Welcome back to the Art Meditation Podcast for the next in our series.
I'm Hugo and I'm here with Bergs.
Hi Hugo.
Hello and today I'm going to be interviewing Bergs on safeguarding our consciousness which follows on from the previous two podcasts the long out breath and the give back generation.
So Bergs as many people know we are now as a global society facing many challenges but we hear about we hear about this conscious awakening that everyone's undergoing and if we look at ourselves across society we find that we're more technologically advanced than we've ever been.
We've got more technology,
We know more about the solar system,
About the planet,
About how things work.
We see progress all around us so why is it that you're positing this idea that we need to safeguard our consciousness when it seems like we're more advanced than we've ever been.
I think in order to answer that question we first of all need to separate the idea of consciousness from this notion of intellect.
Now consciousness is the vehicle through which we have the experience that we are having.
Intellect is our capacity to understand ourselves and our experience but the square root of our experience is how we feel within ourselves and this felt quality of what's happening to us is the basic ground of that experience.
So when I'm saying we need to safeguard consciousness I'm saying we need to safeguard the quality of how we feel within the experience that we're having and that is something that I see is degenerating.
Now we as you've just said are more informed,
We're more intelligent,
We appear to be more intelligent than we have ever been but if we are more intelligent than we've ever been why are we making such poor decisions about how we live our lives that are leading us into the situation where as humanity our presence here on this planet is so precarious not just our presence but the whole sustained or the whole sustainability of life itself on this planet is now at great risk.
So surely if life itself is the fundamental principle that needs to be upheld and maintained and guarded and nourished how is it that the quality of life itself is in such a dangerous position when we are supposed to be more intelligent than we've ever been.
So this is what I'm saying it's consciousness,
The quality of our consciousness and the quality of our experience that is now peaked and started to degenerate not the quality of our intellect that is obviously still breaking new ground our ability to to build new technologies and to understand things that are deeper and deeper level at a sort of intellectual level is still growing but the quality of our experience that's what I'm saying the quality of our experience is peaked and now is degenerating.
Now of course that's not necessarily the case everywhere there's many people on this planet where the quality of their experience is still very very challenging but these are the people who are putting the planet in great risk.
We as the modern involved provided for sectors of humanity are the ones whose quality of our experience peaked and is now degenerating and rapidly so and we need to look and recognize the qualities and the areas in which this degeneration is happening.
So I've got with me this book this your book The Survival Guide to Staying Conscious and there is a chapter chapter 5 which is which is entitled Are We As Conscious As We Think We Are and the opening paragraph have you noticed how when you ask someone how they feel what they will almost always tell you is what they're thinking.
When asked how do you feel instinctively we go up to our mind to ask ourselves how we feel because we don't know how we feel.
Are you suggesting here that one of the reasons for our loss of consciousness is because of the way in which we approach our experience so we're so removed now from how we feel because we've become so international.
Yes exactly that becoming numb is the way we cope with experiences that essentially are good for us don't make us feel well or are not for our well-being.
When you experience something that is unsettling you've got a choice you either respond to that by changing the experience or your approach to the experience or you become numb so you don't feel where you're challenged.
What's happening at so many levels of our lives we are living our lives in ways where we aren't nourishing ourselves at a level of consciousness to the point where we feel challenged,
Unsettled,
Stressed,
Anxious,
Worried,
Afraid and all these negative emotions that are arising within us that are basically arising in order to show us that the way we live in our lives isn't for our well-being and unable to respond or unwilling to respond or afraid of what's implied by the need to respond we allow ourselves to become numb in the stages so that we can continue to sanction that behavior that at a deeper level we know isn't for our well-being.
