of the dream, your conditioned thoughts, says I should do this and that. Part of you believes this and another part knows it is not true. What you have on your side is simply this feeling of happiness, of peace, of love, of contentment. Trust this. It is guiding you well. That is its purpose. Whatever pulls you away and distracts you from this feeling is not true. It is just left over conditioned thoughts that are still believed. When you are pulled away, when you are struggling, this is also teaching you. When does this happen? Something is not true in this situation. You are simply entering the conditioned dream of thoughts again. When there is peace, happiness, contentment, love, pay attention to this. This is pointing you to truth. Don’t trust your thoughts. All of our thoughts are confused. Trust instead this direct feeling, this direct experience.
Will you ever have a relationship again? Who knows? But if you bring this experience of deep peace, happiness, and love into the relationship it will always be successful because this is your True Self. It doesn’t matter if it lasts or not, you are still happy, peaceful and filled with love.
Will you go back to school? Perhaps. And just the same, if you are present, happy, at peace and filled with love, then this will also be successful no matter what happens. Do you see? It is not what you do. It is who you are. When you are living as an imaginary separate self as most of humanity does, you are simply living in a dream. When you are awake, whatever you do is permeated with your True Nature and thus it is always successful no matter how it may appear to others or our own judging conditioned mind.
You have been following the experience of your True Nature. That is wonderful. It is all the guidance you truly need. It is the most important guidance to follow. Will society disagree? Almost certainly at times. Society is created from and supports the illusion of separation and suffering. Will your societally conditioned thoughts disagree? Almost certainly. They too come from and support the illusion of separation and suffering. They are not true. Trust what is true, as you have already been doing. Is this challenging? It is to the conditioned mind. There are no real road maps to truth. Yet truth is truth. When you directly experience it as you have, road maps are not really necessary. Your direct experience is always more than enough. Trust this.
Peter,
Your reply is a treasure! Thank you.
Really, I think I knew all of this already, I just needed to hear it from the outside. I needed a little support and some ‘it’s ok to do this’, sort of thing.
It’s really good to hear this. Thank you.
What we feel we know already is coming from the truth that is always inside us. Truth is always here. This never changes. All spiritual teaching that comes from truth feels as if we already know this, and we do. It is a feeling of truth in our heart that is often beyond what our mind thinks is true. You have always known this. But a little reassurance is often helpful, given the conditioning we are all subject to. I am very happy to provide. 🙂
Thank you so much, Karen and Peter for sharing your question/ thoughts! I can so relate. And this just gave me hope.
I am in training to become psychotherapist for children. And I doubt a lot what I do („Do I do it right? I am not good enough, I can’t help …“). Meanwhile I know these are egoic thoughts. But long time I didn’t. Just suffered so much. Then, this year, once during Pentekoste and once in summer, I suddenly experienced such a deep joy, happiness, absolute fearlessness and peace. Once I just woke up and there it was, this deep joy, absolute peace. And most importantly, I knew with all my heart that I can’t but also don’t need to „do“ anything with my clients. There was just this wonderful light accompanied with the deep knowing. I can’t even say I believed it because it just was. This was like Heaven. But after an hour or so, I started to fear that this state would fade, thought this can’t last. And of course, it didn’t :-).
I am so grateful for having been given this experience. I don’t know how I would do it now without knowing that life can be different. Because some time after this experience faded, I started to feel extremely painful emotions. I never felt so vulnerable before. Even thought I need to stop my work, as any time there is a chance with a client to think that I am not good enough/ can’t help etc., I am overwhelmed by such a pain that sometimes lasts for days. I try to detach from my thoughts. Really, I get to know my ego very well :-). But sometimes, I start feeling that I can’t bear it anymore. I just heal from a painful feeling and the next one pops up. I feel like being farer away from any joy / peace than ever before. Just grateful when there are some days of rest from this ride.
It gave me hope to read your conversation and a sense of joy to welcome this emotional pain arises. But when I am in the middle of this pain, I often feel so exposed and helpless that I stop doing any practice. Fall into the state of just bearing the pain.
I guess, dear Peter, you would give me a similar answer as Karen. But maybe there is still something I could do when I fall into this helpless state?
But in any case, your conversation already helped me a lot – thanks very much!
How wonderful, Katharina. To have but a glimpse of what you experienced is the doorway to reality. These painful feelings are part of a releasing process. There are so many conditioned thoughts and due to the power of your awakening experience these are all being purged without your doing anything. When you resist them, the process will be much harder and more painful. So what I advise is to instead welcome them. I know this is challenging. All your conditioning says “Resist. Try to make them go away. Change the channel.” But, in life, things don’t happen unless they are supposed to. You probably don’t realize it now, but those painful feelings are actually a great gift. They are not only healing you but also showing you how painful thoughts can be when you believe them. You experienced a brief freedom from thoughts and that felt wonderful. Now you are also seeing the true pain and suffering that come from attachment to thoughts. The combination of the wonderful feeling of freedom from thoughts and the suffering from attachment to thoughts is leading you to awaken to reality beyond thought. When this happens you will an enormous gift to all your clients far beyond anything you have ever learned in school. You will see that true presence and unconditional love have extraordinary healing powers. And eventually this will become the way you live.
I am very happy you have had this opening. It is a blessing not only for you but the entire world. Right now the painful feelings can feel overwhelming. But when you begin opening to them and allowing them to be whatever they are, they will soon work their way through the process and you will be free. Along the way you will understand suffering in a very deep way. And this will be enormous help to your clients. You are learning things now that will one day become the way therapy is done. A true healer needs no more than a single session to heal pretty much anything. That may seem surprising to you now. But, before long, it will become obvious.
I cannot say how healing your words are and how grateful I am for your reply. Thank you so much. Yes, I always want these feelings to stop. Just stop hurting. But I feel that with your words in mind, I might be able to welcome them. Already now there is relaxation. Thank you so much.
And yes – one session to heal pretty much anything is really very surprising. I already experienced that it happens that I „take over“ the pain of my clients. My painful feelings are often attached to thought complexes that also condition the entire family of a child. And often, as soon as this pain is released, the children suddenly open and thrive. But this takes much longer than 1 session 🙂
How wonderful that this process can be eased!
Hi!
I am exploring god and find most sense and comfort in monistic concepts of god where all is god as in Hinduism etc. This view has come as a result of a bunch of things over years- reading texts, different philosophers views, studying religion at school and then university. The most significant experience however being my first acid trip at 17 where I felt no seperation from the world around me and knew this existence to be god and to be so beautiful. This was a realisation that hit me with full force and I’ve never fully recovered I guess- it slips into my mind every day and sometimes I find it very hard to abide to the routines and paths that we are expected to enact- go to work, go to uni, make a career, find meaning in these things when I have known none of it to truly matter. This view I have makes me feel very lonely, as no one I know really understands it the way I do. I don’t quite know how to reconcile my beliefs with functioning in our society. The other thing I want to ask your opinion on is the older I get (I am now 20) the more I see of the awful realities that exist for some people. People who in no way deserve this. For example, a 2 year old girl in Syria being made to hack away at a man until he died, under a terrorist regime. This young baby girl, entirely ruined for her life before she even could talk. When hearing stories like these, it’s very hard to accept that suffering is an illusion as thru our egos- this seems to me completely wrong. There exists suffering in this world that is beyond imaginable and very very real and I feel that I can accept eg hindu or Buddhist perspectives on these situations only because I come from a situation of immense privilege.
I just need some guidance on topics like these because I feel that it really might drive me crazy- existential depression or something like that. Which in a way is what I am seeking.
Thankyou for the opportunity to discuss.
Olivia
Hi Olivia,
Thank you for writing and expressing yourself.
You are now exploring concepts, teachings, writings and you should. You are in the exploration phase of your search. This is appropriate to your age, although people’s true age can be very different from their biological age. What you are experiencing are windows into reality beyond a conditioned dream that all of society lives in. This is important. Right now you probably want to figure this out and understand it with your mind, so you are searching. This is good. Eventually you will discover that Truth cannot be figured out and understood with the mind. If you understand this now, you will take it more lightly and not be so concerned about succeeding or failing in your search. That may sound very negative, that try as you might, you can never understand Truth with your mind. So let me help try and make something clear that is very positive.
You ARE Truth. It’s not what you think. It’s never what you think. It’s what you ARE. And there’s nothing you have to do to be. You ARE. You have always been. So this is very good news. But seeking and searching are all part of the process. I don’t want you to stop doing that. But I do have a question for you. It is a different way of searching. Right now you are aware of many things, isn’t this true? You are aware of reading this. You are aware of your body. You are aware of your eyes and seeing. You are probably also aware of your ears and hearing whatever sounds arise. You are aware of sensations in your body. You may be aware of feelings. If you pay close attention you realize you are aware of whatever thoughts are arising now. All of this is very simple, very obvious. Just notice that this is so. You are aware.
You are aware of many things. But something is aware, isn’t it? If there were no awareness, you wouldn’t be aware of any of this that you ARE aware of. So my question is not what you are aware of, but what is the awareness itself? This is important. Everything you are aware of is an OBJECT of awareness. But awareness is not an object of awareness. Awareness is the subject. So what is this subject that is awareness itself? This is not a mental answer I am asking for. This is an experience. This is a practice. What is awareness? Every mental answer is an object of awareness and not awareness itself. So what is awareness? You are aware of many things. So what is this awareness that is aware? Every mental answer is not it. Let them go. Keep looking. When all mental answers fall away. When all thoughts fall away. When your attention moves away from every object of awareness (thoughts, sounds, images, sensations, perceptions, experiences), it will naturally rest on being awareness itself as there is nothing left for attention to rest on. It will rest on pure being, which is the same as awareness. You will find many of your answers in this. It is not a mental answer, so I will not give you one. It is a direct experience of your own beingness beyond all thoughts, beyond a person, beyond anything I or anyone else can say. Here you will find a great peace, happiness and love for no reason at all. Here you will find Home. It may take some time. There’s a lot to let go of. Don’t worry. You don’t lose a thing. You’re just shifting attention. You are the Source you seek. You only find this by letting go of everything else. What is left over, what remains, when everything is let go of is this Source is You.
What we see in the world is a dream created through our conditioned thoughts. You have experienced several cracks in this conditioned dream. Bravo. This practice I gave above can take you Home. It is beyond words and thoughts. It is a direct experience of your Pure Being.
In the meantime try not to take it all too seriously. Unless you really need to. Our lessons come in many different ways exactly appropriate and perfect for us.
I hope this is of some help.
Love,
Peter
Hello, dear Peter!
I really like how you say that whatever happens in our life, it’s always a perfect path to our awakening. This is quite soothing, but at the same time – a bit confusing and even scary sometimes, and I’d love to explain why and receive some advice from you, if possible.
A few years earlier, at 21, I came to a point where I got tired of living. I did not understand why life seemed to be so stupid, with all this suffering, with all the “rules” of how-to-be-good-enough-to-deserve-something. It all seemed to be so meaningless, and I cried and literally asked to be taken back Home to uncondtitional love, because I’d read that in reality, there is only Love (which I have read about again and again since, inlcuding in your book :)). I didn’t want to commit suidice, but I so desperately wanted to be out of here.
Just a little bit afterwards, I had this amazing dream, which felt like a visit to Heaven. In that dream, I kissed a guy and it felt like we became One, and we suddenly were at some place which was not even a place – i don’t even remember seeing anything there but this beautiful golden light. I just FELT that there were so many, many loving beings all around us, and it felt like everyone and everything was singing. It felt so amazing, I felt this Oneness with everything, peace, as if I had reached some final destination. It was incredible, and even when I woke up – I physically sensed some kind of bliss, with all my body tingling.
Shortly after that dream, I realized that the guy that I kissed and became one with in the dream was a friend of mine whom I had a crush on since the first day we met. We started dating on Valentine’s Day :), and now he’s my fiance.
The weird thing that happened is, when he and I got together, I got inspired to live. If just a few weeks before I wanted to leave this life, I now wanted to be alive and experience all kinds of adventures, fun, joy, just any of the earthly experiences that had any kind of fun in them.
So, it’s like my fiance was the answer to my plea. But when I’m thinking about the irony of how it has turned out – I asked to leave, and my answer was a desire to live 🙂 – I’m thinking, what if craving for these earthly joys is a step back from awakening…? And this is so puzzling to me, because this craving seems to be a part of my personal awakening itself, but at the same time, I always thought that when you awaken, you don’t really care about earthly joys that much.
Now that I have someone who sheds the light on the beauty of life for me, there are all kinds of things I’d love to do and have, and many of them seem to be very vain. Like eating tasty foods, going to lunaparks, dressing up in funky clothes, traveling, having good money, giving loads of presents, laughing… And it seems so far away from that detachment-based concept of awakening that I know of..
I read that it’s very important to follow your feelings, and I feel like I would love to combine the light of Awakening with an intensely jolly life. And i don’t know if that’s possible, because the two concepts seem to be the opposites of each other. Like, how can I detach from the game while still being so involved in it? I believe that it’s possible, but what if I’m mistaking… I don’t know if I’m allowed to combine the two things, I don’t know if the way I want my life to be is really achievable – for all I know, I could have put a lot of suffering on my path before I was born, and I’m scared of suffering. I know that my perspective is limited, but I think that suffering is a waste of time, that it’s totally meaningless – it is the reason why i wanted to leave life in the first place. And I’m hoping that since i was convinced to stay, the Power that did it also implied that I wasn’t going to suffer. (I actually had another dream with a heavenly feel in which I was told I wouldn’t have to be afraid ever again, and I’m hoping those words were really a message from the Universe).
Every day I’m torn by this question in my head: what if what I want is not in line with what I had planned for myself? What if the plan has something bad for me “to learn from”, while i deeply believe that bad stuff is not necessary at all…
I’m also very impatient, which makes it hard for me to still my mind and train myself to connect with the Truth. Maybe in some way i’m scared of it, i’m scared that in my “conversation” with the Divine I may learn that i indeed have to go through something bad in my life.
So there’s a conflict between what I want and what I think the Universe may want for me. I want to spread the light of Love in some way, but I want to have a tasty funny life as well. And I’m afraid that the Universe doesn’t want that “tasty funny life” thing for me, that it intends to break me and “teach” me through the means which I find heartbreaking and unnecessary. In my opinion, suffering is the very last means that the Universe would ever want to use, and it would happen only because a person is too closed-up and leaves literally no other way for the Universe to wake them up but through some unpleasant event. But this is just my opinion, and I don’t know if it’s true.
I don’t know what exactly I want to ask you about)) I think I just want to hear from someone that I am free to live the way I want to, and that my guides will be more than happy to help me spread Love exactly the way I want to spread it. After all, why is it that I have this strange desire that I have? Isn’t it exactly the way in which the Universal Self wants to be expressed through me? I’m not sure I would ever make peace with a way of living that differs from the one I have in mind – and I realize that’s it’s not wise to fixate on just one way of living, but I feel like my vision is very well in line with the mission of Love. I just don’t know if the Universe shares my view, and if it doesn’t – I don’t know how to make peace with that. I guess what I would love to hear is something that would help me trust that the Universe doesn’t want me to suffer. That it doesn’t want anyone to suffer. I’m so tired of being stuck between my greatest fear and my biggest desire. I just don’t know what to do to get unstuck…
I’d be very greatful to receive your feedback to my mess of thoughts :)) Thank you very much for your time and your Loving message.
Hello, Dear Jules,
This is a wonderful letter. Do not worry about what you think. You have found love and joy. This is wonderful. Embrace every delicious moment. Do not worry about what enlightenment or spiritual awakening are. Do not worry about Truth. Embrace life in this moment. Do not worry about any thoughts about how things are supposed to be. You are experiencing love and joy. This is enough. This is all you need.
The Universe absolutely does not want you to suffer. Suffering comes from the illusion of thoughts. The Universe is Truth. You are Truth. You will find the Universe in this love and joy. It is here. And it is here you will discover it. There is only one thing I would ask you to do a little differently, and if you don’t do it, it is still perfectly okay. I would ask you to ask yourself, from time to time, where this love and joy are coming from. Where are you experiencing love and joy? Are you experiencing this love and joy in your Beloved? Are you experiencing this love and joy in the world? Or are you feeling this love and joy right in your own heart? Are you experiencing this love and joy right in your own being? From time to time, notice where this feeling is. If you do this, you will find the experience of love and joy increasing. If you don’t, there are too many thoughts in the way and simply feel the love and joy and don’t worry about this question. When you do feel the love and joy increasing every time you discover that it is in you, then you are doing it correctly. You are beginning to discover the Universe. You are beginning to discover your True Self.
The Universe and your True Self are not separate. They are the source of all experiences of peace, love and joy. We imagine that these things must come from outside of us. We all do this. Who could imagine that this love and joy is our very nature? We may even imagine that suffering is also our nature because we have experienced suffering many times. But, actually, it is not. Suffering is simply a product of the conditioned mind of thought. The mind of thought is not our True Nature. It is just thought. Our True Nature is this love and joy you are now experiencing. As I hope I made clear in my book, you can follow this experience of love and joy back to its Source.
Spiritual awakening is not about detachment, some bland, neutral and lifeless life. It is just the opposite. Do not trade in the experience of love and joy for some idea of a detached spiritual life. That is not what the Universe wants for you. Spiritual awakening does involve the end of attachment. Detachment and the end of attachment are very different. We are no longer attached because we realize that this great peace, love and joy have never been separate from us. First we discover love and joy in the world. This is wonderful. Savor this. Enjoy this fully. Embrace every delicious moment. Then we begin to notice somehow that this great peace, love and joy have always been here, even when our mind convinced us they were not and we were suffering and searching for them. So we never lose peace, love and joy. They only become far stranger and we no longer feel that we can ever lose them. The love and joy you are feeling now is a doorway into the love and joy that is always here. Even though our minds tell us differently, you can never actually lose this. You simply realize it is always here and no longer need anything to create this experience.
But for now, enjoy this love and joy however it comes. This is the Universe, isn’t it? You don’t need to understand the Universe. Your direct experience is all the understanding there ever is. When we awaken we don’t suddenly understand everything with our mind. We no longer rely on our mind at all. Instead we rely on this direct experience. We trust what we feel in each moment, knowing that we cannot and don’t need to understand it with the mind. You are already experiencing this great love and joy. This experience IS the understanding. There is no understanding other than this nor does their need to be. Do you understand the experience of love? Nobody does. And yet we feel it, sometimes very intensely. That is enough. It is more than enough. That feeling, that direct experience, IS the understanding. And it is also so for awakened consciousness.
Thank you for your lovely letter.
