OVERVIEW
When we seek in our lives, that seeking is often outside ourselves – acceptance, affirmation, success, recognition, financial abundance and many other things. The truth of your life is that whatever happens to you is actually experienced within. To awaken to a deeper experience of life is actually to come home to yourself. “Try on” some new ideas about Life along with practices to experience it more deeply.
TRANSCRIPTION
So there was a zen master that everyone respected, but he never offered any teaching. He would simply walk around with a stick, with a sack attached to it. And in that sack he carried a bunch of sweets and a lot of stuff. And every time he would go to a town, he would take his sack off and he would share the suites with the children. But he would never offer any teaching to anyone. And so there was another zen master who found this very irritating and he decided he needed to test him. So he calls him over and he says, What is zen? And the man drops his pack and he stands up straight. And then the other zen master says to him, What is the goal of zen? And he picks up his S sac, he slings it over his shoulder and he walks away.
And so that’s really what our spiritual practice is about. It’s about letting go of everything and being able to let go of our sac, if you will. But then if we choose to pick it up again, that we don’t feel that we’re carrying a load anymore. It gives us a different way of moving through life. And Ro dos tells us that the game of awakening is subtle. We assume our thoughts are reality with the capital R, right? But suffering is just a set of thoughts, right? Suffering is thoughts. And a lot of the spiritual path is about setting down our suffering so that we can move through the things that happen in our life but not suffer.
And we can get caught up in semantics, right? Like what does it mean to it? Awaken. What does it mean to be enlightened? What does it mean to be conscious? And so let’s talk about what awareness is not right. What is awareness? Not awareness is not mental alertness. Like we can think that if we’re mentally alert that we’re awake, but our mental alertness really is given to us to protect us in life, to keep us safe. Sad Guru says, Awareness is not something you do. Awareness is something which you are. Awareness is your very aliveness. You’re very beingness itself. And when we’re aware, right, we’re inclusive, we embrace everyone, we embrace everything we might say. We practice our oneness. That’s a word that we use here. But to be aware or awake, whatever word we choose to use, we have to set the right conditions in our life.
And do we set these conditions in our life? It is through our practice and it’s through also preparing our body, our thought, our emotions, so that we can step in with sort of aligned energy. When we do that, then our awareness or awakeness, whatever word we wanna use, is gonna blossom. And how do we know that that’s what’s happening, right? How do you know you’re becoming more awake, more aware? You know, sometimes it’s um, through kind of extreme experiences, right? You hear stories about people who have like, you know, a, a very extreme experience. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it might just be like I’m meditating and I feel something larger than myself. Or I’m praying or someone’s praying for me and I feel the energy expand out beyond myself. I remember the first time I felt that I was at Machu Pichu and I was kind of new on the alternative path.
I didn’t meditate, but I did sign up to go on a trip with Wayne Dyer, who was a very quiet person by the way. And he barely taught the whole time we were there. But there were lots of other wonderful people on the trip. And so they would take us out and you’re on this beautiful mountain and we would meditate. And that was the first time I ever felt the energy beyond myself. And I would say I kind of felt like I lifted outta my body. I had no idea what I was doing, but that was the first time I was aware of it. And spiritual places can help us, right? Because the energy, they say a lot of these places were chosen because the energy moves upward. We just came back from Mexico and we went to a couple of sacred sites. And one of our guides, Oscar said, you know, it’s the weirdest thing at the highest point here.
Um, a place called Monte Alban, which was one of their ancient sites, um, down near Oaxaca. He said, Compasses don’t work when you get to the highest place. You know? And they were very related to the directions, right, and the ancient path, but he said they don’t work. And that makes perfect sense to me cuz the energy moves up, something about the site, the energy moves up. And that’s why these places were chosen. You know, it also happens when we gather together. Have you ever noticed that when you’re meditating with other people you can really feel things differently? It also happens through music. You know, the beautiful music that they just shared, I am Light. It happens through music too. You can begin to feel something that is bigger than yourself and what exactly is happening when you’re experiencing this. So I’m gonna talk for a second about the five elements.