So that's working at so many levels for example in the pursuit of a more affluent lifestyle and the acquisition of more things but by which we can support that lifestyle we put ourselves under inordinate pressure that our system psychologically and emotionally is really challenged just to go through our daily life for the purposes of supporting ourselves and in order to continue to do that we almost have to pretend to ourselves that we aren't feeling unwell to the point where many people are getting up and going to do a job that is meaningless for them and the only meaning is the fact that it is the means by which they can acquire more and the idea of acquiring more is their perception of how they can improve their life and in that sort of cycle that we get locked into we shut down to the sort of deeper qualities of our experience like how am I feeling within myself how am I relating to those around me how am I relating to life at large so whether it's something like having to get up and spend three hours a day traveling to or from work in an incredibly congested environment which is really quite painful if we're actually to pay attention to it or being willing to sit in an office with 15 or 20 or a hundred phones going off at the same time full of wireless technology that's bombarding us energetically that's destabilizing us at a subtle energetic level if we actually felt that we would be really unwell and so in order to cope with being in these kind of environments we shut down our capacity to feel now when you shut down your capacity to feel what is unpleasant you also at the same time shut down your capacity to feel what is present because it's exactly the same mechanism by which we feel stress and anxiety as we feel joy and pleasure it's a self quality to our experience and it's felt through the same mechanisms and it's not just something that's going on in our minds so when becoming numb in the face of something that's challenging means becoming numb to those things that have the capacity to enrich our lives and so what's happening where once maybe two or three generations ago a social gathering down the pub of an evening or spending a Sunday tending to the garden or meeting with family on a regular basis sharing how we're feeling with each other our meaningful experiences and pleasurable experiences that enrich us and we get joy from simple things we used to get joy from simple things in lives in life because we weren't so overwhelmed now being overwhelmed and having to shut down and become numb in the face of that we are unable to feel these simple pleasures and appreciation a sense of gratitude a sense of joy all of these felt qualities of our experience we are becoming numb to them and so in order to get an experience that feels satisfied we need to keep stimulating ourselves more and more to have a pleasing or pleasurable experience and the catch-22 here is that as you become more stimulated so your system has to become more numb to cope with being more stimulated as you become numb you need more stimulation in order to satisfy yourself so this is downward drive this downward spiral in the quality of our consciousness whereby the real subtle fees of our experience that actually enrich the experience itself are basically being shut off shut down crowded out and we need and we're now needing to find our pleasure and our reward in grosser and grosser experiences and this is basically what I'm trying to say here that in that process and the constant need for something that gives a sense of meaning means that our levels of consumption what it requires to drive that need for stimulation gratification pushes us into into a way of life that by definition requires us to consume more and more and more at a time where it's obvious to us we really need to be consuming less and finding our pleasure in a simple way of life and we won't find that's in that simple pleasure in a simple way of life if we are numb we'll just be bored and frustrated and this is the problem so the way that we're driven now is pushing us further down the line on this way of life that we see somewhere has got to change so until we address it at a level of consciousness and at the level at which we are actually functioning being asked to make the choices that we can see we need to make we're going to actually look to try to avoid having to make those choices because we can't see any meaning or pleasure or reward in them we just see it as a sacrifice we see it as having the things that we are now we've worked so hard for being taken away from us interesting there's a lot there's a lot in what you've just said and I'd like to come back to various parts of that over the course of this interview but I think the first thing that I'd like to pull out of that is you said we've got to look at this at a level of consciousness consciousness is an elusive thing for for most of us and it's not a very well defined thing that necessarily we understand and yet it's the basis of our experience well let's look at let's define consciousness as our capacity to be aware of the experience that we're having at every level the ideas that we add to that experience that is just our mind with our mind we add all kinds of ideas but the the mental process itself is a layer that we add to the basic ground of the experience itself which is our simple awareness of what is happening yeah now something�ルen something unpleasant is happening there is an unpleasant feeling with it and there is a an awareness that this is an unpleasant experience when something pleasurable is happening there is a pleasurable feeling that we have and there is an awareness that this is a pleasurable experience there is an innate intelligence within us that is always capable of informing us whether or not an experience one experience or another is for our well-being being or to our detriment and that is how we feel that how we feel about the experience or how we feel within the experience is the marker of whether that experience is essentially for our well-being or essentially for our detriment and when you lose that quality of consciousness that intelligence that informing intelligence starts to degenerate and degrade and our ability to make wise decisions about the way that we live our lives and to drive our lives in terms of the quality of how we're feeling starts to break down and now our life is driven by the ideas that we have or the ideas that we generate about what we think we should be doing or what we think might be for our well-being and happiness and we're now driven by our intellect and not by our consciousness and even even that being driven by our intellect our intellect itself even if we've lost our ability to feel what's happening to us our intellect is still