Love,
Peter
Thank you very, very, very much :))) This does help, immensely 🙂
Hello Peter,
I understand at the level of my mind that there is no objective experience during deep sleep. I see it as some blank experience, but this recollection of my deep sleep experience in the waking is certainly best summarized as an image of a black blank space where there is absolutely nothing. I wish I could consciously experience that state. But my question to you would be for whom is the deep sleep? Because in that state I am totally unaware of anything, at least in waking or dream I know I am, but here there is nothing. Also, intuitively I know there is something subtler which has experienced the deep sleep too. To me it sounds as though deep sleep is like a portal which leads to the self? And it acts as an intermediary state where you lose every bit of consciousness of anything and everything so that you are prepared to enter the den of the true SELF just like a newborn. I would love to hear your comments on this. Thank you very much.
I feel you are correct in this. Deep sleep is a wonderful experience for all humans and all species. In little more than 20 minutes per night all our healing occurs. Isn’t that amazing. There is no sense of a separate ego self, no thoughts, no problems, not even the world we perceive in our waking life. And is during this time that the body repairs itself. Deep sleep is not just a portal to the True Self, it is the True Self. During deep sleep, you, me, and all beings are the True Self. We always are the True Self as we could never be anything else. But because of our conditioned thoughts, senses and perceptions we experience something else, something very limited. In deep sleep, those conditioned thoughts, sense and perceptions no longer interfere. This is why it is said that awakened consciousness is much like deep sleep. Here too conditioned thoughts, sense and perceptions no longer interfere. We see through them to something much, much more. And this the True Self, what we see and what we are. I heard once that Ramana Maharshi was even aware of deep sleep. I don’t know if this is true or not. I am not aware of deep sleep, although I love it. So perhaps there is some awareness although I don’t know what I am aware of. I don’t think this is of any importance. As long as deep sleep is happening, it’s all good. What we can do is to bring our daily waking life as close to deep sleep as possible in terms of freedom from all attachment to conditioned thoughts, senses and perceptions. This is often referred to as Samadhi or Satori. Much as in deep sleep it is a completely relaxed state of experience. The body is completely relaxed and at peace, as is the mind. There is also the experience that a lot of healing is going on physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, although this is happening beneath the attention of the mind’s comprehension. This too is similar to deep sleep. As we grow more familiar with these Samadhi or waking, consciously aware deep sleep experiences they eventually permeate the rest of our waking life. The body remains relaxed and at peace even in extreme action. We act in the world, teach, write, paint, work, engage in all activities in this place of deep relaxation without the interference of thoughts or separate self identity. So the true way to explore deep sleep is to explore it while awake. We do this by shedding our conditioned attachment to all things that interfere with deep sleep and are not present in deep sleep: thoughts, perceptions, sensations, sense of personal self, etc. Thoughts, sensations and perceptions still occur, but without attachment they no longer interfere.
I would not say that deep sleep is like a “blank, black space where there is absolutely nothing”. Samadhi is not like this either. Although being free of thoughts there is really nothing that can be said about it. I think the same can be said about deep sleep. There is nothing that can be said about it and it is not nothing, nor is it something. All words, descriptions and thoughts completely fall away when trying to describe these experiences. Yet the mind desperately wants to describe, label and understand. So it continues to try, until our attachment to it ends and then it finally stops and rests in not knowing. I’m very happy with not knowing. I experience this not knowing not only about Samadhi and deep sleep but about everything. Reality of anything cannot be made into a thought that is accurate. As soon as it is, it is now just a thought. Reality is always free of all thoughts. And you could describe this as being like a newborn. In Zen we call it “beginner’s mind”. Fresh, new, alive and present in every moment. It is a good way to live. We have knowledge of course. Otherwise I could not write this. But we are no longer attached to it. In every moment there is this perfect and innocent not knowing that allows the present moment to simply be what it is. Deep sleep, Samadhi and the sound of a morning dove cooing. I like where your questions are leading and pointing to. I hope I have answered them in a way that leaves the questions still as questions. Questions are very good, very open, leading to the unlimited, leading to Truth. Answers, not so much. Answers must always be limited. If we believe them and attach to them our movement toward Truth, which is always present in every moment, ceases. So keep questions. Keep questions but stop desiring answers. Then there is what I call an open question. A question that is not seeking a limit answer. It is a question that life is continuously answering in every moment.
Hi again dear Peter.
Its been some months since I wrote you, or even since we talked. Once you said ”life is your teacher”, and only now I begin to understand what that meant. I see confirmations of the same wisdom in different places, objects, landscapes, teachers, in different religions, sometimes in people’s eyes, in life itself.
I was searching for understanding, trying to comprehend what Truth is, how to ‘get there’. Now what pervade me is a lovingly intention to live it. To remember, and remember again and again and again, daily, in every moment, here and now. Even when the feeling ‘i lost it’ appears now, I say to myself ”even this. Truth is also in this moment”, and even though these fluctuations continue to happen, and I apparently lose myself again and again, there’s much less heaviness in doing so. Guilt at these moments is fading, or this sense of doing ‘something that wasn’t supposed to happen’ is becoming less and less present. Although my life seems to be the same, people now tell me I’m better, happier, more stable and calm. It’s even weird to remeber now how it was like being trapped in thought 24/7. Life keeps teaching me, and whenever I think I’m getting somewhere, it seems a fall into dellusion happens, to remind me of how it was, and reveal the suffering we ourselves create, and how long I can stay there.
It seems now I feel less and less wanting, like long-term desire its fading more and more. I still do want a piece of cake, or to see some friends, small things…but regarding my future, these life goals seem to be dissapearing. It’s a strange place to be, as I used to plan several lifetimes I could live in this life, several dreams and goals to achieve. I do feel though, there is a path to take in this life, but more like a floating river that will just take me where it wants me to be. There is no need of much effort. And life has been so kind, so loving to me, I pray that with every day grows stronger and stronger the trust in life, in it’s loving nature.
I still see inside me attachment, arrogance, desire of recognition, anxiety, fear. But now I came to realize how much fear there was in my life (and still is)! I was so used to it, it felt normal. The witness comes and goes like the wind, that blows wherever and whenever it pleases. Some beautiful prayers and poetry are also appearing spontaneously. I try to remember what is truly important in this life, as the days go by and challenges appear. I told you once, that Beauty came naturally to me, and what was only perceived in landscapes and objects, now slowly seems to embrace people too. Truth only seems to deepen and deepen, as a kind of devotion to life begins to reveal itself.
I just want to thank you for the wisdom in your words and the grace in the guidance that you so lovingly shares.
– Camile
Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful, Camile. I am very happy for you. Yes, there is nowhere to “get”. You are beginning to experience what you ARE and have always been. There is no greater joy for any human being. All this will continue to grow, this realization of your True Being. We cannot see it, hold it up to examine it or even be aware of it because we ARE it. It is the one thing we cannot be aware of. Mooji says, “A knife can cut many things, but it cannot cut itself.” As such we are not aware of what we are. We simply ARE it. Your True Being, you could call awareness itself, is showing you what you are. It is not separate from all of life, all of existence. So you are paying attention. And the more you pay attention the more you see, the more you realize, the more you realize what you are and all of life is. It is a beautiful discovery.
There will still come moments when you forget, when you are distracted, when you are triggered into old conditioning. It is part of the process for all of us. But it works itself out. As you now see, “there is no need of much effort”. And eventually no effort at all. How much effort does it take to be what you already are? How much effort does it take to be present when you can be nowhere else? All of this life is showing you.
Seeing the “attachment, arrogance, desire of recognition, anxiety and fear” is very good. More and more you see what used to be unconscious. This is not always pleasant, but it is real. This is what the mind does. Eventually you simply don’t listen to it any more and you are free of its prison of suffering. This also happens naturally and seeing it is part of the process.
This is a very beautiful post and I am very happy to read it. I could see all this in you when I first met you and I am very happy that it is coming out now.
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing it. I am very grateful. Whenever anyone wakes up, the entire universe rejoices. The entire universe is with you.
Love,
Peter
Thanks Peter. I will write to you whenever new problem or question arises. Thanks again for helping seekers on the path.
Hello Peter,
Last year I had some questions related to meditation and you helped me well. I am doing meditation regularly from more than one year. Now I can hear louder ringing bell. It happened that once there came a moment when I was not there, perhaps that was the moment of no-mind. It was beautiful and fearful also. Now whenever I am in meditation, perhaps that moment is on the verge to come again, but my mind will say “o that moment” and whole thing get disturbed. On the one hand, I want to descend that moment because it was beautiful, but I also do not want to come it because it is fearful also as It looked I am gone forever. Fear and happiness are mixed together. I do not know what it is and how to handle this situation. Please guide me.
Thanks.
Thank you for your question. We have many experiences in life, uncountable experiences. All of them are teaching us. All of them are for our benefit, our learning, our growth. When we accept some but reject others, we are limiting our experience of life, limiting our learning, limiting our growth, limiting our benefit. Practice being open to ALL experiences. That is the way. We can learn as much from disturbing and uncomfortable experiences as from comfortable and happy experiences, often more. Practice being open to the experiences you don’t like, the ones you fear, reject and resist. In this way you will learn to be happy in all situations.
It is not bad to have fear during meditation or to have any disturbing or uncomfortable experience. It is simply what is in that moment. That’s all. Learn to transcend your opinions, your likes and dislikes. Open to ALL of it, to every experience. Your True Self actually loves all experiences and does not make judgments of good and bad. Practice being in alignment with your True Self, acting like your True Self, even before you realize what this is. Open fully to all experiences. Don’t cling to or reject anything. Let life flow as it flows. It is not up to you how life flows. It flows as it flows. You have no control over this. When you open to whatever arises in each moment, you are in alignment with life and Truth. You will soon learn the perfection inherent in each moment when you stop picking and choosing how life should be. This is a wonderful discovery.
Thanks for reply Peter.
Sometimes this question comes in my mind, that I have started witnessing directly with watching thoughts, thats why I am unable to watch my thoughts separate from me although I am doing this technique with dedication and sincerity more than one year. I have also seen some good changes in me as my negative feelings like anger, hatred etc are lessening but I am unable to watch my thoughts. Should I change the technique and start with watching my body or some other object or some other technique? As Osho says that it is very rare that one can reach with one technique. Please guide me.
You can place your attention completely on your breath. Any time you even notice a thought at all, bring your full attention back to your breath. This will give you the discipline of concentration. It is very important. While our attention can be distracted by thought, we have not yet begun meditation. It is a practice of concentration. If you practice this diligently, eventually thoughts will no longer distract you. If you notice them at all, they will simply drift through your mind like clouds in a clear blue sky. They will no longer grab your attention or interest. You will realize they are just thoughts. They have no reality or validity beyond that limited function.
While thoughts still grab your attention, you still see the world through a filter, distortion, interpretation and commentary of thought. That is the dream world. When you become free of interest or attention on thought, you will begin to see the world as it truly is. This is liberation from your conditioning.
When you do this practice focus your full attention on your breath like a cat watching a mouse hole. Cats have the discipline of concentration. You can develop this too. We have been conditioned to listen to our thoughts, to believe our thoughts, to believe that our thoughts represent reality. They do not. Witnessing your thoughts means you have no attachment or identification with them. They are of no interest to you. Without the discipline of concentration it is impossible to do this. Thoughts will just grab your attention. You are still attached to them. You still believe they have some importance. Practice freeing yourself of this addiction and attachment by focusing on the breath until thoughts no longer pull your attention away.
Thanks for replying Peter.
I will pay attention to my breath. Can I also do this technique of watching thoughts for some minutes in a day ? Because doing this for one year I have some kind of love with this technique as I feel sensations in both sides of my head and between my two eyes and I love to listen ringing bells. I fear If I quit this completely I may lose something of that experience. I am in dilemma. Please guide me. Thanks.
Of course you can use and should use whatever techniques and practices are of benefit to you. Having a number of practices is useful so that you can know which practices work best for you. Some practices that once worked may not work as well at a different time. So have a number of different practices and use whatever ones benefit you the most.
Hello Peter,
I’ve been actively following some sort of spiritual path for the past 6 years or so. I have so many questions and reading spiritual books and watching youtube videos just doesn’t seem to be aiding me in anyway anymore. I feel it is time to reach out to someone who is awakened and ask a question based on my own experience. I feel it is best to share my story with you as you have with us. I apologize in advance for the length of this post.
Since an early age, around the age of 16, I became very interested in physical fitness. I was working out with friends in school and developed many great relationships from it. It became one of the main focuses in my life among a few others such as girls and friends. I was obsessed you could say. A few years later, I discovered that there was more to over all fitness than just lifting some weights and flexing in the mirror. I was reading an article about health and it mentioned something about stress and how reducing it could add to a person’s overall well being. In the same article, it provided methods to go about reducing stress. The number one method was meditation. Now, I want to mention that before, I was not a religious person by any means. I was baptized catholic as a baby, but my parents never had me go to church. I grew up without any education in religion and without any real belief in any higher power. I also knew nothing about meditation besides that I saw a few guys on the discovery channel sitting with their legs crossed and eyes closed for long periods of time. But here was an article saying that I could become more fit if I did meditation. And so I followed the directions on the website.
The first time I tried meditating, it was nothing special. However, I believed that I could get better at it and that I was missing something. I found some guided meditations that seemed to help. As I continued with my practice, I learned to relax my body and to breath deeply. I learned to focus on my breath and to allow my thoughts to flow. I came to a point where I was relaxed enough to lose sensation of my body for a few moments at a time. I was seeing results so I pursued it further.
I bought a book called The Attention Revolution. I figured it would just be a book about how to relax more with a few tips about breathing and some motivational quotes. When I read it, it talked about this higher state of consciousness that the author called samatha. It interested me and so I continued diligently with my meditation with the goal to achieve this state of consciousness. If it existed at all. After about six months of daily meditation, I eventually came to a place that is really beyond description. I will try though. I was sitting as I always did, with my back against my bed while sitting on the floor. I had my head phone on and I was listening to a guided meditation. The voice had stopped and all that remained was some peaceful music playing in the back ground. I remember becoming relaxed to the point of losing bodily sensations. The feel was familiar except this time, I maintained the loss of sensation for a long period of time. In place of my body was a warm energy that seemed to deepen as time went on. It felt like I was dropping and I saw white lights flashing behind my eye lids. There came a point where I felt like I was in a massive dome-like structure. It felt like some kind of massive and sudden expansion, but I can’t describe it any further. When I returned to my body, I was calm and could tell that something had changed. I was not sure what had changed, but I knew there was more to life than what I was used to.
I ended up buying more books and started watching various youtube spiritual teachers. Some of my favorites were Eckhart Tolle, Sadhguru, Osho, and Mooji. All of them resonated with me and I continued to learn. I had about ten of these meditative experiences over the next two years. Some more powerful than the others. The most powerful one of all came during a very toxic relationship with an ex girlfriend. Something had gone wrong as it always seemed to in that relationship, and she was on her way over. I was in the height of my mediation practice and I had the best control over my emotions that I ever had. I had an amazing experience earlier that morning where I had completely lost all concept of time and my body. It had felt like I was gone from the world I knew and I was plunged into this warming, loving, and caring space. I emerged from the meditation with this over whelming sense of peace. My girlfriend at the time, showed up. She was beet red in the face with neck veins popping and she was out for blood. But no matter how much she screamed and blamed and attacked, I was able to sit there and just listen. I felt no urge to attack her back like I had so many times before. I felt no guilt and no feelings of regret. I felt no need to defend myself from such a viscous onslaught of verbal battery. I simply sat and spoke to her as if having a conversation with a loving friend. She finally tired herself out and left my house and I just remember sitting there in utter amazement at what had just happened. Never before had I had such composure. Never before had I realized the insignificance of words and yelling. All I knew was this deep feeling of peace. She probably could have slapped me in the face and I would I have still been happy. Nothing could shake me. I maintained this state for a few days before falling back to my normal self. Now all that remains are memories of the occurrence.
I had a few more experiences with mediation after that but it seemed the more I practiced, the further I was from that feeling of ultimate peace and contentment that I had felt that day. For the past four years, I have continued my practice but I’ve been stuck in moments of anxiety and depression with few moments of happiness thrown in the mix. I’ve watched so many videos on youtube. I’ve sought out many websites. I’ve bought many books. I tried many methods. Some produced subtle results such as I had in the very beginning of my practice. But nothing has come close to the experience I had that day my ex girlfriend came over.
I some how stumbled onto your website through one of my random google search tangents and what you wrote on the website resonated with me. I bought your book and that woke feelings in me that remind me of that day when I was so peaceful and centered. I have known something that is beyond comprehension and have been unable to return despite more study and practice. I feel compelled to write this to you and to seek your guidance. What is it that I have forgotten? Thanks for reading this. I know its a long one, but I tried to condense what I needed to say into as little words as possible. Thank you very much.
-Travis
Hello, Travis,
Thank you for your post. We have many different experiences on our spiritual journey. In the beginning, we pay a lot of attention to them because they are often very powerful and different from anything we have experienced before, as you have experienced. But these experiences are not really important in and of themselves. They do point us to realize that there is something more than what we had previously believed. That is their main value. Yes, there is something much, much more. Now you realize this. That is very good. What that something more is you will continue to realize. That never ends. There is always something more.
What you consider bad or negative experiences are not really bad or negative. They are also just experiences. These experiences come when we are very attached to an ego, a sense of a separate self. The more attached we are, the more we suffer. This is what you are experiencing now. That is also a very good lesson, although not very pleasant, and it’s not supposed to be. You are learning that when the sense of a separate self is very strong and attachment is very strong, there is suffering and it feels terrible. You have also experienced a time when this sense of a separate self and attachment to a separate self were not strong at all. They were almost completely gone. And that felt wonderful. So this contrast is also teaching you.
We can seek and seek, try and try, practice and practice, but this will not bring us to reality. Reality is always here. The separate self that we experience when we are suffering is not really here. That is just our belief and attachment and conditioning. Reality is always here. Truth is always here. So no amount of seeking or practicing can actually get us to what is always here because it is always here. It is not a goal of something that is not here right now. When we think it is, we miss the fact that it is always here.
So trying and not getting the result you desire is also not bad. It is also teaching you something. When you believe that reality is some rarified state that is not always here, you miss the fact that it IS always here.
You have forgotten that when you had that experience of freedom and deep peace, you didn’t actually DO anything. You stopped doing. You stopped trying. You were simply present in reality as you always are. It’s amazing what this feels like because we are always trying to get somewhere that is not here. You were simply here. You were simply present. And that does feel wonderful.