We don’t talk about that a lot, but water, fire, earth, air, and ether, the first four of those elements exist within each of us. But the ether is actually outside of us. And each person has what is called an ACO field, which is about 18 to 21 inches around you. It’s an energy field. Some teachers teach like Amit Gwai, who, who was in what? The bleep who’s a physicist, who became a spiritual dude, interesting. But he believes that even the intelligence of your body is in this akasha field. That the organs, that that is how your body knows how to work. And so when we pray, we love to talk about healing, right? When we pray, we’re tapping. We are actually praying in that field. We’re not praying in our physical and mental body. We’re praying in that field. We’re putting the energy out there. That’s actually where healing happens. And so that is why it is so important for us to gain awareness. Because when we practice, we tap into that field.
And what keeps us from that field is all our humanness, right? Our compulsions, our concerns, our intellect. But that field is really beyond our intellect. It’s beyond our identity. And when you experience that sense of timelessness, has anyone ever experienced it? I’m sure you have. You’re here. You know, when you experience that sense of timelessness, there’s a great sense of peace. It’s like you’re tapped into the intelligence of life itself. And it’s only as humans by the way, who need to figure everything out. Like in nature, things just sort of work themselves out cuz there’s a greater intelligence working here. So we’re gonna do some practice together in a, in a little while. But I wanna talk about a few different ways, few different kinds of ways to think about things to help you to deepen in your awareness. The first one is what Rob read to us.
Enlightenment is not an attainment or an achievement, it’s a homecoming. So it’s already in you, right? You’re not separate from it. We’ve been taught by conventional religion that things are outside of us. But the truth is, it’s in you. You can’t be separate from it. And that’s why we’re on this path. And our senses make us think we’re experiencing the outside, right? Even things like love, we think or we touch someone, we think we’re experiencing the outside, but where are you experiencing it? You’re it inside of you, right? So we’re never really having an experience on the outside, we just think we are. And so when we have this homecoming that Rob read to us about, that’s enlightenment. But what keeps us from enlightenment is our mental constructs, right? Good, bad, all the, all the ways we define life. That’s what keeps us from that.
And when we buy into these constructs of the world, right? It fractures our own sense of oneness. It can build our own sense of separation, right? We’ve been told that who we are is about the outside, but that’s not the truth, right? Our true happiness, our true sense of wellbeing, it is within each and every one of you. That’s where it is. You know, I was thinking about how thought fractures us, right? Garden of Eden, what was that story about? They ate from the tree of life, right? The tree of knowledge. And then they realized their separation, right? They were separate, but what were they really doing? They were thinking when they started thinking they became separated from their spirit. I think that’s what that story’s really about. But the truth of who we are is that we are part of a borderless unity. We often call that oneness here, right?
And and like science actually proves this now that everything is connected. We don’t live like everything’s connected, but everything is connected. And even love, I wanna talk about love for a second. You know, love is a phenomenon that happens within you. We can think that love is something that is happening on the outside, but love is a phenomenon that’s happening within you. And Ernest Holmes talked about love and law. And I’ve said this before, at the end of his life, he said he wished he had spent more time on the love. And when I think about that, I think about, you know, what is that love? It’s this nature that we’re part of. It’s this divine intelligence is the love. Like he spent a lot of time on the what’s in your thought part of this teaching instead of this nature of God. And so we wanna cultivate this nature within ourselves and how do we do that? We do that through our practice.
But all of this requires us to step into a place of curiosity and not knowing, which is really hard for us. We’ve been taught that the intellect is the supreme power <laugh>, right? But we wanna step into just trusting and not knowing. And I know that can be very difficult, especially if you look at what’s happening in the world. Like you reading about these poor people who lost their homes in the hurricane and stuff. And you can say, where’s that higher intelligence of that? And the truth is, we’re never gonna know. We’re never gonna know what the higher intelligence that’s happening in any of these things. But we know when we turn back within that, then we can experience peace within ourselves and we can then be in a more, um, loving place within ourselves to be available to other people because we’re at peace within ourselves. And that’s why we do our practice. It’s not that we pretend it’s not happening in the world of form, it’s that we’re reminding ourselves of our true nature and then we can move from that place.
