Cancel The Cause Of Unconscious Suffering GF Live 6-7-25

We have an important topic to look at together.

And I think that before we're done you'll understand,

Or at least I trust that you'll have some new understanding about this topic that will allow you to meet the moments in your life that you presently do from a completely new kind of standpoint.

So,

Let's just jump into it.

I don't know about you,

But it seems that life is filled with moments that are not dissimilar.

If you can remember when you were in like grammar school or high school,

The teacher would walk in college and say,

ÌWe have a surprise exam for you today.

Î Do you remember those pop quizzes?

Maybe they don't do that anymore,

But I do.

And I always remember the sort of dread that would come over me because inevitably I didn't feel prepared for any kind of sudden test.

And I just want to bring you into that mindset to get you to pull back well enough into your own life experience and see that it seems like life is constantly throwing tests at us.

You're going to go to a family reunion,

You're going to go see your own children,

You're going to take a trip,

It doesn't matter what it is.

In a heartbeat,

It feels as if something is asking us,

Are we going to be able to succeed or not with whatever it is that this moment now unfolding in front of us is asking us.

So I think I should just stop for a second and ask if you can see that is true with me or not.

I'm looking over at the board where you're posting.

Even sometimes just waiting at a stoplight.

So I want to set the stage by asking Kate to put the title of the talk for this morning up on the screen,

Which you can see now.

It reads,

Cancel the cause of unconscious suffering before it makes you its captive.

Cancel the cause of unconscious suffering before it makes you its captive.

What does that mean?

What is this unconscious suffering that we've sort of pointed out as being this feeling of always being tested?

So let's get into it.

Have you ever wanted to tell somebody how you feel and you find yourself tongue tied?

And I'm not talking about spewing anger.

I mean,

Maybe you wanted to say something from your heart,

But for one reason or another,

Some kind of inner doubt silenced you.

Or maybe there was a moment where you had a kind of an insight of some kind.

You knew it was true.

But on the heels of that insight,

Something kind of came along and through a reaction sort of pushed you off of looking at what you had seen was true and got you thinking about what it might mean if what you just realized is true.

What is it that interrupts,

As it often does,

Moments where we are wishing to go and do,

See,

Act out something,

And we run into this sudden wall of resistance,

This giant sort of stone-like,

No,

You can't go further here.

It happens all the time.

And this isn't a rhetorical question.

I'm asking you to see a deeper truth with me,

How one way or another,

We are more often than not caught in a kind of a silent war within ourselves.

And we think that the war within us is between what's unfolding outside of us and what it brings up who we are that is given to meet that moment,

When the truth is that the source of this suffering,

Of this conflict,

Of this constant sense of being tested,

Is that we're living from a level of consciousness that we don't understand how it works.

We don't understand the source of our suffering belongs to a mind with which we are fully identified with its activity that never stops comparing who and what it takes itself to be in that moment,

The content of itself,

To what the moment it is meeting seems to be asking of it.

Let's bring up the first key lesson,

Kate,

If you will,

Please.

Read along with me.

All forms of useless suffering are created in a vain attempt to either acquire what we imagine will make us feel complete or in the equally vain attempt to escape or otherwise control what we perceive is making us feel incomplete or somehow inadequate in that moment.

This is such a big topic,

And I can only ask the powers that be to help me open your mind to see how persistent and pernicious is this sense of feeling inadequate.

Why don't we speak up if we're out to a dinner with friends and family,

Even in a casual conversation?

Why don't we agree to take on new responsibilities?

Why are we always shutting ourselves out someplace,

Our lives increasingly limited,

Not wanting to explore but more to protect whatever we think we've acquired?

And the answer is because without understanding it at all,

There is something inside of us that never,

Ever stops looking at the moment and deciding for us in that moment whether or not we have what it takes in order to listen,

In order to succeed with what we imagine ourselves being in that moment,

So that the test that we constantly are facing has nothing to do with whether or not we are capable of coming into that moment and being willing to learn the truth about ourselves in the moment,

But rather something is quite clearly telling us the truth of ourselves in that moment,

And that truth is almost always that somehow or other we're going to miss the mark.

We don't have what it takes.

We're going to come up short.

And nowhere is this more important because this is not a motivational talk.

Nowhere is this more important than when it comes to you understanding how this comparison,

This unconscious comparison is always going before you to make sure that in the moments where it's necessary for you to go into that moment and let the moment give you,

Show you what it's intended to,

That consciousness tells you you're not going to be able to cut it,

So there's no point of trying.

Are you able to follow the transitions we're making so far in this material,

Please?

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this.

A reporter,

A local beat in a small city,

And they're getting ready to have the city finals for the entire metropolitan area where young men and women will compete against each other in various track and field events.

And as with most of these kind of events,

There's a lead up to it.

There's three or four days perhaps where the young athletes,

Especially those that aren't local to where the venue is being held,

Are allowed to come and learn about the equipment,

Learn about the field,

Learn about the environment they're going to be competing in.

So our reporter is there four days ahead watching the young men and the young women working and training at what they're going to compete in.

And the reporter is mostly interested in pole vaulting and hurdles.

So long story short,

Four days in a row,

He watches this young woman take her pole,

Her pole,

I don't know if you've ever seen it,

The pole,

And take that pole and she runs and runs and runs,

Plants the pole and goes up to go over the bar,

And then she goes back and hits the bar,

Crashes down on that pad.

Three,

Four,

Five times a day,

Three,

Four days running,

Exact same event,

Exact same outcome.

And the event,

The big event,

Preliminary start the following day.