All of this is life teaching you what truth is. The amazing experience of presence, freedom and peace. The feelings of anxiety and depression. The trying and being frustrated. These are all valuable lessons. Pay attention to them. When you feel anxious or depressed, pay attention to what your body feels like, the contraction. Inquire into what this self that feels anxious or depressed is, or if it even is. If you discover that this self is not really here, it’s just conditioned thoughts, you will discover that you now feel this great presence, freedom, peace, happiness and love, because this is reality. You will discover that there is really nothing to do to experience this. It is simply the realization of what is and what has always been.
All of us go through life seeing the world through concepts. It is as if we have thrown a blanket of concepts over reality so that we can no longer see it as it really is. All of us do this. Some of us wake up to the world as it really is. The blanket suddenly comes of and we see far more than our limited conceptual perceptions could even imagine. A window into this reality has opened for you. You liked it. We all do. And we are all motivated to try to find it again. That’s the process you are going through now. When we think it is difficult, a rare experience, impossible to regain, then it seems to be like that. “Seems” because it is not. It is always here. You don’t have to try so hard. Practice now is about letting go. Letting go of what is not real, the conceptual world, so you can see what is.
Question all your beliefs. Is it really true? Place truth as your highest priority. Is what I am feeling true? Is what I am experiencing true? You will discover more and more that this conceptual world is not true. It is a blanket covering up what is true. And what is true will always remain a complete mystery, a wonderful, miraculous, incredible mystery, a mystery you can directly experience. It is reality, after all.
I hope this helps, Travis.
Best wishes on this wonderful journey. Accept, welcome and pay deep attention to every bit of it. It is all happening for you.
Peter
Thank you so much for your guided meditation and talk at the Sedona library today. It felt like I came home. Namaste.
Wonderful, Rose. Thank you.
Peter,
When do I know the time has come to look for a teacher?
How do I recognize my teacher?
And how to know if he or she is fully awake? I really want to avoid teachings and teachers that reinforce the separate self…also, there is a saying that goes ”when the student is ready the teacher will appear”. Is it really so?
How do you feel about this, as a teacher? How do you feel your students have come to you?
Thank you!
By asking this question, the time is probably now. Recognizing the teacher is more subtle. I recommend beginning with either of these three widely accessible teachers on YouTube of through their books. In order of my recommendation. 1. Mooji. 2. Rupert Spira. 3. Eckhart Tolle. Each of these teachers is awake. That’s very important because many teachers who claim to be awake are not. Until you are awake, you will not know if a teacher is awake or not because you perceive the world through your mind. That’s why I suggest these three people because they are. You can also use me as a teacher, but I don’t feel right blowing my own horn. So begin with them first. Yes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s a beautiful happening that cannot be understood with the mind. It has to do with the nature of reality and non-separation.
I’m very happy about it. It is the nature of reality. My students come to me in this same way. I spread a few bread crumbs. Very few. I’m not good at marketing. But I have a book, a website, a Facebook page, and when people want to interview me I accept. I could do a little better in helping people find me. But that might be a job for someone else to do, as I don’t feel interested in or motivated to do that. Still somehow people do find me. And almost always they are in exactly the right place and the right time for both of us.
Life is a mystery beyond the mind. When we fully accept the reality of this, we become more open to what life is showing us in every moment. The good news is that reality is far better than anything our mind can imagine. The truth is that everything in life is teaching us in every single moment. Your question refers to a physical human teacher. So that is what I have answered. But also pay attention to everything that is happening in your life. There are deep lessons presented here that are far more than what the limitations of the mind are aware of.
Dear Peter,
Its with joy that I write to you. Since I was little, I had this deep longing for God, which later became a longing for Truth itself. I looked everywhere I could until I became confused, truth seemed to be everywhere as I looked and studied several different religions, trying to find that which all of them had in common. After some years of deep emotional and spiritual suffering, I got to a point where life apparently had no meaning anymore. But at the same time there was always this feeling of Love that the Universe seemed to have towards me and towards life itself. Something slightly changed in me. This thrist I had now seemed to point to enlightenment, and there is nothing in this world that seems more precious to me than realizing the truth of I Am.
I’m only in the beginning, the journey only begun. I keep feeling that thrist but now it has deepened greatly, through videos and books and fleeting no-thoughts experiences where I feel I’m seeing the world for the first time, and its so beautiful. I also feel desireless, and some vices I have, like smoking, are not so pleasure anymore. As a young artist, I’ve been trying, and failing totally, to express this through objects or works of art. I also have no more goals for the future, it is a complete sense of not knowing. I’ve also been more and more recluse to myself and to my own house lately. At the same time, I’ve never glimpsed something so beautiful, so peaceful, so ineffably gracious.
I feel this has been a lonely path for me. I really have no problem with being alone, but no one I know have the same deep longing, or maybe they do but redirect it to objects or experiences, pleasures, etc. I feel that I don’t know whether to talk to someone or to remain in silence about it, since nobody actually understands it and its beyond words anyway. Is awakening a lonely inner journey back to yourself?
With love,
Camile.
Hi Camile,
Thank you for your beautiful letter. There is a time in the process of awakening where we do find ourselves spending considerable time in isolation. The reason for this is to avoid distractions. At some point the awakening process acts on its own without us really doing anything other than paying attention. And, as you say, most of this is beyond words or thoughts. We may notice a beautiful energy moving through us. This needs to work without the normal distractions we had become used to pulling our attention away. As you also say, there is no problem being alone. This process is wonderful, beautiful. That is our incentive for doing it. You may also notice that you don’t really feel alone or lonely. Somehow you feel connected to everyone and everything, more intimate even than connected, not separate. So that makes being in isolation not a problem at all, but wonderful.
Yes, there are not many people who understand this. Eventually you will find spiritual friends who do understand. They will just come into your life naturally. It is not necessary to talk about it and with people who don’t understand not advisable. This transformation of awakening has its own perfect wisdom. Trust it. Allow it to do what it is doing. You will feel when the process is done as far as the need for isolation. Then you will find that you engage with people in a far more effortless and beautiful way without your really doing anything. Everything you do will naturally, spontaneously and effortlessly be in the highest benefit of all. You engage with the world through unconditional love. This all happens without any effort or intention on your part. Most people will only notice that you seem happier and more peaceful and they love being around your energy. You won’t really notice any of this yourself. Your focus on yourself will have disappeared. But you will notice this great peace and love that is always present. It sounds like things are working perfectly. Follow the lead of your intuition, the deep inner knowing that is arising. It doesn’t always translate into a mental understanding. But eventually you won’t care. 🙂
Dear Peter,
I am writing to you out of a real strange feeling of desperation. In truth, Grace and Beauty have come over me and there is deep gratitude in my heart: After visiting the silent retreat with Moojibaba last week, I had a deep Realisation that I am in everybody and everything that I perceive… there is so much stillness under everything…..there were a lot of tears and a deep letting go and for some time there was this awe and this deep gratitude and this innocence and I was just marveling at all the beauty that is. My heart, that has been aching and searching for a long time is deeply satisfied. I have come home…
Now, strangely enough this new way of experiencing life puts a real strain on my relationship with my partner. I love him but at the moment I really just want to be by myself most of the time. Also, it is difficult for me to find a heartfelt connection with him. Much of the investigative spiritual talks we had before does not resonate in me anymore. And, at many times this puts stress on him… It is really strange: all other relationships feel so much lighter! But with him I feel distant, not connected…. maybe you can help us and shed some light?
In deep gratitude, Susanne
Yes, Susanne, I understand this. You are going through a transformation to realize Truth. It is wonderful. Nothing can ever be more wonderful. But it IS a transformation. And you are being guided to let this transformation unfold and flower, which it will do all on its own. But it needs our cooperation. We must do what we feel intuitively called to do. It speaks through our intuition. You might even say it is our intuition, the deep wisdom in us. Often we are called to periods of silence. Mooji often calls this “zipping yourself up in your sleeping bag”. He means let this transformation happen without distractions. Let it do its work. So, basically, you are feeling a call for space, stillness and silence, for this transformation to unfold and integrate, which it does on its own. Casual relationships don’t have so many pulls and attachments from the past. So they are easier. Close, intimate relationships have many pulls and attachments to the past, to how you were, to how he was, to how the relationship was. But you are changing. You were living in a dream and as a dream, now that dream and that dream person is fading away. It wasn’t real, so in the light of Truth, it cannot last. It is fading. Often our partners in an intimate relationship resist this. It frightens them. They want the old you back again.
This happened for me when I had a big awakening at age 22. I was not with my wife and children at the time this awakening happened. When I returned, I was very different. Before the awakening, I was a very self-centered artist. After the awakening I was the embodiment of pure unconditional love. You would think my wife would have been overjoyed with this change. People were healed simply from being in my presence. But she wasn’t. She was frightened. She didn’t know what to make of it. She felt I could look right through her and see her deepest secrets. And I could. But all I felt was absolute and total love. What I saw in her and everyone else was pure innocence, beauty, love, the Truth of what they were underneath all the ego identity and confusion. My children were young. They loved it. But my wife was scared. She wanted the old familiar me back again. And eventually she got her wish. The awakening only lasted for ten days. After that time, slowly the egoic self identity returned. I didn’t know how to stop it. I had no idea how this awakening had happened. So I had no idea how to “get it back again”. I kind of knew that this was Truth and the egoic self identity was not. But still this experience of Truth only lasted for ten days. I was not mature enough at the time to continue in this awakened life. I still needed to experience more of the ego more of suffering before it could manifest as a permanent consistent transformation, which it has. The point is my wife resisted it, where everyone else loved it. And without the support of my wife, who I was closest to, it just didn’t last. This is not uncommon.
The best thing is to trust your inner guidance. This is Truth. Your relationship was based on the past, your previous experiences with each other, how you know each other. Awakened consciousness is about the present, the moment to moment present. The past doesn’t have the same draw and attachment as it did before. The relationship can last and grow and flourish if it is and remains present, moment to moment presence. For someone who is awake this is all it or anything can be. For someone who is not, it’s a bit intimidating. Where is the security in moment to moment presence? Where is the control? There isn’t any. This moment is everything. If your partner can be with you in this moment to moment presence, beyond mind, beyond investigative spiritual talks about theories and teachings, just this, here, now, in this very moment, the wonder of this, the beauty of this, the miracle of this, then wonderful. Enjoy this. Can he remain silent with you and truly love and feel comfortable in this silence? Is he threatened by your awakening? Or is he overjoyed, totally happy and supportive, selflessly happy for your happiness?
Nothing that I say really makes any difference. You have an inner guidance that will lead you to Truth and the highest benefit of all. Listen to this. Follow this. It is never wrong. It may be new to understand what it wants you to do. Listen. Practice. Learn to tell the difference between the mind and this intuitive feeling that feels so complete, so spacious. Trust this. It really knows far more than I can say. It is likely that this guidance to be by yourself most of the time is probably right. Sometimes we can feel pulls from the past, guilt, doubt “Am I doing the right thing?” “I don’t want to be selfish.” “Will this hurt him?” These come from the mind, not from the intuitive inner wisdom. The feeling of the intuitive inner wisdom feels good, expansive, spacious. It outshines the concerns of the mind. If we follow this, we see that somehow it knows what is in the highest benefit of all in a way the mind never can.
Already you are also in your partner. You always have been. Even before you ever met him. It is this way with everyone and everything. That is why love changes from personal to unconditional and limitless. When this unconditional and limitless love is allowed to flourish in a personal relationship it is wonderful. It is always wonderful. A personal relationship can be a wonderful opportunity to express it. Where there is fear, resistance or anything holding back or trying to control this limitless flow of unconditional love, then this is not for you. In this way you are also changing. Some people can accept this change. Why not? It’s wonderful to be the beneficiary of complete presence and unconditional love. There is no better gift we can give another human being. But some people are afraid and resist it, as my first wife did. That is fine. That is their place in the world. But often it is not our place to be with them any longer.
Changes happen in this transformation. It is a transformation. It is a change. Always it is in the highest benefit of all, because that is what Truth is. It is in the highest benefit of all in a way that our minds can never understand. Eventually we come to trust this as we see it demonstrated in our lives over and over again. Seeing yourself in everyone and everything is really what we call unconditional love, which is the only real love there is. The experience of love is the experience of non-separation. They are the same.
Perhaps you both want to do a session with me together. I can only speak Truth, so that could be intimidating. If it is not in the highest benefit of all, then it might be painful. Separations of intimate partnerships are usually painful. There are many attachments that are severed and that hurts. The more we realize that separation is actually impossible, the less painful and the less attachments there are. But most people still cling to some degree to the sense of a separate self. There will always be some suffering until that completely dissolves. It is dissolving in you. There is nothing any human can ever experience in this life that is better than this.
Love,
Peter
The Main Obstacle to Awakening and What to Do About It
A wonderful question that many spiritual seekers have. “Does a change of this sort mean jumping off a cliff and losing everything? I’m scared of drama and terrified of irrevocable shifts.” Just last night at Satsang someone asked a very similar question. “Will abiding in this deep peace mean that the life I have worked so hard to create will fall apart?”
I think many people have deep questions like these. It is natural and maybe inevitable. The nature of the egoic separate self-identity we call “me” is actually created of fear. Much of this is repressed so we’re not aware of it. But as the door to awakening comes closer, we begin to become aware of the true nature of the ego, and that is fear. So this is a very deep and important question. And I’m happy to honor it.
Thank your for this question as its authenticity relates to many people who have the same question. This is a very deep and honest question. Just last night someone in Satsang asked this very same question. I thank you for expressing it. I feel your heart in this. So it also requires a deep and honest answer.
Yes, it does feel like we’re jumping off a cliff and risk losing everything. That is the initial fear of surrender. And, yes, we have to be willing to do that, to jump off this imaginary but very real feeling cliff and to risk losing everything, to surrender everything. That’s why it takes great courage. Eventually we just have to do it. Jump off the cliff, surrender absolutely everything.
This is not a place for careful, cautious stages. Surrender is a very bold move when the very nature of the separate self is fear. And it is. So the fear of doing this is natural and inevitable. The separate ego self identity is made entirely out of fear, fear of not surviving. And to surrender fully, we are saying, “Yes, even this. Even death.”
What We Lose and What We Gain
This all sounds like very bad news. It is what the ego is afraid of. The good news is we give up everything, we surrender everything, we lose everything, including ourself AND as a result, we GAIN everything. We gain the world. We gain relationships that were never possible before. We gain peace. We gain love. We gain a complete uninterrupted contentment, gratitude and joy. We gain freedom. We gain life. And we gain our True Self.
What we lose (illusion) pales in comparison to the unlimited magnitude of what we gain. So this news is very, very good. But you can only know this when you take the leap. My words are only encouragement if you take them that way. I’m saying, “Jump in. The water is fine. It’s wonderful.” But you have to jump. I can’t do that for you.
I know it’s terrifying to take that leap. Every awakened being has done this. And all have experienced this terror. It is part of the nature of waking up. And this terror is a big obstacle. Some never pass through it. In my case it was experience the terror and do it anyway. Not initially. I backed off many times. But finally, I took the leap. And then another. And then another. Eventually I realized this fear had no reality to it. I only realized this because I tested it again and again and what I feared never happened.
I gave up all my talent as an artist and creative person. The result turned out to be more talent and creativity than I ever imagined possible. I gave up my relationships or ever having a relationship ever again. The result was the flowering of all existing relationships and new relationships beyond anything I would have thought possible. Everything I gave up came back to me in abundance. How could I know this? I didn’t. I just surrendered.
I gave up a limited, vulnerable, separate self identity and realized This, the unlimited, infinite, beyond all possibility of identity. Nobody who has ever awakened to Truth said, “I wish I didn’t do that. Is it possible to return to illusion again?” No awakened being has ever said that. Nobody ever will.
It’s worth the leap. It’s worth all the struggle and seeking and suffering that helped to open this door. Even a single moment of this great presence is worth a thousand lifetimes. I know the fear, My Friend. And I know what happens when you leap anyway and discover for yourself what happens. Nobody has ever said all that went before was not worth This. Thank you for the wonderful question that so many also hold deep in their hearts.
Dear Peter,
Could you please help me understand the sentence from Wu Hsin (Mindless Understanding – The Illumination of Wu Hsin Book 2), “Consciousness is the objective expression of the Absolute.”
I thought Consciousness is the Absolute.. and would really like to understand the relation between the two.
Thank You very much.
Hi Marga, when we get into speaking about the Absolute or consciousness itself, it is probably wise to say the less said the better. Words cannot help but confuse. What is the Absolute? Nobody knows mentally. Any idea we have is just a thought. The Absolute is beyond all thought. Consciousness is also beyond all thought. Let all these thoughts go. Be still. There is a stillness in you. Can you find this? Everything in this world is changing every moment. But something is not changing. Something is absolutely still and silent and never changes. See if you can feel this. We do not know the Absolute or Consciousness through thoughts. We know this through the direct experience. It is the ONLY way. Any thought or mental understanding of the Absolute or Consciousness is just going to be more thoughts, not the Absolute, not Consciousness. So both Consciousness and the Absolute are beyond thought. To truly understand this we must also move our attention away from thought. Then what is here? We experience life directly without the filter of thought. This is pretty astounding. For the first time we know what it feels like to be alive. But there is more. As we continue opening our awareness, we sense this underlying stillness and silence. In the Bible it says, “Be still and know that I am God.” It is pointing to a direct experience, not a mental knowing. People have written millions of words about what the Absolute is and what Consciousness is. And many of these words offer a very good pointer. But these words, wonderful as they are, are not the Absolute, are not Consciousness. When we experience this deep stillness, we have found a doorway into the Absolute. If you do this, you will not have these questions. The questions will naturally fall away by themselves. Somehow the answer will be here in this direct experience. I don’t want to give you more words and descriptions and explanations. These cannot help you. I point you to a direct experience. This is the true answer to your question. Let’s just say for now that both the Absolute and Consciousness are completely beyond words and thoughts. This they have in common. To know what is beyond words and thoughts, we have to let go of words and thoughts. In the open freedom of this experience, we find what we are seeking.
Hi Peter,
There seem to be some people who fall into a kind of “dark awakening”. The ones I specifically have in mind are Jed McKenna and David Norquist, but there are several others. They ridicule the conventional notion of enlightenment (as a state of abiding peace and happiness) as some sort of fanciful fairy tale. Norquist describes the enlightened state as “creepy” while McKenna calls it “abiding non dual awareness” which bears no relationship with happiness, joy or bliss.
Being familiar with the teachings of Ramana Maharishi, Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti, it is hard for me to take such dystopian visions of enlightenment seriously. And yet, with Jed McKenna in particular, it is hard to not be touched by his strength of conviction and clarity which could only have come from some sort of true realization. I wonder what your thoughts are?
Another question that that I want to ask is about the relationship between enlightenment and mental health. Now I have always believed that enlightenment is the only permanent way out of anxiety and depression – after all it’s been called the end of suffering.