Ro dos says one of the be benefits of meditation is that we begin to be rooted in a space of awareness. He calls it practicing quietness. And what happens when we practice quietness, we can pull back from our own life. We can simply observe our life. It’s our story. It’s our movie that’s happening. But we become less attached to what’s happening when we separate, you know, when we draw back from it and we can let go of the labels of knowing what it means. Even we can just observe what’s happening. And I’ve been really working with this idea of how uncomfortable we are with discomfort, right? We’re so uncomfortable with discomfort, <laugh>, At least I’m noticing how uncomfortable I am with discomfort. I mean even silly things like Rich doesn’t have global entries. So we had to wait in the big long line. And I, like I noticed in my head I’m like, Oh, I’m so resistant.
How uncomfortable is this? It’s midnight. No one, no one’s at the airport. This is fine. But like that’s just my own mind wanting everything to be convenient and comfortable all the time. But if you think about what are we really longing for? We think we’re longing for the stuff on the outside, like ease, abundance, the job, the relationship, whatever. But we’re actually longing for this allness to really feel like we are part of this. We’re part of this bigger thing, this bigger connection. And when we’re feeling that, we’re not worried about what’s happening on the outside. We’re not experiencing separation, we’re feeling at peace.
So one of the other ideas I want to give to everyone is just this idea that your mind is the servant of your spirit, not the other way around. You know, we grew up in a belief system, uh, in the western world. I think therefore I am, that is backwards. I am therefore I think is actually the truth. I am, I’m here, I’m a a being, right? A spiritual being. And I’ve been given the ability to think, but the ability to think is not my spirit. If you think about eastern religion, so many things that focus on the chakras and stuff like that, right? It’s very much focused on being in a different place in your body. Like your soul, your spirit. We think of the heart or the solar plexus, that’s the center of intelligence, right? It’s not up here, but we think it’s up here.
And when we’re not experiencing wellbeing, what’s happened, we’ve let our thoughts kind of go haywire, right? And we’re allowing the outside world, not our inside world to drive the car of our life. And we all do it right because we’re human. But we wanna let go of the idea that an external situation is the key to any happiness in our life. We really wanna let go of that idea. You know, we and and we’re so, you know, even n our teaching, we’re so focused on, you know, first we wanna start, I’m not a victim, right? Things are not happening to me, right? We can really move into buy me like I’m doing it, I’m making it happen. You know, I’m putting my word out there and it’s coming into form. And that’s just a place on the journey. We don’t wanna stay there. We wanna move into like okay, whatever this higher intelligence is, whatever you call it, Ernest Holmes homes called it it. It’s happening through me and it’s actually happening as me. That’s the spiritual truth. You’re never separate from it. You’re never separate from this intelligence.
So when we do our spiritual practice, we’re trying to create a distinction between our mind and ourselves. You are not your mind. That’s not who you are. You are your spirit. You are this eternal part of your self. That is who you really are. And that is what we remind ourselves when we practice. And a human being who has transcended their mind is a Buddha. So Gama Buddha that he transcended his mind. But there have been many other Buddhas throughout time. There’re just not as famous as him. There’s people walking on the planet today who have transcended their mind. And when that happened for him, he was literally, he had tried everything. You know, he was an aesthetic. He went around begging, he did everything and then he sat down under a tree and that’s when it happened. When he stopped efforting. And that’s the invitation in your practice. It’s not about effort, it’s about allowing it to happen. Because if you’re doing your practice, it will happen.
And one thing you might wanna try at home is just to sit quietly for an hour and notice what thoughts arise in that hour. Don’t do a mantra or anything else. Don’t listen to music, don’t look at your iPhone for sure. But just sit quietly for an hour and notice what comes up for you that’s gonna tell you where your focus is in your life. And don’t judge it. Just notice it because then you can overcome it. You know, because we have the ability to respond in our lives. And when we take responsibility for our lives, then we respond instead of reacting, we stop being victims of circumstances and we move into action. It doesn’t mean that everything that happens is lovely, It’s not, you know, that’s one of the things I love about the Mexican people. Um, you know, we had these great guides, local people and one of ’em said, I know you’re gonna think we’re weird, but like on the day of the dead, we actually go and we go to the cemetery and we have a party.
