Session 8: Conclusions
OVERVIEW
Introduction to the twin paths of Empowerment and Awakening,
The necessity of surrender/acceptance expectation of the outcome, and
Pointers to the realization of a much greater Awareness.
Conclusions
Along the path of empowerment, the path of awakening, there are countless realizations.
To name them all would be like trying to drink the ocean with a fork.
Some of these, such as the nature of attachment, doing things for the sake of doing them without regard for results, mastering integrity, and more, are more central than others.
If you explore some of my other work, I go into detail on these and many other concepts and pointers in much greater detail.
With the toolsets and understandings gained from these videos, you will at least be able to make physical living not so much a chore. The body decays over time. It doesn’t need to get in your way.
The idea is not to chase pleasure. Desiring pleasure is to try to quench my thirst with saltwater; the more I get it, the more I want it. To want pleasure is to lack it. What is one to do?
There is no Way. Nobody knows the Way. The only way there is is the path of a bird across the sky, leaving no trace in its passing.
Life is not going anywhere.
There is nothing to be attained.
This may be impossible to admit that our well-laid traps for happiness are just a bunch of ways of kidding ourselves that by meditation, psychoanalysis, hatha yoga, zen Buddhism, or mental science, we are somehow going to save ourselves from a final plop into nothing.
To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One: “I give up.”
The Awareness that’s aware of reading this text, before a feeling appears, is the same exact changeless Awareness that is aware of the feeling while it is present and begging for your attention (which is fine).
Rest as Awareness while your mind notices the feeling, and keep resting in the recognition that you are aware, for 2 to 5 seconds again and again.
That same Awareness present during the emotional turmoil is also present when all emotional appearances disappear from view; disappear from your awareness in that moment.
Then you remain with that which you always already were—I-I, I AM Aware, the pure I.
This can be likened to space or, say, to sky.
Clouds appear all the time in the sky. In fact, in a sense, you can say they’re “made out of sky”—they are due to sky, they are enabled by sky.
Without the spaciousness of the sky, the presence of the clouds could not be present.
Very similarly, the presence of your emotions, the presence of your energy, and Presence in general, could not be present without the space of Awareness.
It is inside of this spacious Awareness—this cognizance, this ability to know, this universal ability to know this moment—that Presence in all of its forms can occur.
So, while these clouds appear in the sky, the sky is not actually affected. The sky’s coloring, the sky’s density, the sky’s energy is affected, but those are the contents.
Awareness, remember, is the container for the content, for the appearances.
A movie screen is not affected by the appearances that are projected onto it, even if the movie is very dramatic and very intense.
At the end of the movie, when the projector is turned off, the screen is still the screen.
Now, the screen was still that same exact screen, even with the light projected onto it in different forms, showing different motion pictures.
But during the movie, we don’t tend to notice the screen, because the movie is so engaging, so entertaining.
The movie sucks us into the story of it, into the definitions we’ve built up around it.
Similarly, we tend to only see and perceive what is projected onto the field of Awareness, but we miss the fact that there is the Awareness of it. Just as you are aware of the pains of your body, and the pleasure of its grace, you are aware of it. You are not it.
The more clearly you see that you are not affected by even your own thoughts and emotions, by stories and beliefs and history and past and future projections, the freer you are.
You’re free; you’re free from yourself, and that is the highest freedom you could ever wish for. Freedom from yourself.
Similarly, when your emotional fireworks start firing off and exploding in your sky of Awareness, is the fact that you are aware affected? No.
What is the answer to freedom? What is the solution to suffering?
It is to rest as who you truly are, to rest as the immaculate changeless sky, so that, in no uncertain terms, you can become convinced experientially of the fact that it does not matter what happens.
You will also start to relinquish attachment to outcome. This does not necessarily mean you become passive about your life, or become a couch potato.
It does not mean you stop engaging with your life. It simply means you realize that at the core of your being, you’re not affected by outcome; you’re not dependent on outcome.
The more you simply rest and relax in, or as, Awareness, the large majority of your expectations, of your tightly held beliefs and expectations for certain outcomes (because you’ve identified yourself with the movie of your life, you believe you need to have these outcomes in order to gain liberation, to feel free) won’t matter to you as much anymore.
You will start to simply develop a very relaxed, confident attitude throughout life, no matter what occurs, because your identity is no longer dependent on the forms of Presence-Consciousness.
It simply rested in the truth of the I; the purity of I; the constant free nature of “I am spacious clarity—free Awareness—I am the first principle of Infinity.”
You don’t have to remove all your stories.
You don’t have to stop thinking altogether forever. You don’t need to control your mind in any way. All you need to do is to interrupt—just tease, just interrupt—that seeming continuity of the denseness of mind, of the thinking mind, and it will all fall apart for you, effortlessly.
The illusion of it will be revealed and it will no longer seem real. And then you won’t believe in your troubles or your drama as much anymore.
Because now you know it’s fake; now you know it’s self-projected; now you know it’s an illusion.
And when you know it’s an illusion, you can even have fun with it, as long as you are always clear of the fact that you are transcendentally free Awareness, untouched, unaffected by the changing forms of the story, of the movie, of the illusion.
This is all established very effortlessly by interrupting the continuity of thought for 2 to 5 seconds several times a day.
This is the highest teaching.
If you want to peek behind the curtain of this course, to know and understand and experience for yourself the mechanisms of why yoga works, to understand why you can recondition your body, and to take it to the next level, to recondition your mind, to take active, conscious direct control over your emotional state, to transcend limiting beliefs and to seriously apply these principles to your yoga practice, check out The Horizontal Path.
I want you to enjoy the difficult parts of life. To relish the pain that living brings. Not to suffer, but simply to see that life has meaning. That you matter. That you are infinitely valuable and important and wonderfully unique.
Life has meaning precisely because it is finite.
Mortality gives meaning to human life.
Peace, love, friendship, these are precious because we know they cannot endure.
A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all.
And you, my friend, are no caterpillar, you are no butterfly, you are not your pain, your traumas, your body or your mind. You, your true nature, are that which remains in the absence of all this.
You are.
And I love you.
Goodbye.
Next Steps
There are no endings, only new beginnings.
Please continue to the final chapter of this series!