But recently I have read even Adyashanti say that you could be awakened and still have unresolved issues in personal psychology. While commenting on the death of a meditation teacher who had bipolar disorder, Francis Bennett – who is also widely regarded as enlightened – said that an awakening does not make us immune to mental illness (or something to that effect). To me, the idea of an awakened person suffering from clinical depression sounds rather incredible. Your thoughts?
Thanks & Regards,
Amit
Strength of conviction it not an indication of Truth. Donald Trump seems to have enormous conviction in his pronouncements. In my experience a “dark awakening” is simply an incomplete awakening. There is still come attachment to thoughts. What are commonly called different levels of awakening, we can also call incomplete awakenings. There is still attachment. True freedom from attachment to thoughts has not yet happened. There may have been moments or experiences of freedom, but it was not complete. Attachment has not yet been uprooted except for the temporary experiences.
And this relates very much to your second question. When awakening is not complete, when there is still some attachment to thoughts, even unconscious thoughts, then suffering can and certainly will still arise. Look at it this way. Say you are experiencing depression. Your thoughts, feelings, body, hormones, perceptions are all affected by this depression. And you think this experience is bad. You would rather not have it. It feels horrible. Now say you had no attachment to these thoughts at all. You realize they are just thoughts and not reality. You don’t believe your opinions. You don’t believe good or bad. You don’t believe the label depression or anything else about it. Now it’s just an experience. Experiences come and go all the time, arising in this moment and continuously changing in every moment. So now is the experience you had previously called depression bad? You no longer believe good and bad. What is the experience you had previously called depression now? If it is a chemical reaction and at least partly not related to a thought, still you have no opinion one way of the other about this experience. It’s just the experience arising in this moment. Not bad. Not good. There’s nothing you can say about it because you are no longer limited and attached to thoughts. It’s just this fresh and alive and completely new moment of presence. So, yes, Amit, I agree with your assessment.
I think it comes down to an incomplete awakening where there is still an attachment to thoughts. There are many, I would even say most, spiritual teachers who have had an incomplete awakening or a series of incomplete awakenings. So they teach and write from this perspective. I’ve heard many. It is useful to many people and I think the majority of people can probably relate to those with an incomplete awakening maybe more than those who had a more complete awakening. Awakening couldn’t be more simple and obvious. It simply means the end of attachment to thoughts. But because attachment is so deeply conditioned, very few people are truly free of this attachment. So teachers who still have somewhat of an attachment to thoughts and even to a personal, separate self-identity are easier for most people to relate to. They have a more similar perspective of life. They have a little more freedom, but not much more. Those who have complete freedom from thoughts and no attachment to a self identity are much harder for the average person to relate to. It’s like you come from a different planet. Your perspective on life and the world is quite different. It’s as if you are lucid dreaming in this shared dream. You function in it, but you don’t believe it. So the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” don’t really affect you. You’re not overwhelmed by any of it. You live free. Few people do.
Thank you for your intelligent questions.
how to do self enquiry
Self Inquiry is one of the oldest spiritual practices. Thousands of years ago humans asked essential questions: What am I? What is life? Why am I here? These are very basic questions. The most basic is What am I? We may have many questions in our life. What food should I eat? What career should I have? Who should I marry? Should I marry? Many questions. But these questions pale in comparison to the question What am I? If we don’t know what we are, all these other questions are really kind of meaningless.
The Indian Sage, Ramana Maharshi, suggested that Self Inquiry, asking this question, was one of the most important practices we could do. He was not the first to suggest this. What am I?
This is not a question or practice to be limited to a few hours in meditation each day. We can do this practice continuously throughout the day, every day. What is it that is reading this right now? What is it that is thinking this thought?
In the beginning we are searching for some person, some identity, some form. In the beginning our mind will come up with many answers. “I am me.” It may resist with “What a stupid question.” It will say, it is a body, a brain, a mind. It will have many answers. But none of them are true. Let them go. Each answer that comes, let it go. Can you find this I, this self? Where is it located? Continue looking at all times.
Eventually you will discover for yourself that there is nothing really here you can point to. There is no location. At first this may feel a little frightening. “Oh, no, I’m disappearing.” But only illusion is disappearing. It is just an illusion you have believed for a very long time. Continue in this spaciousness without a self. What has changed? Did your furniture suddenly disappear? Is your body still here? Continue in this spacious freedom. Only illusion is dissolving. The longer you stay in this spacious freedom, the more you will realize how wonderful it is. How wonderful it feels to be free. The illusion is gone, but everything is here. Far more than you were ever aware of is here. What is not here is illusion. That’s all that has gone. Now you realize and are aware of things you never even knew existed before. And you are not separate from any of it. This is unconditional love. Not something you do. But the very experience of being.
Another way to approach Self Inquiry is to ask “What is aware?” There must be awareness for you to be aware of anything. But what is this awareness? It must be here, but what is it? Everything you are aware of, every thought, feeling, sensation, perception, even this experience of a self are all objects of awareness. You are aware of them, so they are objects of awareness. But none of them are awareness itself. So what is awareness? What is this awareness that is aware of all these objects? This is an interesting inquiry. You cannot hold awareness up in front of you and say “This is it.” That would just be another object of awareness. So to discover awareness itself is a different type of experience. It is a stepping back, as Self Inquiry is. Since you cannot find awareness as an object of awareness, you can only find it by pure being. By realizing that everything you are aware of is an object of awareness, you easily discard every answer, every thought. Those are all objects of awareness. What is awareness itself? In a mind empty of all answers, empty of all mental knowing, this pure being is realized. It’s wonderful.
Thank you for asking, Chandra. Best wishes on your journey. It is a journey that has neither beginning nor end. It is life. It is Truth.
Aloha Peter can you discuss consciousness/awareness as it relates to self-awareness? It would appear that we are self aware and it is a pr-requisite for the recognition of the divine. Our self-awareness may be misrepresented as a separate self but without that mirage we would not be able to experience the divine in any type of context within the given vantage point of the body. What was never here can not be recognized without the awareness that what is here is only consciousness, the ego which is just a part of consciousness looks at itself and cant find itself therefore it disappears instantly.
Thank You ! Aloha with Gratitude and Appreciation. Rob
Hi Rob,
Thank you for your question. I’m not completely sure what it is, but I will try to answer the best I can, which means an answer that is not from the self. 🙂 Awareness of the separate self is fine. It is not a prerequisite for awareness of what is beyond and more than the separate self. What stands in the way of conscious awareness of what is beyond the separate self is identification with this separate self. It clouds our ability to see by creating a veil of illusion over everything we see. What you say later is more to the point and very perceptive. “What was never here (except in thought) can not be recognized without awareness of what is here (always here).” And recognizing what is always here is awakened consciousness. Once we realize this, the illusion of a separate self is seen clearly. And all identification with it dissolves. Illusions can come and go. Thoughts are basically illusions. They are not truth. And they come and go like clouds in a clear blue sky. But the blue sky of awareness always remains, unchanged by any cloud that appears in it. This is wonderful. Before we realize this unchanging nature of Truth, we live only in a world of the changing, even if we don’t realize it as such, hoping for some permanence where it is not. We live in a world of clouds unable to see the sky that all clouds arise and pass away in. Once we are aware of this unchanging sky, then the clouds are no longer a problem. They no longer have the importance they had before. They are wonderful. We accept them all fully. We love them all fully simply because they exist. But they are not unchanging Truth. The sense of a separate personal identity is also one of these clouds. It is also constantly changing. It has no unchanging substance or reality. When this is all we know, then we are kind of stuck with it.
There are many ways to realize this unchanging Truth. When the illusion is seen through, Truth is realized as always having been here. So Self Inquiry is one way to this. We search for this separate self and cannot find it. In this not finding, Truth is revealed.
We don’t add anything. Truth is always here. We can neither add anything to it nor take anything away from it. It is unchanging and unchangeable. And yet everything that appears in it is always changing. Kind of a paradox. This is why surrender is the most practical and efficient and effective way. We cannot surrender Truth. Even if we try, it still remains always. All we can surrender are illusions. So it is safe to simply surrender everything. We have nothing to lose but illusion. That’s all that can be surrendered. Our mind is not capable of discriminating between Truth and illusion. So we simply surrender everything and observe what remains. Truth itself is beyond words, thoughts or descriptions. It simply is. But somehow we know it. Somehow we know it. Not through our mind. Something else knows it.
Namaste, My Friend.
Consciousness is the medium. Thanks again Peter Aum Shanti
Dear Peter,
Any words of wisdom and advice on how to deal with grief and coming to terms with ‘good’ and/vs. ‘bad’ when faced with the world of destruction?
Love,
D.
Hi Dusica,
Thank you for your question. It’s a question of perspective. How wide is our perspective? Are we seeing the world through the eyes of a person who might live for 80 or 90 years? The world looks pretty scary and chaotic from that perspective to be sure. I remember that. Even this body that we cling to and identify with will not last much longer than that.
But if we can open up to a larger perspective, something that is not so limited, perhaps we get a very different picture. Awareness must always be here for us to be aware. Was this awareness here when we were a teenager? How about when we were two years old? Is it possible that this awareness was here before this body was even conceived, before there was a body or brain or even a gleam in our parent’s eyes. If this is so, and that is my experience, then awareness has a much larger perspective than the limited body / mind that I may have thought was me. It was not only here before this body was conceived. It was here before this earth existed. It has seen entire universes born and die. So when we look from this very wide perspective, then the destruction of the entire solar system is something we have witnessed many, many times before and will many more times.
If we observe the world from a limited perspective, then it can seem overwhelming and extremely important. If the earth dies, then I die and I am only this individual body / mind. There is a lot of suffering built into this kind of perspective. And most people have this perspective.
So I suggest going out at night and looking at the stars. Or looking at the sky and the clouds coming and going across it. Have a wide view. Be aware of all that space that the stars are in. Be aware of all that space the clouds move in, the space that the sky is in. Pay attention to space in your room, outside your house, in the sky. Be aware that everything we can see is appearing in this space. Pay attention to the space. This will give you a wider perspective. It will expand a limited perspective. And you will find that there is less grief. There is less knowing that this is good and this is bad. Things simply become what they are, things happening in the moment. Do we really know that one thing is good and one is bad? I have found that I don’t know at all. I used to have many opinions about what is good and what is bad. Now I have none. My perspective is very large. It is too large for opinions.
In the world, things die and things are born. You know about things being born. And you also probably know at least a little about things dying. Such is the way of life. If we say that birth is good and death is bad, then we will spend quite a bit of time being unhappy, especially when you reach my age because we tend to see a lot of death of good friends and loved ones as we get older. But these are just opinions, thoughts. We don’t really understand birth or death. We don’t really understand what we are. We don’t really understand most things, maybe nothing at all. When we can surrender our mental knowing, a different type of wisdom is revealed. It also has a very wide perspective. It is not limited to thoughts and opinions. And somehow it knows about the birth and death of planets, species, solar systems, galaxies. It has seen all of this. It is a very wide, spacious perspective. And the interesting thing is that it all makes perfect sense somehow. It is all perfect. Everything is in its perfect place at all times.
So look at the sky. Focus on the great space that stars and all objects appear in. Even this body / mind appears in this great space. Even all thoughts, feelings, grief appear in this great space. Even opinions of good and bad appear in this great space. But interestingly the space doesn’t have any opinions. That’s because it has wisdom, great wisdom. And you do too. 🙂
Love,
Peter
Thank you Peter. This is so valuable and comforting: perspective and space in contrast to pain and suffering; surrendering and trusting to not knowing.
Love, Dusica
Yes, wonderful. Thank you, Dusica.
Dear Peter,
Recently I came across your website, and love reading you describing the stages of awakening, making it more clear to me some of what has happened to me. Thank you.
I am still wondering about something which has to do with consiousness and dying. Sometimes when I am fully conscious, I feel I am one with everything and formless and at the same time I am not dissolved, there is still this ´me´or subject that experiences this oneness. What happens with that when I die? Do I go back into the big energyfield without having this awareness of consiousness? I seem to be kind of confused about that…afraid maybe to loose that and going into nothing, going into not knowing.
Knowing I am consiousness, an energy aware of itself…if I die and go out of this form and maybe back to no form: will this awareness of my awareness still be there or will it disappear too? Like going back into a big pot where everything is mixed and I dont know I am anymore?
Thank you for your time and energy.
Paulien
Thank you for your wonderful question, Paulien.
Nothing really changes when you die. You don’t change. You are already formless and there is also form. Form changes when you die, your body, etc. But form is always changing all the time. This is nothing new.
This sense of a personal separate “I” is the last to go. That is a big transition. When we start talking or thinking about the vast energy field or Oneness or after death consciousness, it is not helpful. This is beyond thoughts. Yet the mind always wants to know everything. At some point we accept that it cannot. So the experience of vast energy field or Oneness or after death consciousness is beyond conceiving, beyond thinking, beyond imagination and yet we can directly experience it because it is what we are. Even feeling or experiencing are not quite accurate. I don’t know how to express this in words. Even being is not quite it. It is very, very clear, but it is not of the mind. Maybe presence is a little closer. There is this presence.
And when we experience this presence, infinite, unlimited, without beginning or end, we’re aware of this in living bodies and also after living bodies are no longer living. This presence, this essence remains unchanging. In other words, death is not what we think it is. We have never been limited to these bodies or these minds. So when these bodies die, what was never limited to a body or a mind, remains. The difference we experience is the things of the body and mind are no longer present but the essence, the presence remains. So the idiosynchrocies of a body / mind are gone, but the essence is still here. And, for awhile, there is a unique flavor or taste that remains. It is much purer than when the body was alive, in most people. In fully awakened people there is almost no discernible difference at all after the body passes.
So all the time there is a living body, this presence, this essence, this purity is still always here. It is not the personal self, the limited I. It is something before and beyond this. Some call this the True Self.
You might say you go back to purer awareness, but not quite yet pure awareness. Although fully awakened people may go back to pure awareness and some very few may even live in a human body as pure awareness, although this is very rare. There are many shadings of how much we let go into our pure natural Self. The word Self with a capital S may also be misleading. There is no personal self in this Self. It is pure awareness.
Both nothing and something are also misleading. In spiritual terms, Emptiness does not mean nothing. It is the absence of what is not True and unchanging. It is just this purity. And this purity is in all forms that are changing all the time. Without it, no form could exist as nothing is separate from this essence, this purity.
This unchanging purity, this essence, is what we are, what everything is. In Buddhist terms, we say, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.” They cannot be separated from each other.
Even these words can only point to what this is. It is beyond words. And yet it is what we are. Nothing can ever be lost but illusion. Truth always remains. We cannot lose that. Even if we are completely unaware of it, it is always here.
Sometimes we call awakening, “Dying before you die.” Because we come into this direct realization of this purity, this essence, while the body is still alive. Only the illusion has died.
Awareness is aware of everything. It is not “my” awareness. “My” awareness is only my attention on objects of awareness. Awareness is not personal. It is not limited to any person. It is not limited at all in any way. So awareness is aware of this body while it is alive. It is aware of all other bodies. It is aware of all bodies throughout all space and time, all universes, galaxies, all that exists in both form and what we call formless. That doesn’t change. That never changes. The realization of this is pure awareness. And this is what we fully awaken to when and if we do.
Thinking about this cannot help much or probably at all. Although it my “blow your mind” and cause your awareness to leave all thinking alone for a while. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s the state of not knowing, which is good. It opens us to this direct realization of what is before thinking.
So don’t worry about it. Don’t try to understand it, if you can let your attention off your mind for a moment. It’s always here. In many ways, the less we know, the more we know. Sounds funny. But there is truth in this. We don’t realize this pure awareness through thinking. We shift our attention to something else, something that never changes, something that is always here. And that’s a very good day. 🙂
Thank you for this answer Peter. I found it strangely comforting. I apologise if you have been asked before but what is your understanding of reincarnation? Thank you.
Thank you, Jane. We are not limited to this one body / mind we may be identifying as me. We are so much more than this. In fact, we are not separate from anything or anyone in all existence, past, present and future.
I have “remembered” many past lives in different body / minds, not just human either. These are very vivid memories. They are like being in that time and body at the same time as this one. At first I thought I was only in these two bodies at once. But later I came to realize I am in all bodies at once, but my experience of all bodies is so limited I only remember one other one at a time. So it is not like my soul moves on to another body when this body is done. It is always in all other bodies, even while this body is alive. But the experience of this is limited. Sometimes we do experience the totality, but because there is no differentiation in this experience it is not the experience of many different bodies. It is just the experience of the totality. A wonderful experience, but what can you say about it. It doesn’t translate at all into a mental concept.
So basically, in this very moment, we are already what we might call reincarnated, in everything else that exists. We’re just not aware of it. We feel as if we are limited to one body and mind at a time. Because that is where our attention is. And also because when we are attached to the mind and our thoughts, we cannot be aware of something that is so far beyond the limited conceptual mind.
So the Dalai Lama remembered his previous life as a Dalai Lama because that is what he was supposed to do. He did no remember all the other lives because they would have been a distraction not a benefit. I also experienced certain previous (or simultaneous lives in a previous time) because these experiences were beneficial to me. They taught me 1. that I was not limited to this particular body / mind. And 2. That I must be something more than this particular body / mind. The further exploration of this (of course I was curious), led me to a great opening into something that is more than all body / minds and all form as well as includes all of it and everything else. It was a beneficial step on the path to freedom and Truth.