capable of showing us now because the situation has got so drastic that the life we're living is not sustainable intellectually we can see it but because we can't feel it we're still willing to override that and continue to do what we're doing inspired the knowledge it's not correct and I said correct you know it's obvious that human life or the way that we're living conducting our lives on mass can't go on forever so you know without the ability to feel we will not make the decisions that even our intellect is now telling us we need to make because we're numb enough to continue to section unhealthy behavior so within this one of the things that we're increasingly talking about nationally is the rise of mental health problems how does this loss of feeling the loss of ability to connect with our experience relates to the rise in childhood adolescent and and and adult depression and proliferation of mental illness well the basic fundamentals of an inner sense of well-being which is the basic ground our own happiness are brought about through a sense of equilibrium of balance that we can get we feel we recognize we encounter within ourselves now when you drive your decisions about how you live your life by regardless of whether they're correct or incorrect assumptions at an intellectual level it still remains a fact that at a deeper level we are aware of whether we feel well within ourselves and whether we feel we are moving in a direction towards our wellness young children before they leave school and our study to be depressed now at one level they're going through the same process that we've gone through for generations it used to be childhood depression kids used to have challenges of course they did there was bullying there was not coping very well there was worries and anxieties yes but enormous increase in depression that we're seeing in children now is on account of the fact that as innately intelligent beings even before our intellect matures we know whether we are well within ourselves and a child under the pressures that it is under growing up long before it can look out to the world and decide whether it's going to cope out there knows fundamentally whether it feels well within itself whether it feels secure whether it feels it's it's able to cope with what to put in front of it or whether it feels overwhelmed kids feel overwhelmed by the degree to which they are stimulated to be the degree to which they are challenged to the degree that they are in environments that are fundamentally unhealthy and basic markers that give us a sense of well-being are not present so even though they may well have a loving mother and father they may have friends at school all of the basics may be in place but the energetic challenges upon them are too much the degree to which they are overwhelmed by what's going on around them is too much the degree to which they are overstimulated is too much that somewhere inside they feel unable to cope with what is being asked of them and that's the same whether you are a child or whether you're an adolescent growing up or whether you are somebody you know in the middle of your life trying to carve out your career or coming to the end of your life that basic sense of well-being that comes from knowing that you are settled within your self settled within your life settled within the world around you it gives a sense of well-being the lack of that sense of being settled within ourselves within our environment that is the cause for this massive increase in depression I think this brings us on actually quite nicely to another key theme in your book which is the role that technology plays in all of this you talk about this this sense of not being well within ourselves where's that coming from well so they're all so there's the chip the pace of life and the degree of stimulation that we are exposed to and and this will come on to talk about the idea of this being so focused on projecting myself at an individual level and the insecurities about whether I cannot hold my individual sense of self in a highly competitive environment but behind and I think this is the elephant in the room because you know across the board people are recognizing that we are not coping at a number of levels but we need to understand the consciousness itself and life itself is electrical and electromagnetic by nature the presence of the sign of life within a human being within any life form is the presence of a very subtle electrical currents through our nervous system electromagnetic fields conducting this information that drives our lives and extremely delicate now these technologies that we are now using also run on electromagnetism so the human life is an extremely coherent intelligent mutable responsive field of electromagnetism and we are living within these highly discordant this dysfunctional incoherent electromagnetic fields but the intensity of which are increasing and increasing and increasing year by year and exponential rates to the point where I don't quote me on this but I you might know better than I do but I remember somebody telling me recently that we are now exposed to something like 30,
000 times more microwave radiation than we were 30 years ago now you know there is absolutely no way that we can anticipate what the longer term effects of that are actually going to be but I can tell you when I'm looking at meeting people and people coming to see me explaining to me the problems that they're facing how they're feeling the depression the anxiety the panic attacks all of these things that insomnia that people are suffering with and I look at them as at a subtle energetic level and I look at how one of the things I do first and foremost is get a sense of the degree of coherence or incoherence that people are carrying within this field of life or vital current that's moving through them and the degree of incoherence that we are now living with our body is bombarded with it's just I in it's inhuman it's inhuman you know everything on this planet was an expression of consciousness and life and then we started to produce things ourselves and we and you know the things that we as humans are able to create appear within that natural order and then we started to produce electromagnetism which is the current that conveys consciousness and then at that point not only did our creation start to impose themselves upon the natural order but our creation started to impose themselves upon the order of consciousness and that's the elephant in the room because so far it's not entered into mainstream debate but I would say that long before the physical body the physiological body starts to suffer and it will and it is already starting to suffer through the exposure to this radiation consciousness