And he is like, cuz for us death is not different. It’s just a continuation of life. And that’s really a beautiful thought because that’s actually what we believe too. But we spend, spend so much time fearing death and illness as a culture cuz we wanna be comfortable. There’s a story about Aristotle walking on the beach. And if you know anything about Aristotle, he was a pretty serious guy. He didn’t laugh a lot cuz he was trying to figure out the universe. And he is walking on the beach and it’s a beautiful day. And finally there’s this guy who gets his attention and this man has dug a really tiny hole in the sand and he’s got a tablespoon and he’s running out to the ocean and he’s filling up his tablespoon and he’s coming back and he is putting it in the water. And Aristotle’s like, What are you doing?
And the man says, I’m trying to, you know, fill this whole, fill the whole ocean into this hole. And Aristotle says, That’s madness. And the guy says, Leave me alone. I’m busy. This is important work. And Aristotle could not let it be. He’s like, What are you doing? And he said, I’m emptying the ocean into this hole. And Aristotle says, You have to stop. This is madness, this is insanity. You must stop. And the guy throws down his spoon and he said, My work is done. You are trying to put all the wonder of the entire universe into a little hole with it, which is your head. And that is madness. You have to stop.
I love that story. So we wanna stop trying to empty the whole universe into our little head. That other man by the way was her colitis, who is a very famous Greek philosopher. And it is said that, um, Aristotle had a, an awakening because of that. So the invitation for us is to, you know, stop extending logic to every aspect of our life, right? The spiritual path is not about logic. Early in our seeking, we might be trying to figure out like, why is it this way? What’s the right way? There isn’t a right way actually Ro dos says that in his book Journey of Awakening. It’s whatever path that you are on that is the right way. And we just wanna work together to move beyond our thoughts so that we’re really available to spirit. And we do that through our practice. And that’s the challenge and the invitation this month.
We have a lot of opportunities for to next Sunday. Reverend Darl, I’m sure he is gonna be talking a lot about meditation. It’s his thing after service. You know, we’ve got seven, um, spiritual laws. You couldn’t even think of the name of the class and we’re gonna do a lot. I studied at the Chopra Center. We’re gonna do a lot with the chakras and with some chanting and some other things like that just as an experience of something different. But I invite you, even if you can’t do either of those things, do something at home, try something new. There’s so much out on Insight Meditation Timer and so many other places where you can try some different things. But just mix it up a little bit in your practice and just allow yourself to be open to something new. Cuz we can get in the same habits in our practice that we get into in the rest of our life.
And that’s the habit of going to sleep, right? We can go to sleep in it. So that’s my invitation is for you to mix it up. We’re actually gonna close with a little bit of practice together. So I’m carefully gonna move this stool over and Tiffany is gonna come back and sing with me. Maybe Greg too, maybe others I don’t know. But, um, when we practice too, it can also be really helpful to do something to prepare yourself, to practice. You know, you wanna make your body comfortable and at first we can be really fidgety. Um, I can’t put my feet on the ground here, but I invite everyone to put your feet on your gr on the ground right now and to put your palms up because actually it helps you to breathe more fully when you put your palms up. And I’m gonna invite you to take three deep breaths with me in a moment. But one of the benefits of meditating and something that can help you in your awakening is to just slow your breathing down. Take less breaths each minute. So let’s breathe in together and breathe out together. Breathing in together
And breathing out. Breathing in together and breathing out. Just bring your awareness to your forehead, to your third eye. I just imagine light coming out from your forehead in the top of your head and just expanding out into this room. Let’s just sit in that together while Tiffany sings for us. So from this place of expanded awareness of the light that is the truth of your being, just speak a word of gratitude for our time together. Connecting in community, just knowing that as we turn within together, that there is a greater sense of love and connection that is happening here. And I know that we take this sense of connection out into the week, that it is the truth of our being and that we have a deeper and deeper awareness of this truth. That we are light, that we are always in everywhere connected to spirit. I just know that this is the truth and I say yes to this on all our behalf.
Grateful to know this, grateful to know that always and everywhere, all is already well grateful to know that this prayer is fulfilled. I simply say. And so it is.