Thanks Peter. That is a great, helpful answer. Hope you dont mind me asking a perennial question that i am sure you will have answered before. What is your experience of dreamless sleep or of general anaesthesia? My experience is of no experience whatsoever. Are you confident that my experience after death will be different to that? Many thanks Jane
There is a cleansing of most of what we consider the eogic self-identity, which is made of thoughts. The brain is no longer functioning so we don’t have thoughts as we did when it was. The experience of awakened consciousness or enlightenment is quite similar. We have transcended all concepts, all thoughts. They tend to recede into the background because we’re no longer paying attention to them. So there is a purity of direct experience without the interpretation or imagination of thoughts. People who have had near death experiences have a similar experience. Although they generally try to understand it through thoughts after it’s over. So this is the experience after the body passes and the brain no longer functions. When people’s bodies die, there is still a kind of lingering aspect, sense. It is subtle, but still enough so can recognize the consciousness of the person who has passed. I don’t understand how this happens in a mental way. But it is a common experience I have with those who have physically died. So, yes, there is an experience. No, it is not just blank. Many people, like me, are able to communicate, in a non-verbal way, with the consciousness of those who pass on. I have no control over this happening, so please don’t ask me to do it for you and a love one who has passed on. It just seems to happen with people I have been in contact with while they are alive. I can’t explain more than this. But in this connection I’m aware of their experience, just as I was of my own in a near death experience, and experiences of before this particular body. Again, to try to make a mental understanding of it is not very useful. Ultimately and Truthfully, there is always only One. None of this is as it seems to be. It’s all an appearance of one Source, which is everything. This is not religious understanding. Scientists have long conjectured that all matter, universes, life forms, humans, galaxies, etc. originated from something smaller than a single grain of sand. The Big Bang theory. If that is the Source of all of this, then it still must be all of this. And without that Source, that something smaller than a single grain of sand, none of this could exist. It’s not difficult from this to also understand that before there was this thing smaller than a single grain of sand, there was a completely formless state with no form at all of any type or size. And it is from this that the thing smaller than a grain of sand came. So that before all matter is also present in all matter. You will have whatever experiences you have, as you are having or not having now. But you are also not the you that you imagine, believe and feel you are. You are something much more than this. Infinite, eternal, boundless, birthless, deathless, the Source of everything that exists and not separate from any of it. Rest in this and nothing else will ever bother you. It’s all a process, a very interesting, exciting adventure. From where it all began and returning to where it all began. It is possible to have THIS experience right in this human body / mind. And that’s pretty amazing. In addition to this dimension of form and matter there are many dimensions that are not of form and matter. And all of these also comes from this same singular, undivided Source. What you are is simultaneously in all these dimensions as well as all appearances of form, human, other species, rock, water, plant, etc. There is nowhere in all existence you are not. While you still experience yourself as a separate being, enjoy it, play in it, experience it. If you can accept what you are as something far more than this, even a little, it will make your experience as a separate being much more enjoyable and effortless. You can live in Truth and illusion at the same time. Eventually Truth will win out. It’s far more interesting. 🙂
Thank you sooooo much Peter. This is beautiful ❤️
Hi Phyllis,
What is being stolen away?
When you are in a state of Oneness, you are in your True State. That is what you are. As you say, this cannot be stolen away. Nothing can be added to this state nor taken away. It is already and always complete, just like you. So here, you feel fearless and free.
So something else must be overcome or stolen away.
What is that?
What can be overcome or stolen away often experiences fear, doesn’t it?
It experiences anger and disappointment when things don’t go its way.
Yet there is a great freedom that doesn’t experience any of this. Yet it is completely aware of it, aware of all feelings, all thoughts. Not separate from any of it, yet at the same time untouched by any of it.
The ego can be very suspicious. It will never trust fully.
Yet what can be trusted fully? Can any person be trusted fully as a person? I’m not saying to be suspicious. I’m only saying that the egoic nature of persons is imperfect. It is not whole and complete. What is whole and perfect is not separate from any person, but it is not their egoic personhood. It is something else. And that something else you can always trust 100% because it IS whole, complete and perfect. When you are consciously aware of that state of consciousness, you know this. It cannot be denied. That is what you trust 100%. In yourself and in others.
The person is just the person. The closer the person is to this wholeness and freedom from the limited self-identity of the person, the more you can trust them.
From your description of how you feel around this particular person, perhaps you are falling in love.
Falling in love is a good thing. You fall in love when you trust enough to let your guard down and open your heart. Some people are triggers that permit you to do this. They seem safe enough. Usually because they love you so there is less of a chance they will break your heart. Falling in love is in some ways similar to awakening. You need to let go, be open, surrender to something else. In the case of falling in love, it appears to be a person. That’s why heartbreak can come. Persons are imperfect, while the something else of the True Self is perfect.
But falling in love is a wonderful practice for awakening. It is a step. You’re just choosing the wrong object to fall in love with. But that can change. You can learn and grow from this. And the falling in love stage feels really good.
The surrender is the important part. What are you surrendering both when you fall in love and when you awaken? You are surrendering your limited, egoic self-identity. And that’s what feels so good. It’s not the other person. It’s your surrendering of what you are not and have believed you were for so long. That surrender is what feels so wonderful. Suddenly you are much less limited. Suddenly you are free. When this freedom depends on another person, you experience ups and downs depending on what this person does. Sometimes we call this “the end of the Honeymoon”. But it is still an important lesson.
The reason you feel overcome and stolen away is because your limited, egoic self-identity is resisting it. “No. Don’t surrender me. That would be terrible. And here are the reasons why …” The ego will always resist this surrendering of the ego.
This is what it sounds like to me. There are intuitions of danger, but that’s not what it sounds like from what you wrote. And the intuitions of danger or simply something to stay away from at the time have a very different feeling. They arise in the moment and do not last after the moment has passed. That’s intuition. Mental, egoic fears last much longer, long after the particular moment has passed and cause concern and anguish and obsession. “Oh no. What’s going to happen? Etc.” Intuition causes no such mental concern. It’s just an inner guidance of the moment. Go here. Don’t go there.
It sounds like a good lesson for you. If you are falling in love, I suggest paying close attention to what is happening without resisting or attaching to anything. Where is this feeling coming from? Where is it located? You will see that it is located in you. And this person has allowed you to be open enough to experience it. You might ask another question. Has this feeling always been here my entire life although I have not been aware of it until now? Where is this feeling really coming from? What is it that I really love about this person? Is it their separate personhood or is there something else, something I can’t see, but I can feel? And is it that that gives me a feeling of not just safety, not just love, but oneness, not separation? Is this sense of separation dissolving? Is that why I feel so good? Just pay attention to these things. In this way falling in love will be a very powerful and transformative lesson. Plus it feels really good. 🙂
As a side bonus, when you realize that this feeling of love is in you and has always been in you, you realize it cannot be taken away. You cannot lose it. In this way you become less dependent on others for this feeling. This doesn’t take away from your relationships. It makes them stronger. They are based on love not dependence, illusion or need. You realize you are not giving or receiving love, you ARE love itself. This is a very powerful and wonderful realization.
Thank you for your wonderful questions, Phyllis.
Love,
Peter
ohmy goodness this is so helpful . What a sweet treat it is that you offer this goodness . Thank you for your wisdom Peter !
Dearest Peter,
Here is some background:
I went through 4 years of debilitating insomnia due to anxiety about being sleep-deprived the next day (a cruel vicious circle…and catch-22…), and then had a profound and complete awakening to the vastness of the present moment about one year ago when I was in Junior year at college after reading Tolle’s TPON.
Since then, however, the fatigue I felt has continued unabated, and for the past 26 months (January 2015 – Now) I’ve been on my parent’s couch in a drained, often exhausted, quasi-depressed state.
I haven’t been able to resist what is, or avoid what I feel in the energy body, since surrendered, so in that sense, I have been at peace. But I haven’t had any cosmic consciousness experiences since reading TPON, Basically, I know all is well. But, my parents see me unresponsive, not really talking, depressed, and fatigued, and are very worried and sending me to doctors, blowing thousands of dollars….Matt Kahn calls it light body activation or something. Not many teachers write about it.
So, now it’s April 2017 as I write…and I gotta say, in the 26 months since this started, I’m not sure the fatigue has lessened at all.
I am doing herbal treatments for chronic lyme, and have had blood tests and everything is good and healthy. I’m physically healthy, but I think my energy body is fatigued and de-pressed (heavy). I feel strongly and deeply that this process is some sort of integration and transformation of the energy body, which uses all my energy, and thus requires me to “incubate” and lie on the couch. But, I suppose I can’t be sure, that’s why I’m treating for lyme. If you ever come upon some more information on this “awakening fatigue” situation, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d pass it on.
My question is, basically, what is this? What is happening?
Much love and appreciation,
Ethan Zwirn
Hi Ethan,
Thank you for your question.
This has been my experience involving energy relating to your question of fatigue. There have been a number of transformations that happen in the body. Sometimes a feeling of bliss is so intense, so overwhelming, that it feels like the body cannot stand it. This has happened many times by now, so I know that the body can stand it, but a transformation and rearrangement of the body is soon going to take place. What happens then is I do feel tired and I take a nap, maybe for the rest of the day. In my experience, the body usually takes a day to do most of the transformation, so the next day it can take that same intensity of bliss without feeling overwhelmed.
I have not experienced 26 months of fatigue, only one day. Recently a lot of transmission happened during a group session, even more than usual. It was wonderful. But after it was over, I felt like taking a nap and I slept for two hours. So, yes, there are times, when the purity of this energy needs some “incubation”.
I cannot really speak to your situation, as I have not experienced that length of incubation or fatigue. Each year I am called to remain in silence for a period of months with no social contact at all. That is another type of incubation.
I have a question for you. Are you your body? Are you your energy body? Are you what is feeling fatigue? Is there something here that is not feeling any fatigue? Is there something here that is not limited to a body, an energy body, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations? Is there something here that is not limited to or by anything at all? Please don’t rely on the mind to answer this. This is not a mental question. This is a question to deeply feel into. Is there something here that is aware of all of this but not affected in any way by any of it? Don’t answer this with your mind. Reject every mental answer because it won’t be it. Instead relax and settle into these questions, not looking for an answer but instead allowing the questions themselves to reveal a greater Truth than any mind can understand.
You can think of this as awareness. Something is aware of your body and aware of the fatigue in your body. Isn’t that so? You can say that the body and the fatigue are objects of this awareness. Your thoughts and feelings, your perceptions and sensations, are also objects of awareness. Everything that you are aware of is an object of your awareness. But the awareness itself is not an object of awareness. It is the subject that is aware. That is what the questions I asked above are pointing to. You cannot see this awareness because it is the subject that is aware, not an object of awareness. If you think you know what it is and can describe it, then that is also an object of awareness and not the subject. Yet, if you look, you can experience this awareness as your very being. Not anything you can see or describe or even imagine, but the subject that is aware of all of this.
And if you look and experience this very being of what you are, then you will see that this awareness is not fatigued no matter how fatigued your body may be. This is quite an amazing and wonderful discovery. Your body can be fatigued, yet you are not. If you place your attention on your body, then you will experience this great fatigue. If you move your attention to the pure being of awareness itself, no fatigue. How extraordinary. In this way you can use this experience of fatigue as a doorway to awakening. Something is here that is not touched by fatigue or anything else. And that something is you.
I don’t know why your body is experiencing fatigue. I don’t know why your energy body is experiencing fatigue. But I do know that what you really are is not touched by this fatigue, but is completely aware of it just as it is aware of everything else.
See if you can do this little experiment. Look for what is aware of all of this you have written about and are experiencing, yet is not touched by any of it. It is absolutely pure and clear, not affected by life or death. Discover this and you will discover a great freedom and a great Truth. Then perhaps you will be very grateful for this fatigue and anything else in life that has led you to this discover. And you will realize that everything in your life has been leading you to this very discovery.
Be well, My Friend.
Love,
Peter
Hi Peter. I’m very new to all of this stuff and i feel almost a fraud because i don’t or can’t feel the love like so many people on their spiritual journey feel. . Something very strange happened in a dream i had many many years ago and it has never left me to this day… I’m trying my best to describe how I felt but difficult with words! I was in some kind of a cloud or bubble that i was immersed in complete love that was part of me. This energy felt like gentle moving and the most serene music but all was ME!. The only thing i said after waking up was I dreamt of God. After that i had a thirst for something missing inside of me. I even went to church which so unlike me and as we all began to sing i got emotional and started crying because i was feeling every word inside of me.. I then went to the library scouring religious books ect and it was there i came across masters of India. This was something i had never heard of before but i couldn’t get enough of this searching.. I’m still searching and have come across Mooji and osho videos ect. I can get to a place within myself that i can describe as all knowing and I know it is my true self.. but i feel so stuck Peter. . I want to give up so many times but i just keep getting pulled back in. Help ?. Thankyou Peter.
Hi Debra,
You are not a fraud. But the ego is a fraud. It is not you. It is fraudulently posing as you. The ego does not know love because love means no separation, the realization of no separation. This is experienced with the wisdom of the heart, not the mind. The heart has its own much deeper wisdom than the mind can experience.
Your dream sounds very good and very true. You might say that in your dream you woke up from the dream you had been living during your waking life. That’s pretty nice. So this dream was a tiny peak at life as it really is, outside the waking dream most humans exist in. And after you got this little taste, the truth in you wanted more. You felt something missing inside you. In truth, there is nothing missing inside you. But the limited ego self has a lot missing. It is always incomplete. That’s why we are always trying to fix it and improve it.
You are searching and this is not bad. We must search until we realize we are already what we are searching for and then we can stop searching. It is like holding our hand in front of our face and saying I am searching for my hand. I can’t find my hand. I have no hand. Yet all the time the hand is right here in front of our face. Yet we must search for this True Awakened Nature that we are. It is not as simple as looking at the hand in front of our face because it is the one that is looking. That is harder to find. To find the one that is looking we must stop looking for it outside. We must stop looking and start being.
As you know from watching Mooji videos, when we surrender everything that is not what I truly am, then what I truly am can be experienced since it is all that is left. We strip away everything that is not what I truly am. This True Self cannot be seen like we can see other things. Just as a knife cannot cut itself, we cannot see our True Self in the same way. Everything we are aware of is the object of our awareness. But we are the subject that is aware. When we put aside all objects of awareness, then all that is left is awareness. We cannot see it, but we can be it. We are it.
This stuckness is normal. It is part of the frustration of searching when finding is very close. At some point searching has become so frustrating that we simply give up. It is in the giving up after this long search, that we find what has always been right here the whole time. But we must search first. We must search first before we give up. The limited, separate imaginary self cannot wake up. When we give up fully, we also give up this imagined separate self identity. When we give up this self, then we realize the True Self that has always been here.
To the mind this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Give up the self to discover the Self that has always been here? But the Self understands this. And it understands it through the heart, through a deeper more aware faculty than the mind.
So searching, being stuck, frustrated, giving up are all part of this process. When a Zen Master gives a student a Zen koan, like “Show me your Original Face before your parents were born.”, the student will seek and seek and come up with many different answers. The Zen Master will always dismiss each one of them and encourage the student to try harder. Finally the student reaches the end of his cleverness. He has nothing more to say. He tries and tries but his mind has reached an impenetrable wall. It cannot go further. He may go to the Zen Master with his head hanging in shame and say, “I don’t know.” The Zen Master responds, “Good. Keep this Don’t Know Mind. Then you will find the answer to this Koan.” If the student is a good student, he will do as the Master says. He will keep this Don’t Know Mind 24 hours a day. “My Original Face. I don’t know.” Eventually this Don’t Know Mind will embrace and encompass everything. He will live in Don’t Know 24 hours a day. Finally a breakthrough will come. He will experience Satori, an opening into what is beyond the conditioned world of thoughts. When he returns to the Master (and this could be a year or years later), the Master will at once realize the student’s awake mind. Then whatever answer the student gives to the koan is the correct one. It is not about an answer in words or actions. It is about the free and awake consciousness that says these words or does this action.
So this Don’t Know Mind, a mind that is free of concepts, clear and open as space itself is a very good thing. When the mind is free of conceptual knowledge, free of knowing, free of even wanting to know, then the whole universe is very clear. So this is giving up. Giving up the dream. Giving up the separate self identity. Giving up everything so that the truth of life can reveal itself without the intermediary and interpreter of thoughts getting in the way.
And perhaps you are experiencing what this Zen student experienced with his koan. This stuckness. This frustration. This reaching the impenetrable wall so you can’t pass. At some point something breaks and surrender to life, to what is, to truth becomes thorough, becomes complete.
When this happens it is usually not “one and done”. We may go back and forth from the dreamworld of thoughts to the true world of life as it is many times. But each time we move closer to the transition into living in truth or living awake.
It is fine to be “new to this stuff”. It’s probably preferable. It means less things to get rid of. The awakened mind is always a beginner’s mind. Since we don’t attach to or resist anything, we are always starting over in each moment. Each moment is new because it is.
It is not easy to experience stuckness. But that uncomfortable frustrating feeling is also part of the process. If we don’t want it enough, then we will not surrender enough when we find we can no longer move forward. The bigger the surrender, the bigger the awakening. It is easy for me to say everything you are seeking is already here. But that can’t help you at all. It’s just words. You must experience it yourself. And you will. You are going in the right direction. Immerse yourself in the Mooji videos. There are many of them so it’s probably enough. Keep your focus. Keep your attention. Don’t want anything in life more than this. Because this will give you everything in life. If your motivation is strong, complete, 100%, you cannot help but realize this. Already what you are seeking is working from inside you to make it happen. There can be many challenges before awakening happens. That’s because the strong habit of ego identity is resisting this big change. The closer you get, the more resistance. You are moving into something that the mind cannot even imagine. You are moving into truth, into freedom, into the unconditional love of no separation.
Please explain Karma.
Thank you.
Welcome, Ute
Thank you for your question.
Karma is the Law of Cause and Effect, isn’t it?
Every action has a re-action. What goes around comes around. The chickens come home to roost. There are many ways to express this concept. Say you are young and you steal something from another child. You see that this child is suffering because he no longer has what you stole from him. This makes you feel guilty. Also you understand that stealing is not a good thing. Partly this comes from your conditioning. But also it is true. In the truth of Oneness, doing anything that creates suffering in another is out of alignment with the truth of Oneness. So you steal and now you have this guilty feeling. The child you stole from is suffering and now you are also suffering. That is Karma. When you wanted to steal you only thought that perhaps the child you stole from would suffer. You were not aware that you would also suffer. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it, would you?
But Karma means that if you make another suffer, then you will also suffer.
Now you can also be free of Karma. Karma means there has to be someone who suffers and someone who is a doer of any action that creates suffering. If there is no you, no doer, then suffering cannot exist. And without a you, Karma can also not exist. Who would there be to have Karma if there is no you. So if you wake up to your True Awakened Nature, you will be free of Karma. Your True Awakened Nature has no you. It has no separate I, me, mine. There is no longer any identity as a separate person who can suffer and have Karma.
Like everything in the dream of separation, Karma is for teaching and learning. You learn that if you make someone else suffer, you also suffer. This shows you that perhaps you and that someone else are not as separate as you may have thought. Now both of you suffer. But if that other person is not other, but is none other than your own True Awakened Nature, as is everything else, then all you can feel is unconditional love. You cannot harm this “other” because it is no longer an “other”. It is you. Everything and everyone is you. You are not separate from anything. So the lessons of Karma are no longer needed. You are already One. You are already awake to your True Nature and the True Nature of all.
But until then Karma is a very good teacher. 🙂
Thank you Peter. This part I understand. What puzzles me is how Karma is supposed to be responsible for illness, accidents, past lives’ transgressions catching up with you, so to speak. I have not yet come to believe in multiple past lives, yet I understand that molecules and energy never die.
Could you please elaborate?