started to suffer much earlier and our brains are still able to function we're still able to have our thoughts and our sense of what we're doing as far as an intellectual and a mental level is still intact and because that hasn't broken down it doesn't appear to be any harm at a consciousness level by being exposed to this technology but when you start to ask yourself how do I feel and if you're really honest with yourself and I ask this often of people how do you feel within yourself the degree to which people feel unsettled and disturbed has increased tremendously but not only the degree to which I feel undisturbed I that there's an unpleasant experience that I'm having but the degree to which I am able to feel things like empathy feels things like loving kindness things like appreciation things like joy things like happiness that's this is where this numbness that I'm talking about is creeping in because we feel empathy through resonance with a sense of resonance with another person now that resonance only works within a coherent electromagnetic field once our own electromagnetic field is violated and becomes discordant we don't feel resonance with those around us so our sense of being connected from one with one person and up another or our ability to connect to how another person is feeling when they're telling us how they're feeling we feel that we've seen that within us it's not just the result of somebody telling me how their day was it's a result of I'm present with this person and I get a sense of what they're going through and that sense of what another person is experiencing we can't feel it we can only think about it now and that you know that's the I from my point of view is the most fundamental level of which consciousness is breaking down because we will say that you know we make this claim that we're all connected that all life is connected well how is it connected it's connected through this current and this flow of consciousness and the ability to feel our own presence within the presence of what's going on around us when that breaks down we we don't see it our own presence in relation to what's going on around us we feel isolated within ourselves and all that we end up with is a sense of what's going on around me is going on as something separate from me and I no longer have ability to feel how I relate to it so we don't care about each other the way we should we can't because we can't feel what each other are feeling and that lack of regard for the quality of our experience and the quality of the experience of others allows us to sanction that behavior that is not for our own well-being and to sanction our well-being of others allows us to sanction that behavior that is not for the well-being of the planet otherwise if we were the most intelligent species on the planet we simply wouldn't be living the way we are living all stop it's really really worth fighting and working to reclaim your deepest part of your heart and its capacity to feel none of us are inherently greed or aversion rooted and that it is all in truth when it does arise in us selfishness of any kind it is all a reflection of not understanding or some kind of confusion but what in truth we're missing which if we weren't missing it we would not feel greed or aversion or selfishness is that connection not just to the stillness but what actually that stillness contains because when we do touch that place when we do get to the place that we are really in touch with what is deepest part of our heart we know that there's nothing lacking nothing lacking and the tragedies that we would feel that we get to the place where we feel there is so much lacking I mean particularly when we have such an extraordinary life that is so unfathomable fathomably rare and it's it's completely understandable that we feel something is lacking all the time but we don't know where to look to find what feels to be missing and we run around like rabbits in a spotlight war whatever in any direction looking for something that's going to give that meaning to my life that means I can just settle down now and get on with it that search can go on for our whole life often does when that connection is lacking in us why would we think to look for it in a quiet moment when nothing of any particular interest is going on we wouldn't it's quite possibly the last place that we would look and so it's completely to be expected that we as humanity would have turned every stone over that we could possibly turn over in the search for something that is going to be ultimately meaningful to us and goodness me haven't we unturned a few stones in that search and it feels almost that the more stones we unturn more rabbit holes we go down the further away from that deepest part of us again so you know I want to say to you that whatever else you choose to do in your life doing whatever you have to do to end that numbness is what you should do because I promised you when it's gone your quest for meaning in your life will be over and you'll understand what you came here for there is an intelligence that sits in the background behind your lives that is so profound and so full of love and somewhere inside you all know that it's there or if you don't realize you know it's only because you forgot but somewhere you know because it's the very ground of who and what you are all of you are some of you not some saints sitting on the top of a mountain or in a deep forest every single one of us without exception and the reason that we go away to these quiet places to these mountain tops to these forests throughout history forever folk have done it it's because somewhere inside something draws them to a truth that they know is there somewhere and actually there is a reason that when they find it they quite often stay because when you find really what is the true nature of your being what is the ground that your life actually stands upon regardless of what you think it is you'll know that it doesn't matter where you are you'll know that just to be alive is profoundly moving deeply meaningful and extraordinary and all the things that you think you have to add to it to make it something special is only because you didn't spot what it actually is so honestly if you have started to look beyond the appearance of things or started that journey don't stop even if it's incredibly hard work and even if you get knocked sideways many times please do not stop because when you have found that all of your confusion will be over and you'll realize what an unbelievable extraordinary thing it is that you're alive right now and how many unbelievable opportunities there are to do something with that life as we reclaim the quality of our the self-quality of our experience our ability to extract simple