Thank you.
Hi Ute,
If we want to truly understand Karma or anything, we must let go of all our concepts about it. You have heard that Karma is responsible for illness and things that happen in this life because of something that happened in a past life. This is both true and not true and not true in the way you think. The belief in reincarnation is often a belief that we, our soul, somehow leaps from body to body. We die in this body then we get a new body the next time. This is a very simplistic, superficial understanding. I have had many past life experiences. And, at first, it seemed as if there were some continuity. That was me in a past life. It also seemed that these lives happened many years ago. But after awhile I realized that these experiences were actually happening simultaneously with the experience of this life. I was living both lives simultaneously. One of them seemed to be in a more technologically primitive time because of the clothing, living conditions, etc. But actually time is not as linear as we think it is. The other thing I came to realize is that although it first appeared that these other lives were unique to me, it turns out that nothing is actually unique to me. It was only my conditioned thoughts that made it appear that way to me. All bodies are my body. I am not separate from any body, any species, any thing that has ever existed throughout all space and time. To experience all of this at once is overwhelming to this limited body/mind, so I only have limited experiences of this. And all of this is simply for my learning. The experience of other bodies, other lives, teaches me clearly and tangibly that I am not limited to this one.
Like everything else, Karma is for our learning. We are all bodies, all lives, all species through all space and time. And this includes those in form and those not in form in infinite dimensions. So it is clearly far more than the mind could ever comprehend or understand. That is why I say you must let go of all concepts if you want to understand anything. And this understanding will not be mental.
So yes, you can never die. Bodies transform from living to bones and dust. But what you are can never die, has no beginning nor end and is not limited to this body or any other body. When you truly realize this, then Karma has no affect on you. When we feel we are limited to single body or a single series of bodies, then Karma has an affect. That is mostly due to our conditioning and our belief in this. We make mistakes and we either learn from them or we don’t. If we don’t, we will probably repeat the same mistake until we learn and stop repeating it. That is also a good way to look at Karma. It is a teaching and a chance for you to learn. Nothing in the universe is harming you. There is no punishment. There is only learning. Everything is entirely for your benefit always. I know it doesn’t always seem that way. Our conditioned thoughts and beliefs are extremely limited. Life is not limited at all. By life I am referring to more than living things. I am referring to the totality, form and formless, the wholeness, all that is. This is unlimited. Just as truth is unlimited. Just as you are unlimited and not separate from anything.
So the belief that if I do something in a previous life that is negative, I will have a negative condition in this life, or if I do something positive in a pervious life, I will have a positive condition is a very limited understanding of what is actually happening. What is actually happening is far more than you or I can ever conceive of. The best we can say about anything is “I don’t know.” I only want to open your mind a little bit to the miraculous mystery that is life. When it overwhelms your mind to the point where you stop relying on thoughts, on your ability to understand or figure anything out, then you will begin to realize what is beyond all conception, beyond all understanding, beyond all figuring out. When you become comfortable in living in this way, beyond the limitations of the mind, when your mind no longer seeks to know or believes that it ever could or can, then an effortless wisdom takes over. Where it comes from, we don’t know. Nor do we need to. We simply rest in this. Then Karma is no longer a problem.
There are many spiritual concepts. The mind has a very strong habit energy to try to figure out and categorize all our experiences. It does the same with your spiritual experiences. I witnessed my mind doing this for years with my “past life” experiences. It was only when I let all of that go, that a much deeper reality was revealed to me. And I know that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. But I’m happy with that. I no longer need to know. I’m happy to let life be life. The mind still wants to know and understand and tries to. But I no longer pay any attention to it. I let it do its thing. I know that whatever I think I know is just a very superficial level and there is infinitely deeper levels to go. So I relax into these deeper levels, no longer trying to get to the end, to the deepest level. That’s impossible, especially for this limited body / mind. I not only accept this, I totally love it. I let love unfold as it unfolds. It’s a journey. When there is no beginning or end, what else can it be?
If you want to still be concerned about Karma, then please do so. Everything is unfolding perfectly. I have told you what my experience is, as limited as that is. My only hope is that it opens your mind up to the beauty and freedom of not knowing and maybe the even deeper freedom of not needing to know. That is a truly wonderful gift. It is the end of seeking and beginning of finding.
Wherever you are on this journey is exactly the perfect place to be. In every single moment it is like this. Please enjoy every single step.
1. Is waking up real? How do you know?
2. How/why does it happen?
3. Why do people suffer?
4. Is awakening something that can be accomplished and if so,how?
5. If not, why pursue it? Or anything?
Thank you.
Thank you for your wonderful questions, Barbara.
1. Is waking up real? Yes.
All of nature is evolving. Humans are not separate from nature. Humans are nature too. Humans are also evolving. Waking up is the evolution of human consciousness. And this evolution is happening very rapidly at this time.
How do we know? We observe the evolution of our own consciousness and that of others. It is very clear. It cannot be denied. We know through direct experience. At one point, I lived very much in my ego, very much in illusion, very much in suffering. Now I don’t. It was a gradual process, with a number of dramatic leaps in between. And I have seen this same thing happen with students, with family members and with friends.
2. How / why does it happen?
It happens because life evolves. Life continually evolves. It becomes more complex, more efficient, more adaptable to its environment. All species undergo this evolution. Humans do too. Right now the evolution humans are experiencing is consciousness. You probably can’t tell this from watching the nightly news. There you will hear about the wars, corruption, struggles and suffering that seem to have been going on for a very long time and only seem to be getting worse. This is how unawakened consciousness / conditioned consciousness perceives the world. So clearly everyone is not fully awake at this point. It’s a process. It’s an unfolding. It’s evolution. Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. But this evolution of human consciousness is happening. When I did my Buddha at the Gas Pump interview, Rick Archer told me I was the 390th person he had interviewed who was going through this awakening process to the point where it had become conscious. 390. And there are many more he has not gotten around to yet. And these are only the people he knows of. Imagine that only fifty years ago. It wasn’t like this.
3. Why do people suffer?
What a wonderful question. I think many people want to understand this. Thank you for asking it.
People suffer because they are firmly convinced they are a person. They feel that they are a unique, independent, separate being in a universe of other unique, independent beings all separate from each other. What a frightening world that would be if it were true. And yet we have all been conditioned from the moment of our birth to believe that it is true. Parents, friends, teachers, media, society all tell us that we are a unique, separate, limited, human being in a world filled with other beings that are not me. We’ve all been through this. And this is what causes suffering. This is the root cause of suffering. If there is no unique, independent, separate being, then what is their to suffer? Nothing can be happening to ME any longer if there is no longer a ME for it to happen to. Then it is simply events that are happening. Headache happens. Cancer happens. Pain in the body happens. But none of this happens to a separate me. It is just life happening. And I am not separate from life itself. There may be pain in the body, but I don’t suffer. Suffering is something added extra on top of the pain. And suffering must have a separate me or it cannot happen.
Now this doesn’t mean that awakened people are not aware that people suffer. An awakened being doesn’t experience suffering any longer because they are free of this self identification. But they are aware that others are not free and that they experience great suffering because of it. So awakened people are very compassionate.
4. Is awakening something that can be accomplished and if so, how?
Another wonderful question, Barbara. There are many practices that can be done to prepare us to be open. Various forms of meditation, spiritual practices, Self Inquiry, chanting, mantra, koan practice. All of these when practiced diligently can bring us up to the doorway of awakening. But it is something else that moves us through that door. And it does it without any effort on our part. Yet without those practices, we may never get up to the doorway or even know it’s there. And, of course it isn’t. The doorway is a metaphor, but a useful one in this case. If you don’t spread seeds in the ground and water them, you won’t grow crops. But it is not really the planting and the watering that grows the crops. It’s something else. We can’t see this something else. Most humans are not even aware it exists. But without that something else all the seeds, planting and watering in the world will not result in a vegetable growing. And this is also true for awakening. It’s something else that does it. Yet all that planting and watering helps. It’s part of the process. So all that meditation and spiritual practice helps. It’s part of the process.
But the actual awakening itself, the actual stepping through that doorway, that’s something else. At that point we simply surrender fully to that something else. And most of our spiritual practices are really preparing us to surrender, preparing us to step aside so that something else can take over. That’s what all spiritual practice is really about. What this something else is is our True Awakened Nature. And this is not separate from anything in all existence.
We can’t do it. But still it gets done. It’s just not done by a separate ME. Most of what all that spiritual practice that the separate ME does with so much heart, determination and devotion, so much seeking and striving, and frequently so much frustration, is simply to learn to step aside, to get out of the way, to surrender to something else. That’s the secret to the whole thing.
Here is a good post on the website about this: Effortless Meditation
5. If not, why pursue it? Or anything?
Again a wonderful question. Thank you, Barbara. Clearly people do awaken. Throughout human history people have awakened from this dream of a separate me, from the illusion of separation and suffering. And probably more people are experiencing this than at any other time in human history. So, yes, it clearly does happen and is happening. And I don’t think it’s ever been easier to awaken than it is at this time in human history. We are indeed very fortunate to experience a human life at this time. I can speak to this from direct experience, which is the only real way to know what this is.
As in your question 4, all the practices that we do are important and part of the process. At first, they may be challenging and frustrating. But eventually, if we stick to it, they become natural and second nature. As natural to us as our own breathing. And they help with erasing the conditioned thinking (programming) that creates the dream world we believe is reality. The movie the Matrix is another good analogy for this. It’s a just a movie and just a metaphor, so we don’t wake up into a world far more horrible than the dream. It’s the opposite of that. We wake up into Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana. By the way, Nirvana simply means the end of concepts. It’s a very appropriate word. Truth is far more wonderful than the human mind is capable of understanding or even imagining.
I hope this answered some of your questions. And thank you. I am very grateful for your asking them. Without your questions, these answers would not exist.
Thanks Peter for your reply and blessings. You are doing a great service for the people on the path. You have helped me a lot in clearing my doubts whose answer I could not find in books or by other medium. The sound, about which I was asking, is becoming deeper and I can hear it even while I am not in meditation. Thanks.
With love
Sukhdeep.
This is very good, Sukhdeep. I am very happy. 🙂
Hello Peter,
Again new doubt!! I am great follower of Osho and reading him from almost 20 years. I am of 35 years old now. I have not attained that being about which HE had been continuously talking about because I have started meditation regularly just few months before, reason you know better. I attend meditation camps conducted by his sannyasins, but when I look at those people who guide us about meditation, I feel demotivated because these people who have spent so much time with living master and still they miss that aura and fragrance about which Osho talks about. In one camp our conductor who has been with Osho and his teachings from almost 40 years, was teaching us about witnessing meditation for ex he said “if you eat food, just eat it, every bite chew consciously, do not be eater, be eating” but I noticed when he was eating his meal, he was talking to somebody about gym and so many things. He is almost of 85 years old. How should I take it.? My doubt is this If these people can not attain then you do not have any hope, quit all this. Is it lack of dedication of those people or my monkey mind disturbing me? Please comment. Thanks In anticipation.
With love.
Sukhdeep
Dear Sukhdeep,
We must make a choice. We must make a commitment. How deep or shallow this commitment is will be what the results are. Someone can spend every day meditating all day and spend their whole life with an awakened teacher. Someone can attend church 24 hours a day. This is an outer commitment. The is the commitment of form. Everyone can see this commitment. The inner commitment nobody else can see. Only we know the inner commitment. If this commitment is 100%, then the results will also be 100%. To have a 100% commitment means we have completely surrendered the self to God, to Truth, to awakened consciousness. Then there is no longer a me.
Can this be done? Yes, absolutely. I am far from the only one who has done this. But many people, perhaps most, do not make this 100% inner commitment. They only make an outer commitment. “Look at me. I am a spiritual person.” “Look at how devoted I am.” “Look at how spiritual I am.” Even though the outer commitment, the commitment of form, may be very large, the inner commitment mighty not be so much. You see many people like this. They believe that the self can awaken, the self can be spiritual. It is the absence of the self that is awakening.
What you sense in these people might be very true. You might sense that they have not made the inner commitment. It is mostly show. Their mind believes they are very spiritual, maybe even awake or holy. But inside they still cling to the self.
On the other hand, the ego may perceive a holy person, a clear, surrendered person, as not holy. You may have heard the expression: when a pick pocket looks at a Saint, all he sees are pockets.
There is something in us that knows. But it is not the ego.
Always bring all teachings from all teachers back to your inner teacher. What is resonating in your heart? Is it fear and doubt? That is ego. Is it simply a lack of this deep resonance of the heart, this inner truth not bursting into flame? Then you are seeing someone who has not made this deep, full, inner commitment, this deep, inner surrender to something more. You can feel the truth of what they are, but you also see that their words are hollow. They are not connected to this inner truth. This inner truth has no me. It is not “my” truth. It is beyond a me. When we fully surrender the me, then this truth speaks very clearly and eloquently without any effort on the part of a me. This is true teaching. This is our True Self, which is not a self at all. It is beyond all identity.
To the ego, this may sound impossible or only something a great Saint can reach. But that is not true. This the natural state of all beings. Only the dream of a separate self hides it from us. As long as we remain attached to this dream, attached to this separate, personal self, we cannot see the miracle of awakened life.
It is wise to witness the monkey mind as the monkey mind and realize what it is. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. This is an inner job. We must look within. All answers are here, just as they have always been. All any teaching can do is point us back to this place from which we have never left nor could ever leave. When we awaken from a sleeping dream, we find we are still lying in bed, just as we were when we went to sleep that night. This conditioned dream is just a little longer. We are still as we are. Nothing can change that.
Be well, My Friend. I feel your own commitment growing. That is very good. Nobody can see this inner commitment. Only you know.
With love,
Peter
Thanks Peter for showing light on this path.
You are very welcome, My Friend.
Dear Peter,
Thank you for providing this space for questions.
I am struggling with my career. I work in consulting and lately have been declined for every proposal I have put forward. I want to quit my job because nothing is working out but something tells me to stick it out. I feel humiliated and embarrassed. After being ‘successful’ my whole life I am now ‘failing’ constantly. I want to do work that is of service more than anything and yet life won’t give me any work to do!
Any advice would be welcome.
With love
Amanda
A Course In Miracles has a beautiful lesson that states, “We don’t know what is in our best interest.” If we can have the humility and wisdom to truly accept this as true, then we become much more open to life as it is. We no longer believe that our ideas of good and bad are true. How do we know that our idea of success is not a big problem keeping us from what is truly in our best interest? How do we know that our idea of failure is not a great opportunity to open to life and truly receive what is in our highest benefit?
Adyashanti is wonderful awakened spiritual teacher. He tried everything he could with maximum effort and dedication for many years to awaken and ended up completely frustrated. At the end of his rope, he felt completely defeated and he totally gave up. That was the moment he awakened. So we don’t know what is in our best interest. We don’t know what is in our highest benefit. But life does. We don’t need to understand it. But it helps if we trust it and surrender to it, even without understanding it. In Adyashaniti’s case “failing” constantly was in his best interest, was of the highest benefit, because that is what finally led to his awakening, this complete surrender to life, the end of control, the end of the one trying to awaken.
Perhaps that may be happening for you, Amanda. Pay attention. Often frustration comes because of what we believe life should be and what we should be. But maybe this isn’t what life should be or what we should be. How do we really know what life should be? By simply looking at what life is in this moment. What is in this moment is exactly what should be in this moment. It doesn’t really matter whether we like it or not or how we prefer it to be. Because it is it should be and it is. This is trusting life more than our opinions and beliefs about life. If we surrender our ideas and beliefs for just a moment, perhaps we too can see life as it is. Perhaps we will gain a completely new perspective on life and what we are. It can happen. Let go for a moment and see.
What is success? What is failure? What is service? Are our ideas and beliefs in these concepts really true? Or are these just concepts, ideas and beliefs? What does life say about this? Ask and then listen. Listen very carefully. Not to your thoughts and beliefs, but to something else. Something beyond thoughts and beliefs. Listen to life. It has something very important to tell you.
Love,
Peter
Dear Peter. Thank you so much for this thoughtful response. It brought me to tears. After I asked this question life started feeding me whisps of answers. And your response seems to weave them together in a way that helps the message sink in.
I see that I can either keep struggling here or learn to live with life as it is. Easier said than done but I’m getting the message. 🙂
With love and gratitude,
Amanda
Thank you, Amanda. Keep going, My Dear. You are in the right direction.
Hello Peter
I am from India and have read much about meditation techniques through Osho. From Last 2 months i am regularly doing “witnessing” meditation at least one hour in a day. I noticed strange thing that instead of becoming peaceful, I am disturbed. I feel fearful. Once It happened that in meditation by witnessing my though pattern, there came a point that i felt that I may die. I stood up and went outside. My normal life is shaken. If Someone calls me, my heart throbs very fast. If I go to visit any relative, It becomes very difficult to hold glass or anything eatable due to shivering. If someone comes to meet me I do not feel good.Am I doing something wrong meditation or something else? I will be very thankful to you. Please guide me.
Thanks.
Hello, My Friend. I would have to know a little more to advise you specifically. But I will tell you that the transition from asleep to awake can be quite challenging. Here is why. As you become more aware, you are aware of many things you were not aware of before. It may seem almost like you are entering or have entered a different world. And in many ways you have. This new world is unfamiliar. You have been asleep and you have spent your lifetime in a dream. You are familiar with this dream. But you are not familiar with being awake. Now, as you go through this transition, you need to spend as much time as possible with awake people. You have access to them on YouTube, in books, websites, etc. When you are around awake people something inside you will resonate and you will feel a great calm, peace, contentment and love. There are many, not just me. Mooji has many YouTube videos and there are many others. People who are not awake will not understand what you are going through. The feeling that you may die is also not uncommon. But notice that you don’t die. These are your thoughts. You are becoming more aware of your thoughts than you ever were before. And some of these thoughts have been repressed for a long time. Great resistance to awakening comes when you get closer to awakening. This also is your thoughts. You come to see your thoughts in a very new way. Many of them are not so nice. That’s why we repressed them. All this suffering will show you what thoughts are capable of if you believe them. From this you will learn not to believe them. You will learn to just let them be. As long as you realize they are only thoughts and not truth, not reality, they are harmless. They are only thoughts. And something else much deeper and much truer is always here behind the thoughts. This is what is aware of the thoughts. But this is never disturbed by any thought or anything else. Only your belief in the thought makes them uncomfortable and disturbing, sometimes dramatically so, as in the thought you are dying. It seems so real. But it’s not. It’s just a thought.