pleasures from ordinary experiences increases and I talked about this with regards to why we meditate why do we why do we meditate why is it that whilst meditating and not apparently not doing anything at all some of the most enriching and extraordinary experiences were capable of ever having come to us and that's because when we are not bombarded with disturbed by our experience we start to find a joy in almost every experience now that is a really really important and fundamental truth and until we actually experience that for ourselves we can't begin to see the truth there most people listening to what I would say I just said we go well hold on well how can I be of any interest whatsoever if you're not doing something exciting or expressive or personally gratifying and the point is that until you've started to claim that capacity to fill you won't recognize it which is why we're not looking in the right right direction but when we are already starting to become clear about the fact that we need to reduce our consumption while it now now that it is becoming mainstream understanding the way that we live our lives can't go on for much longer while we're coming to the conclusions that we have to change deeply we're now faced with okay what have I got to do to make these changes well what happens is the depth of your felt the felt quality of your experience increases and the richness of your experience returns reclaiming this consciousness that we've become numb to is that we find these simple pleasures in ordinary things and our needs gradually and in stages become fewer and so our desire to go and pursue these things that are actually prompting this consumption that's unsustainable starts to fade away so this is why I call it like the wish-fulfilling jewel it's like if we can address the quality of our consciousness then we will make the choices that we're being able to make without them being imposed upon and this is why I say if we you know here we are looking for economic solutions to our problems and social and political solutions to our problems but if we can look at it in terms of consciousness and reclaiming our consciousness our capacity to be conscious will show us it will tell us time and time again that we need to simplify our lives we need to let go the excessive things that we don't that aren't bringing us any pleasure and we need to start to breathe out in the previous podcast we looked at the sort of whole global system and the whole humanity as a whole needing to breathe out and how we bring about however are we going to make these choices well once you become more conscious as we become more conscious we make those choices for ourselves we would have made those choices for ourselves to incline ourselves towards a simpler less burdensome lives already if we had genuinely becoming bigger become more conscious because that's those are the decisions that you made the decision that you make as you become more conscious is to live more and more in resonance with the world around you and life as a whole and the decisions and the changes that you make are the changes that disincline you towards the things that keep you in a state of conflict that's what intelligence is you make the choices that are genuinely for your well-being so in this in a world where we all remained fully conscious as soon as we get to the place where we're based but we're provided for we then enter into the experience or we engage in the process of entering more and more completely into the experience that we have I mean we came here as conscious beings for the purpose of becoming fully conscious of what it is that we are what it is that we're part of and that doesn't start until we become conscious and the fact that we aren't doing it is a sign of our unconsciousness so yeah the letting go of these as we become conscious is is a completely different thing to recognizing that my life is unsustainable but I'm not sure if I'm able or willing to actually let these things go and make the changes you don't destroy your planet if you're a conscious being you know you know that's not what consciousness does every other organism on the planet lives in a way that sustains itself in the best possible way yeah and long term there isn't anything else that appeared on the planet that degenerated its environment or created a scenario where the ground for it even being here is undermined it's not that's not consciousness that's unconscious you know you don't do that the humanity would not have put itself in a position that it's in if it had remained conscious you put itself in the position that it's in because it was intellectually gifted enough to start to bend that natural order to its will and become intoxicated in what it was capable of creating and in that process completely forgot the crazy process that it's actually dependent on.
Right well thank you Bergs,
Lots to think about.
This is the end of part one we're going to play ourselves out with some music by Mount Wolf and Bergs and next time join us for part two.
I think if I could get you to do one thing I would say when you get to the point that you really feel highly motivated to just towards keeping your virtue then you'll discover quite quickly just how extraordinary a life was meant to be could be.
And it's just we get so messy it's not that we're doing lots of wrong things but our mind is so messy we don't keep it simple and we end up making the life that we're living so inordinately complicated and completely unnecessarily and it's such a shame to end up feeling in a little muddle when actually you ought to be having the time of your lives.
It doesn't actually take very much to make the deepest part of us incredibly happy you know just to be here just to appreciate to appreciate being here to feel that you're alive being touched with your heart that's it it takes mindfulness to come to human life and then above that it takes mindfulness and virtue to come to a fortunate human life the chance to be part of this happens briefly the invitation is not to show how inventive and imaginative you are but how much you can notice what you're already part of and appreciate it and share it and care about those that are around look out for their welfare while you're looking out for your own that's it and then you'll get to the end of it having had a awesome time knowing that that was something you'd recommend to others you know place inside where it's alright the world is creaking under the strain of this mass of humanity dying to just see what it's all about it's like what would it be like and came here with a sense of wonder and somehow the wonder of it wasn't enough for you and in your wondering about yourself you forgot what you came here for what you came to be a part of