This is a transition most of us go through. I did. It is not pleasant. The best way to go through this is as follows. Open to and accept completely whatever arises. Don’t seek peace or love or happiness. Don’t seek anything. Accept whatever is in each moment. If it is fear, accept this fear completely. Allow it to be exactly as it is without wanting it to change or leave. You are space enough for anything that arises. Be aware of this. As you open to this fear, thoughts that may have been repressed will arise and you will see where this fear is coming from. Fear does not need the name “fear”. Let that label go. It is just a sensation, isn’t it? A type of energy. Notice that this feeling, fear or any other feeling, is really just energy. And it is actually the same energy. When we put the label fear on it, it feels like fear. When we put the label bliss on it, it feels like bliss. Let all labels go. Experience it as nothing but pure energy. You may realize that now you are enjoying it. What before was suffering, now is quite enjoyable. Energy, and a lot of it. Good news. You’re alive. This energy is a testament to you’re being alive. The body has a lot of energy. Now you’re becoming aware of this. It’s confusing because for so long you were not aware of your body or much of anything as it really is. Now you are starting to become aware. You’re starting to wake up. It feels very different. It takes some time to get used to it. Along the way, your thoughts will give you a lot of suffering. The difference is now you’re aware of this. Before you thought it was all real and the suffering came from somewhere outside you. Now you are beginning to see that you are creating the suffering with your thoughts. And soon you will realize you don’t have to. You can perceive the world without the filter of thoughts getting in the way. And it is very beautiful. But before you realize this, you’re going to become far more aware of your thoughts then you ever have before. The more fear they bring, the more you will be happy to be free of them.
It’s not that you won’t have thoughts. You’ll have just as many as before. But you will no longer be a prisoner of them. They will no longer pull you this way and that like a puppet. Now I’m afraid. Now I’m happy. Now I’m frustrated. Now I’m angry. You will just be aware of thoughts and no longer reacting to them. You will use them when they are appropriate, learning new things, remembering a phone number. Things like that. Life is far easier and more wonderful than the world of thoughts can ever show us.
I wish you well, My Friend. If you have any other questions, I am honored to help.
Peter
Thanks a lot Peter for reply.
You’re very welcome.
Hello Peter,
I need your precious guidance on the path of meditation. I am doing witnessing meditation from some months and watching my thought pattern. I have realized that there are sensations on five points, two on both ears, two on left and right side of my head and one on my forehead just little up between the eyes. Through ears I listen a sound like “smmmm” continuously. What is all this? I fear the sensations of my head that something can go wrong that some nerves will burst and I may go mad. Please guide me. I will be very thankful to you.
Thanks.
Hello Sukhdeep,
Thank you for asking. When our attention to our thoughts is finally let go, when they no longer interest us, we are open to listen to something much deeper. One sign of that is a certain sound that seems to be coming from inside the head. Some people call it the “sound current”. Some call it the eternal sound or the cosmic Om. Although it doesn’t really sound like Om. It’s just sort of a ringing, but it’s not tintinitus, a symptom of damaged ear drum. We’re simply aware of something we were not aware of before because we were so focused on and attached to our thoughts. That’s all. There are also sensations all over the body. Now you are becoming aware of sensations of certain points on the head which you were not previously aware of because you were distracted by your thoughts. Relax, my friend. You are just becoming more aware. It’s a good thing. 🙂 That fear that something will burst or you will go mad is just the habit energy of the ego resisting going into something new, something you were not aware of before. You have become habituated and attached to the ego. You’re used to it. We all were. Now you are experiencing something new. And it feels strange, maybe even frightening because you don’t yet know what it is. Relax. Let go. Surrender to whatever is happening. You are simply experiencing sensations you have not experienced before, the sound, the sensations on five points. There is nothing special about this. Nothing unique. You are simply becoming more aware. And this is actually wonderful. Your meditation is working. It’s paying off. As you keep doing this at some point you will become aware of energy in your entire body. This can feel quite intense. It may even feel overwhelming at first. Sometimes we refer to this as bliss. Again, relax. Pay attention. Surrender to it. You are just becoming more aware. The body is filled with energy that you never noticed when your mind controlled all your attention. When you do it can seem very strange at first. But it is wonderful. You are simply feeling what it is like to be alive. And you may not have experienced this since you were a very young child. Now as an adult you will again. It’s wonderful. So the sound is simply a sign that you have become more aware than you were before. the sensations, the same. the sound is here. It has always been here. You just were not aware of it before. Notice that if your attention moves to something else, a thought, a feeling, the sound lessens. When your attention returns to the sound it increases. If your attention is full on the sound it can even sound as loud as a freight train. The world is a much more amazing and miraculous thing than our conditioned mind could ever imagine. You are in store for many more surprises. If you resist them, then you will experience some problems. Not from the sound or sensations, but from the resistance. If you simply let them be, whatever they are, you will soon learn how wonderful this growing awareness is.
My blessings to you, My Friend.
Relax and enjoy the ride. It is all for your benefit and the benefit of all. And your meditation practice is really working. Be happy and grateful for it. It takes some getting used to. Everything new does, doesn’t it? But the more you surrender to it, the faster you adjust to it. It is only resisting that creates problems and suffering. The ego will bring up fearful thoughts. It does that for most of us when we encounter anything new. “If it’s new it must be bad.” “I’ve never experienced this before. I better be careful. Maybe I shouldn’t do it at all.” And all kinds of scary images. This is also just resistance. So you go the opposite way. You be open to it. Pay attention. And see for yourself if anything bad actually happens. Whatever the ego says, you say, “We’ll see.” Then see. Did you go mad? Did your nerves burst? Almost always, 99% of the time, you will see that the ego’s fears never actually happen. Then you will learn not to trust it any more. Instead you will begin trusting a much deeper intuitive knowing. And this is what is guiding your awakening. It always has your best interest at heart and the highest benefit for all. that’s something you can really trust.
I hope this is helpful, My Friend.
Love
Peter
Do we have free will?
The false separate self does not exist, so it follows that there is no one there to have free will. Who, then, is ‘steering the ship’ when an ego-driven choice is (seemingly) made by an individual which inflicts harm on another?
Dear Laurel,
Thank you for your wonderful question.
Do we have free will?
Not in the way we think.
The false separate self is just thoughts and primal fear of extinction. So how could this have free will or decide anything?
Conditioned thoughts create the illusion of free will. If for your whole life everyone is telling you that a certain flavor of ice cream is wonderful, you will agree that flavor of ice cream is wonderful. This thought has conditioned your mind. When you go to the ice cream store, which you will do frequently because your conditioned mind says this flavor of ice cream is wonderful, you will order that flavor of ice cream. It will just seem like ice cream and that flavor particularly is wonderful. You will think that you made a choice. “Let me see. There are so many flavors to choose from. And I could even get frozen yogurt which might be a little healthier. Oh, yes! There it is. That’s wonderful. I choose that one.”
But you didn’t really choose it. Your conditioned thoughts did. And they didn’t choose. They were already programmed to act in this way.
You probably have heard the experiment called Pavolov’s Dogs. Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate every time they heard the sound of a bell. These dogs were conditioned to associate the sound of a particular bell with dinner. We humans have been conditioned for many, many things. “I am very attracted to women with red hair.” “I love chocolate.” “I can’t stand broccoli.” “I don’t trust rich people. They are all greedy.” or “I only trust rich people. They have no reason to cheat me.” “Christianity is good. Zen is bad.” “Zen is bad. Christianity is good.” Look around and notice how programmed / conditioned people are. It is clear in who they vote for, what kind of food they eat, whether they exercise or not and what kind of exercise they do, if they have pets and what kind, what clothes they wear, etc. Nobody switches the political party they vote for every single election. At some point they may switch party allegiance. But that is also because new programming has overridden the old programming. Conditioning, conditioning, conditioning. So what makes choices? Conditioning makes choices. What appears to be a free choice or free will has actually already been programmed in. The computer or robot has already been programmed and it can only do exactly what it has been programmed to do. I know, that analogy is not very appealing. But it is really like this, so don’t blame me.
Sometimes this programing leads to harmful actions. Nobody programs their computer or robot to think it is an individual self-operating, separate being that needs to protect itself from life and other beings. But all humans have this programming. With this program other people can seem like they are a threat. So one program may say, “Women are terrible. They will always reject me. They are the cause of all my suffering.” That kind of programming may lead to a rape or some other brutal violent act, like spouse abuse. Or “Everyone is a cheat and a liar. You better cheat them before they cheat you.” That kind of programming may result in some very devious and destructive behavior. Don’t buy a used car from this person.
So does the man who rapes the woman have free will? Is he sitting there thinking, “Hmm. Should I or shouldn’t I?” There is probably very little conscious thought involved. He is simply responding like any programmed robot would. He simply follows his programming.
In the military soldiers are trained to kill who they are instructed to kill. They are trained to see certain people as their enemy. Kill them before they kill you. Many recruits enter the military without wanting to kill anyone. They may simply want their very expensive college education paid for or to have some training to get a good job. But after 6 months of training (conditioning), they shoot and kill many people because they are told that is the enemy. They may drop bombs on entire villages even killing young children and babies. But in their conditioned mind, this is now okay. It is the mission.
After they leave the military, many of these soldiers suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). And it isn’t all because they have almost died or seen their best friend die right next to them. Some of it is because of the things they did that they used to think were okay when the conditioning was very strong, but now after some of the conditioning has worn off they don’t think were okay at all. I’ve known veterans who have a great deal of suffering because when the conditioning wore off they could not face what they had done. Military conditioning only takes place for a couple of years. It is not as strong as the conditioning all humans have had their entire life right from birth. That conditioning is invisible to us. It is how we see the world.
So who is steering the ship? That’s kind of hard to say. The people who condition you are also conditioned. How do you find the first one in this long line of human conditioning? I don’t know. Adam and Eve? Monkeys? Single cell organisms?
So waking up is simply becoming free of all that conditioning, a lifetime of conditioning, lifetimes and generations of conditioning. When you are completely free of conditioning, when you are awake, there is still no free will. You just aren’t programmed anymore. Then life does everything. It always has. Where did programming come from? You could say life. So now you are not conditioned to believe you are separate from life. There is just life. Now you are life’s robot and you are also life. It doesn’t make any sense. There is just Don’t Know. Just Truth in every moment. Did I decide to do that? I don’t know. Is there an I? I don’t know. Where do these words come from? I don’t know. Now we are entering territory the mind cannot follow. This is the world of Truth just as it is in each moment. We are free of conditioning. And we are also free of the conditioning that says there ever was an I to be conditioned. Ha ha. See? There is nothing we can say here in the depths of Truth.
Wonderful question, Laurel. Thank you very much. I hope this answered your question. I enjoyed hearing the answers that came up. I hope you did too.
Love,
Peter
Wow, Karen, that is an interesting question. Let me feel into it for a moment and see what arises.
We cannot find Truth where we expect to find it. And yet life is always pointing us to Truth. Life is always presenting Truth and holding it out to us. The problem is we are looking elsewhere for Truth so ignore the obvious. We ignore life’s gift.
Somehow life has been showing this woman society’s and the conditioned humans mind’s great confusion around sex, relationships, right and wrong, good and bad. That is very interesting. Taboos, social rules and patterns, sexual feelings, attractions, self-identity, etc.
Very confusing. Where is the answer to all this? The conditioned mind is conditioned very early and continually conditioned throughout our life unless we become free of conditioning and attachment to this conditioning. So the father’s affairs conditioned the daughter. And the father was also conditioned by other people, maybe his father. So her attraction does have something to do with this conditioning. There are many single men available, but she choose a married man. Conditioning just like the father. And some part of her is also aware of this. Do or not do? The attraction is very strong. The conditioning is also very strong. The attraction is to a married man and not so much attraction to a single man. Conditioning.
Now whether to follow the conditioning or not? Following the conditioning will lead to suffering. This is not bad or good. If we are open to it, we can learn a great deal from suffering. Even more than simply don’t do that again if we don’t want suffering. If we don’t follow the conditioning, perhaps we will not learn an important lesson about suffering, the cause of suffering, conditioning and who we really are. But we will also probably simply learn this in another way at another time. These questions are not for me to answer. They are not even for this woman to answer. They are for Life itself to answer.
It feels like she is feeling a strong urge to act out her conditioning. On the other hand she is resisting it. This creates an inner tension. And this is also suffering. The best solution it feels is to fully open to this strong urge, not act on it, but fully open to it. Experience it fully without any resistance. What does this feeling mean? What does this strong attraction mean? And let the strong feeling, the strong attraction show her why it is here and what it can teach her is she fully opens to it, makes space for it. I don’t mean acting on it. I mean simply sitting by herself and fully opening to it with an open question. This may reveal a great deal to her if she is willing to do this fully. It takes some courage to be this honest with ourself. But it is very powerful and transformative learning. Before acting on any feeling or impulse it is best to discover what this feeling or impulse is, what is the deeper truth behind it, what it is here to teach me, and who am I really? Everything is pointing back to this final question, “Who am I really?” Who is experiencing this strong feeling and attraction? And what is aware of this “I” that is feeling this strong feeling and attraction.
It is very important to understand what this “I” is. And everything in life is always pointing us to the answer. Even this attraction to a married man. So use everything life offers. Allow life to show us what Truth is.
It may not clear up confusion. For awhile confusion may become even more intense. Perhaps confusion becomes so intense that it becomes the full acceptance that “I don’t know.” Then “I don’t know anything.” Then “I don’t need to know anything.” Then the absolute perfection, freedom and openness of this realization.
Life is always teaching us. Of that we can be sure. Figuring out what life is teaching us we may never understand with the mind. But we can accept and even love this Not Knowing. We can allow life to be life. We can allow Truth to be Truth, without our understanding it.
This is what arises here. I wish her well. It is another example of life continuously presenting us with this great teaching. what we do with this generous offering is up to us. We can try to figure it out, as we usually do. And this never gets us very far. At best it can lead to confusion which may eventually lead to the acceptance that I don’t know. That is a wonderful teaching in itself. Or we can simply let go and ask life, ask this attraction to a married man, ask these strong feelings, what is happening here, what is going on, why are you here, what do you have to teach me? I give up. I don’t know. I am open to your teaching life. I am totally open. And then listen. Listen completely. And discover what life has to teach us.
Thank you Peter for your response. Amazing wisdom.
Now I ask myself: “What was it that triggered me to write you and want clarification about someone else’s problem?”
Answer: CONDITIONING
Conditioning here judged the gal’s experience as suffering.
Conditioning here said suffering is “bad.”
More Conditioning says Karen should try to alleviate or minimize her suffering.
Wisdom here knows none of these conditionings is Truth,
but still…….the frikin’ Conditioning is raised its ugly, limiting and diminishing head.
So with the rising feelings of frustration and despair I feel I will take your advice:
“…ask these strong feelings, what is happening here, what is going on, why are you here, what do you have to teach me?”
Anything else to add?
No. That sounds good, Karen. Life is always teaching us. When we listen, we learn a lot.
Love,
Peter
Hi Peter,
I appreciate how you cut through illusion and see the truth of a situation. Below is a question from a Course of Miracles student that I found on a website. It seems to be a complex story. For whatever reason, I am wondering how you would respond to the gal who wrote this:
“In childhood my dad had a lot of affairs, he once had sex with a lady in front of me, (when i was about 9) i tried to make him stop by hitting him on the back but he just shouted at me. it was a full on thing for me to do as i was scared of him. ive been really looking at so many aspects here.. societal conventions on relationships, desperately seeking for wholeness in sex, plus seeing that dad was never actually ‘messing’ me up, but in this fullness of time has actually offered me an opportunity for awakening, a gift. i have also been focusing on the non reality of the guilt i feel and project, and noticing how i still believe in right and wrong choices. selfish and considerate.. helpful and unhelpful!?
(i had a ‘vision’ the other day of how good and bad are like.. flip sides of the same coin/idea, and how when you bring them together (i saw it like heading toward the centre of a horizontal axis, toward and up the vertical axis), the.. ideas of them get smaller and smaller the closer you get to truth, and also less outside yourself, less ‘revolting on the one hand, and less unattainable on the other hand) til they disappear altogether. and how the same.. um, model? applies to every aspect of duality ideas).
so.. recently a man came back into my life who i had strong feelings for years ago. he has married, and moved back to albany to start his own business, while his wife has stayed in a town hours away doing her thing there.. they alternate visiting each other on weekends and that seems to work for them. i still react to him as strongly as ever, and for a while at any rate he is in my sphere of life. i feel the attraction is mutual, and if he were single we would explore that. im pretty sure he feels guilty for the attraction, though hes not acting upon it, and i know i do, but only because while im in no position to act on these feelings, i am quite aware that if i were, i am simply not sure if i would act according to my moral beliefs, in the way i think is right, respectful and loving to all concerned, or if i would follow my own other wishes. the only reason its such an issue for me is that i very rarely feel anything like this, i havent felt like this about anyone since i saw him last seven years ago or so.
can you shed some light to help me move through this? “
Hi Peter,
I am fighting some health issues that have now affected my ability to work. However, I am still seeking employment. I interviewed for 2 different positions and was offered both positions. I accepted one position, but now when I try to speak to the supervisor, I get put off ….that they will call me. I’m so confused
Hi P,
Congratulations. You interviewed for 2 positions and were offered both positions. Wonderful.
You accepted one of the two and now the supervisor of the one you chose will not speak to you.
Interesting. Perhaps this supervisor is very busy right now. Remember the supervisor just hired you so it is probably a busy time.
Try again. Ask. What is the best time to contact the supervisor if he or she is very busy. Bringing a new person into a business is a very busy time. You have to get this person familiar with the environment and other people. All this takes time. Perhaps this supervisor is already very busy and is trying to find time to do this extra job too. Perhaps it is a sign that the other job is better for you. Who knows? Life will reveal the correct answer and situation before long.
You are confused because you think that you should know. You think it should be very clear.
But life is never so clear like this, like our mind would like it to be.
When you think it is very clear, then later you are surprised that it wasn’t exactly like you thought it was.
But this is all okay.
Life is always doing the right thing.
Usually we don’t understand this. It can seem just the opposite.
Health issues may not seem like the right thing for life to do.
But perhaps when you look back on this a few years from now, you will realize that without that health issue you would not have learned something very important that you could not have learned any other way.
When we try to figure out life, it can be very confusing.
When we let go and simply trust that life is always doing what is best for us, even when we don’t think so, then it is much less confusing. Then it is peaceful and often filled with love.
What at first seemed like a question about health issues and employment, can actually have a much deeper and even more useful meaning and result.
See how life doesn’t usually do what you expect, but often it is much better.
Sometimes not getting a job that you really, really want, that you think will be the best job of your life, opens up the possibility of a very different job that actually IS the best job of your life.
We don’t know these things. We can second guess life all we want, but it doesn’t do us much good. Life will continually surprise us with the truth.
So being confused about life can also be a good thing. If we pay attention to this confusion, we may realize that we cannot understand life. We cannot control life. And we don’t need to. All of our life, life has been taking care of things. Beating our heart, flowing blood through our veins, growing our finger nails, working our liver and kidneys. All of this has been happening without our conscious effort or even awareness. Life has been doing a pretty good job. But we are not so sure. We think that maybe we should be in control of life. Just imagine if we had to consciously grow our finger nails, beat our heart, make our liver and kidneys function, grow our cells. Just having to do this for one second of our life would totally exhaust and overwhelm us. Thankfully it’s been happening all along without any effort on our part. That’s how life works. Everything is like this. It’s already working well. It’s already complete.
We don’t need to understand how it works. Just as we don’t really need to know how our liver or kidneys function for them to work. We don’t need to know how oxygen is carried by the blood stream to all our cells. It happens without us knowing anything about it. We don’t really need to know anything about how life functions for it to function just fine. If we pay attention, we can see how well life is functioning. When we see this a great trust will develop.
The supervisor returns my call. The supervisor doesn’t return my call. If this goes on for too long, I just see if the other job is still available. Before I do that I ask if there is anything I can do to help make this process of a new hire easier on the supervisor. Wait a week before calling? Call at a certain time? How can I help? What can I do to make this easy, convenient and in the best interest of everyone? Everyone likes an employee who is understanding and willing to help like this. And being such an employee feels good. You are not only concerned with you. You have now included everyone else in this picture. You are already bigger and more complete. Before you even begin working, you are already part of the team. How nice.
I hope this helps you.
Thank you for your question.
Love,
Peter
Thank you. I called again this morning. The supervisor had not really discussed me with is director, yet. They have since spoken and now are waiting for corporate/HR to get back to them today. Then the supervisor said he would call me.
P
Wonderful. You see how life works. Trust this. Life always has your back. 🙂
Peter
Dearest Peter thank you for this opportunity to ask a question . I do know that self inquiry can help us in weeding out our garden . How ever I have only managed one time to sit in silence to discover that the idea of ” me ” was just that …an idea floating in space . This inquiry happened by accident while meditating . Now when I wish to inquire there is nothing happening . All I’m shown is space and no insights . It is as if im not doing the inquiry the right way? I’m looking but all I feel / see is nothing . I suppose I shouldn’t have a problem with nothing 🙂 and that I am expecting something to happen ? Thank you . Much love Phyllis
Dear Phyllis,
Thank you for asking your question. I see that you have also answered it. And I agree with your answer. Yes, you are expecting something to happen. Expectations are not useful in self-enquiry. Instead you want to allow the enquiry to show you what it is.
You are resisting this nothing. Embrace this nothing and allow it to show you what it really is. I think you will be very surprised and very happy.
Seeing that the idea of “me” is just an idea is very good. Yay! That is a very great insight and revelation. So what is left when you look for this self and cannot find anything? That is very interesting, is it not? When there is no separate self, what is here? At first it does feel like nothing. But explore this nothing. Explore this space. Allow it to show you what it is. You don’t know. Nobody knows what this is. Be Still. Be Silent. And allow this space, this nothing to reveal Itself to you. Don’t expect anything. Even after we awaken, we don’t know what this is. But it is. That’s all we can say. And the depths of this are infinite. You have scratched the surface. You have parted the curtain a little bit so a glint of this infinite light has come through for just a moment. Be with it. Allow the curtain to part a little more. It will show you. It will teach you. There is nothing we can say about this nothing, this space. It is not nothing. It is not space. It is something beyond all words and thoughts.
You are doing well, Phyllis. Keep doing what you are doing. But leave out the expectations. Have an open curiosity. What is this? I don’t know. What should I find? I don’t know. Enjoy. Be playful. Imagine you are a very young child going into a playground you have never seen before filled with toys you have never seen. They look delightful but you have no idea what they even do. You are very curious. Just observe. What is this? I don’t know. I don’t know but I’m open to it. I’m open to it showing me. I don’t need to know. But somehow I trust. Somehow there is this feeling that I trust what this is. And I trust the next thing to. There is a sense that it is entirely for my benefit. It is.
So let go. Relax. Observe. Enjoy. It will reveal Itself as you open to it and allow it to. How wonderful is this journey back to you.
I am very grateful that you are on it and that you asked me this wonderful question.
Thank you.
Love,
Peter
Dear Peter
I am back with another question 🙂 and I also realized I didnt thank you for the last answer so ” Thank You ”
There is a wonderful opportunity showing itself to me to overcome a huge fear . The fear is the feeling that someone wants to take me or overcome me or in other words steal me away . It brings up huge safety and trust issues . The feeling has never happened with women but with men . Ever so often men show up in my life and there is a feeling that they are like predators after my energy . When I am in a perfect state of oneness this feeling is not there . As I know nothing can touch me . I am at a point now though that the opportunity is showing itself to me again and I really want to transcend it . When I am around this person ( who is very loving ) I get thoughts like ..how do I know he is not trying to trick me ? What is he trying to gain from me ? Even though he has done nothing but help me along my path .This person has a very high vibration and when im around them i feel kind of high and in a trance like state ..kind of dreamy . Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
With Love and Gratitude Phyllis
Hi Phyllis,
What is being stolen away?
When you are in a state of Oneness, you are in your True State. That is what you are. As you say, this cannot be stolen away. Nothing can be added to this state nor taken away. It is already and always complete, just like you. So here, you feel fearless and free.
So something else must be overcome or stolen away.
What is that?
What can be overcome or stolen away often experiences fear, doesn’t it?
It experiences anger and disappointment when things don’t go its way.
Yet there is a great freedom that doesn’t experience any of this. Yet it is completely aware of it, aware of all feelings, all thoughts. Not separate from any of it, yet at the same time untouched by any of it.
The ego can be very suspicious. It will never trust fully.
Yet what can be trusted fully? Can any person be trusted fully as a person? I’m not saying to be suspicious. I’m only saying that the egoic nature of persons is imperfect. It is not whole and complete. What is whole and perfect is not separate from any person, but it is not their egoic personhood. It is something else. And that something else you can always trust 100% because it IS whole, complete and perfect. When you are consciously aware of that state of consciousness, you know this. It cannot be denied. That is what you trust 100%. In yourself and in others.
The person is just the person. The closer the person is to this wholeness and freedom from the limited self-identity of the person, the more you can trust them.
From your description of how you feel around this particular person, perhaps you are falling in love.
Falling in love is a good thing. You fall in love when you trust enough to let your guard down and open your heart. Some people are triggers that permit you to do this. They seem safe enough. Usually because they love you so there is less of a chance they will break your heart. Falling in love is in some ways similar to awakening. You need to let go, be open, surrender to something else. In the case of falling in love, it appears to be a person. That’s why heartbreak can come. Persons are imperfect, while the something else of the True Self is perfect.
But falling in love is a wonderful practice for awakening. It is a step. You’re just choosing the wrong object to fall in love with. But that can change. You can learn and grow from this. And the falling in love stage feels really good.
The surrender is the important part. What are you surrendering both when you fall in love and when you awaken? You are surrendering your limited, egoic self-identity. And that’s what feels so good. It’s not the other person. It’s your surrendering of what you are not and have believed you were for so long. That surrender is what feels so wonderful. Suddenly you are much less limited. Suddenly you are free. When this freedom depends on another person, you experience ups and downs depending on what this person does. Sometimes we call this “the end of the Honeymoon”. But it is still an important lesson.
The reason you feel overcome and stolen away is because your limited, egoic self-identity is resisting it. “No. Don’t surrender me. That would be terrible. And here are the reasons why …” The ego will always resist this surrendering of the ego.
This is what it sounds like to me. There are intuitions of danger, but that’s not what it sounds like from what you wrote. And the intuitions of danger or simply something to stay away from at the time have a very different feeling. They arise in the moment and do not last after the moment has passed. That’s intuition. Mental, egoic fears last much longer, long after the particular moment has passed and cause concern and anguish and obsession. “Oh no. What’s going to happen? Etc.” Intuition causes no such mental concern. It’s just an inner guidance of the moment. Go here. Don’t go there.
It sounds like a good lesson for you. If you are falling in love, I suggest paying close attention to what is happening without resisting or attaching to anything. Where is this feeling coming from? Where is it located? You will see that it is located in you. And this person has allowed you to be open enough to experience it. You might ask another question. Has this feeling always been here my entire life although I have not been aware of it until now? Where is this feeling really coming from? What is it that I really love about this person? Is it their separate personhood or is there something else, something I can’t see, but I can feel? And is it that that gives me a feeling of not just safety, not just love, but oneness, not separation? Is this sense of separation dissolving? Is that why I feel so good? Just pay attention to these things. In this way falling in love will be a very powerful and transformative lesson. Plus it feels really good. 🙂
As a side bonus, when you realize that this feeling of love is in you and has always been in you, you realize it cannot be taken away. You cannot lose it. In this way you become less dependent on others for this feeling. This doesn’t take away from your relationships. It makes them stronger. They are based on love not dependence, illusion or need. You realize you are not giving or receiving love, you ARE love itself. This is a very powerful and wonderful realization.
Thank you for your wonderful questions, Phyllis.
Love,
Peter
Dear Peter
my question needs some more words…. I am listening to Satsangs since some years, mostly Mooji`s Satsangs, but also other teachers. It is clear to me that my mind is causing most of the suffering and I am practicing to watch, to detach, to feel emotions in the body. I had and do have moments of deep joy and love, of gratefulness and peace. Yet, on a practical level, like finding a meaningful job, making money for a living, developing talents, following my deepest interests, I feel stuck since many years. My health was very weak (due to years of stressful and unloved teacher-jobs, due to a difficult relationship, allergies, worries and sorrow, I guess) and I used a lot of time in the last 9 years to try to heal myself, to regain energy. Still I am not stable enough. My deepest wish and joy since many years is to do healing-work with people. I have not so much experience yet, but whenever I do it, I feel that this is the right thing to do. In many workshops and seminars I have known different techniques and I practice self healing techniques. More and more I come back to the very simple “techniques”, like just Being present, watching, feeling what is here, or praying. I know that by doing so, my hands have a natural healing power when layed on. There is nothing else I can imagine to do as my daily work right now. But there are deep self-doubts and mistrust towards myself and my capacity to do this work – and to all my (underdeveloped) talents, like making music, creating things and even making love…. There is not enough energy and commitment to build up a healing-praxis. Sometimes there is motivation to do steps in this direction, but soon this impulses and drive is gone again. It is very frustrating to see that over all theses decades I have not managed to develop my skills, to follow my way, the way of my essence, which is – I am sure – to do some kind of healing work. (I am 53 now). Could it be that I have to awaken fully first? That my purpouse of life is awakening and not doing healing-work? I have to find a solution to stabilize my existence, I don`t want to be dependant of my parents financial support any longer. What is important now and what can I do to finally use this gift of healing and supporting people? Thank you so much! Greetings and love from Switzerland Stina
Hello, Stina,
Thank you for your wonderful question.
It is wonderful that you have the insight that your mind and thoughts are creating your suffering. And that you are practicing to observe these thoughts, detach from them (realize they are not you) and be open to, accept and feel the emotions in the body. Wonderful!
And there is still suffering. This is neither bad nor good. Suffering can be used as motivation to awaken to your True Self, which is not a self at all. If it is used in this way than it is wonderful, although not pleasant.
Through this suffering you are discovering what this sense of a separate self really is. It is not only the cause of all this suffering, it is suffering itself. Can you see this? Can you feel this?
When you are free of this sense of a separate self, it will not matter to you if you are a healer or anything else. Life will take over. You will have no more preferences. You will just trust life to be life. Whatever you do, it is because life needs it at that moment. It will all arise completely spontaneously.
Often what we find life doing through us is the most authentic to what we really are. We are life itself, but there is a certain unique flavor to how life moves through us compared to how it moves through another expression of life. Clearly you are expressing in a way different from that of a tree or a frog. And you are also expressing in a way different from other human beings. This continues. So there is a very good chance that you may find yourself healing people. You will simply do it in a much more effective, powerful and beneficial way. And it won’t feel like there is a separate you doing it. It will just happen. Life knows far more than our limited human minds ever could or ever will.
Yes, you are correct. Awakening is the most important thing right now. As long as you still feel you are a separate self, you will suffer, you will have problems. The painful benefit of this is that life is showing you this. And it is motivating you, through suffering, to continue on your path to awakening and wake up. It is painful, but it is all going in the right direction.
If your parents are still helping support you, this is a wonderful opportunity to focus as much energy as you can on waking up. Whatever you do, use it to direct you to Truth. Not your special, separate truth, but Truth itself. When you heal, how is this Truth? When you worry about money, how is this Truth? How is everything in your life directing you to Truth? This is happening, but you must see it. You must open to it. You must feel it deep inside, where Truth is.
Very simple techniques, just being present. Yes, this is very good. Truth is extremely simple and obvious. Our minds only like complexity and effort. So just being is True. And if you can really just Be, Truth will arise for you. Just being and Truth are very connected, very intimate.
Think of everything that is happening in your life, moment to moment, as an invitation to Truth, an invitation to wake up. When you do this, you will also see that everything that has happened in your life was always the same. It was always an invitation to Truth, an invitation to wake up.
Here is something else that is very easy, simple and obvious. Notice that everything that feels good, free, effortless, peaceful, loving and spacious happens when you are in alignment with Truth. And everything that feels not good, constrained, limiting, small, anxious, fearful, conflict, annoyance, anger, lack, etc. is when you are not in alignment with Truth. This is your inner guidance system. You are already paying attention, feeling your emotions in the body. So now you can use this inner guidance system to show you when you are in alignment with Truth (going in the right direction) and when you are moving away from Truth (going in the wrong direction). It is just like the GPS system in a car. It shows you when you are going in the right direction and when you are going in the wrong direction. Pay attention to this. Listen carefully. And make the appropriate course correction.
It is not as easy as the GPS system in a car that has a graphic visual map and voice commands. You have to pay closer attention to these feelings. But they are all here to help you. All negative feelings are directly connected to the ego, the sense of a separate self. When there is no sense of a separate self, negative feelings are impossible. So doubt, feelings of lack, mistrust, self-criticism, anxiety about the future, regrets about the past, all these are directly connected to the sense of a separate self. Without that sense of a separate self, these feelings cannot arise. Who would they arise to or relate to?
Feelings of peace, well-being, happiness, freedom, love all arise when this sense of a separate self is either not here at the moment or is very limited. Pay close attention and notice if this is true in your life. Notice if this is always true in your life and has always been true.
When we understand this, we can use this inner GPS system to not only relieve our suffering but to help us wake up. Used in this way, a negative feeling is just as good as a positive one. They are both directing us to Truth. Since the negative feelings are particularly good at grabbing our attention (pain is the best way to grab our attention), they can be even more useful than the positive feelings. This way instead of being a victim of negative feelings and overwhelmed by them, we use them to our benefit. And this was always their intended use and purpose.
To prevent being overwhelmed by these negative emotions, which you are now going to be even more open to than before so you can learn from them, you need to make space for them. Use the video I posted on Facebook and will post on this website soon about the Practice of Space to show you how to increase this feeling of space. As long as you make enough space for any negative emotion, it cannot overwhelm you. You are already infinite space, but this will begin to draw your attention to this.
I hope I answered some of your questions.
And thank you for giving me the gift of your questions and your presence.
Love,
Peter
Awesome reply Peter. Thank you.
Hi Peter,
I am new to the website and so pleased to have found it. I have been awakening for at least 20 years. What I have not been able to manage is remaining awake when I am around people. I find myself just isolating myself from them to avoid the drama of the dream. I can definitely still see the light within them, but I do not see how to relate to them at all without getting sucked in. I easily feel the negativity and I can feel myself contracting immediately. I have read that I need to stay open and allow the light to change others……I know no one that is focused on awakening. I have connected with others through reading a kazillion books on spirituality. Any advice you have is appreciated.
I also often have one big struggle that maybe you can help me with…maybe not. What is the purpose of it all? If we have never been anything but Love and nothing on the physical level changes anything and we all return to the same place we never really left. What is it all about? Sometimes, it makes me want to give it all up. What is it for?
Thank you Peter for listening to these questions. I appreciate your service.
Leanna
Hi Leanna,
This is very common and I had exactly the same experience. As a result, I would spend up to a year at a time with no contact with people. Free of those distractions I lived in pure bliss and love. For over 6 years I needed to spend at least 3 months of every year isolated from human contact. Now I have learned to remain solid in this peace while being with people, in conversations, etc. It took some time. It is a process.
You are aware when you are triggered back into the common illusion of a separate self. This conditioning is very thorough and it is easy to be triggered back into it after we have experienced some freedom. It is natural to avoid this triggering and distraction after you have experienced some freedom. For a while we need to isolate ourselves from these constant distractions until the freedom becomes the new normal.
As you begin to awaken you also become more sensitive. You become aware of the energy, thoughts, and feelings of others. Energy has a tendency to even out, to find a mid point. If your vibrational frequency is high (love, peace, happiness) and a group of people’s energy is not as high, your frequency will tend to go down and theirs will come up to reach a mid point average.
Our own will and personal energy is not strong enough to counteract this tendency when there are many people. But we can open to energy that is beyond our personal self and personal energy. We can open to universal energy, the Quantum Field, divine energy, God. This will raise our own personal energy even higher than it was before and at the same time raise the vibrational frequency of all the other people even if there are hundreds. It’s kind of amazing, but it works. This is what I do in transmissions. It is not my personal energy. It is this vast infinite field of energy I surrender my personal self to. In this way and only in this way I can be in a group of hundreds of people and not have my vibrational frequency lowered but actually increased and somehow all of their energy is also increased. It takes full and complete surrender of all aspects of a personal self. I think of it as dissolving a grain of salt (my personal self) in an infinite ocean of Love (God).
Purpose is a human thought, a concept. Reality is far beyond anything the human mind can understand or conceive of. Nothing is as it appears to be. And yet it all is. In every moment the purpose and your purpose are absolutely and fully complete. What that purpose is I cannot tell you in words or thoughts. The best I can say is to be fully present in this moment until you experience the full miracle of it. This miracle is beyond anything you can think or imagine. From this presence, everything will make sense. Although none of it will make sense to your mind or my mind. It is beyond the ability of human thought to conceive. We are wonderful instruments in these human bodies, but quite limited compared to our True Nature. Stil, this all serves a purpose. Be present, let go of thoughts, and you will see.
I hope this was helpful.
Thank you Peter! It is just what I needed to hear. It makes perfect sense. I love and appreciate your transmissions and will practice following your guidance on these issues.
Thank you, Leanna.