And honestly,

He's kind of surprised to see her out there,

Not the second day,

But the third day,

And certainly the fourth day prior to the actual preliminaries,

Because he himself had some experience with these kind of things,

And he couldn't help but look at her through his own eyes.

And back in the day,

He decided that it was just too much.

He wasn't going to embarrass himself out on the field by doing something that his mind was telling him he couldn't possibly accomplish.

But on the fifth day,

The first day of the preliminaries,

When they're going to start actually competing,

There's that young woman.

And he's filled with tension watching her.

She takes the pole,

Starts running towards the section where she'll plant that pole,

Plants the pole,

Goes up and clears the bar.

Doesn't just clear it,

But clears it by a good six,

Eight inches.

She picks herself up.

There's not a lot of applause at these things,

And walks over with her pole over to the area where she gets a drink of water and towels herself off.

And the reporter walks over,

And he says to her something like,

I have to ask you a question.

I watched you for the last four days in a row fail to clear that bar.

And honestly,

I was surprised that you showed up today.

But you did.

And I want to know,

Not just for the people who are going to read this story,

But I want to know for myself,

Where in the world did you get what it takes to come out on that fifth day when you failed the days before,

And not just attempt again,

But succeed?

And to make the story short,

Because I've got to keep going,

She said something along these lines.

Because though it is quite hard to understand,

Even for myself,

She said over time I've come to realize that who I am today is not the same person that couldn't clear the bar yesterday.

That is,

Unless,

She said,

I wouldn't do the work to find out whether or not that's true of me or not.

I'm not the same person today who couldn't clear the bar yesterday.

That is,

Unless I won't do the work,

I won't make the sacrifices it takes to find out whether or not that's true of me.

How many times have you been impatient,

And you know the high bar isn't to blame someone else for your anger or your suffering,

But to clear the mind of the notion that somehow are others,

Others that somehow are other,

Other people are responsible for the way that you feel,

And that you have a right to treat people the way you do because of the fact that you couldn't clear the bar before,

And therefore,

At a certain point,

There's no point in trying anymore?

To understand what happens to an aspirant,

And I'm talking to all of you,

When time and time and time and time again,

You come up against that moment,

That challenge where life presents to you this instant in which you're asked,

Will you rise above your own sense of inadequacy,

Will you rise above this fear that you have that proves itself to you every time you go back,

Just as it did to that young woman four times.

Her own physical body proved to her she couldn't clear it.

But she understood something that we have to understand,

And she said it to the reporter,

I am not the same person that I was yesterday,

But I will be the same person unless I do the work to find out whether that's true or not of myself,

And she said to the reporter,

It takes sacrifices,

And he asked her,

What are the sacrifices that it takes,

And she said to him,

Because I have to meet these limitations.

I have to go through running into the bar,

Seeing over and over again that I didn't clear,

But the key here,

She said,

Is that I've understood over time that the measure of my success as a human being is not determined by my ability,

But rather my willingness to discover the truth of my own capacity so that in learning bit by bit with each time I fail to clear the bar,

Something about what I did that caused that,

So that it came the day you just watched where I did clear the bar,

And she said,

I know the bar I cleared today will be the bar I can't clear tomorrow,

But it doesn't bother me because I've understood that at the root of this feeling like I don't want to be tested anymore because I don't know what to do with myself,

That at the root of this conflict that I have with every moment that seems to challenge me is this constant unseen comparison,

This nearly invisible reflex inside of myself,

Not just to measure myself against others,

But actually this constant measurement against who and what I imagine myself to be when it comes into a moment and imagines what that moment might mean to me if I fail,

So rather than failing to be superior to the moment I imagined,

I accede to this comparative mind,

And in the moment that I accede to something in me that compares who and what I have been to what it is possible for me to learn,

The moment that happens,

I've judged myself and it becomes a prophecy for myself.

Can you see this with me?

It is so rampant,

This comparison.

Some of you know,

You've listened to me speak,

I like to play golf.

For many people,

Golf is too painful.

They say it's because it's too slow.

That's not true.

It's because every time that you step up to the ball and get ready to make the swing,

Without exception,

Without having any notion whatsoever,

Your mind,

This unconscious nature has brought right to that moment where you are standing the picture of everything that you have done before and failed at,

All of the things,

So that you look at that moment through the eyes of what you don't want to go through again.

Not what's possible for you to do,

But what you don't want to experience again.

And so the mind resists its own comparison.

It's not benign,

This constant comparison.

It's a life of constantly imitating.

We imitate what we think we need to be in order to get past this imitative life that can't stop comparing where it didn't succeed to the moment where it feels it won't be able to do again.

It's a thankless task,

Constantly trying to match the internal ideals shaped by social and moral historical conditioning,

Trying to get all of that to fit into the moment where something says,

Who and what are you?

And then all of this constant comparison floods up.

And what we meet the moment with is the feeling of that this is a test.

We grow up being tested,

Don't we?

And then we get so filled with things that our parents and their parents and our culture,

Everything tells us,

This is who you're supposed to be.

You're not supposed to feel like this.

This isn't the way things were supposed to go.

And in the moment where the mind looks out at those conditions and that same mind that's comparing itself to the condition decides the condition is too much or that we won't get through it.

Now it feels like everything's a test.

I tell you,

That's how.

You know why people won't try new things or why they won't go through something they didn't succeed with the first time?

Is because they don't want to fail the test.

But they've already failed the test the moment that they let that mind compare who and what they were before to what may transpire this time.

Because now resistance has cut out the possibility of learning anything whatsoever.

Bring up the second key lesson,

Please,

Kate.

Comparison is the root of the suffering we try to escape through the choices it compels us to make in that moment.

You and I think we can avoid or escape a moment.

Sweet God,

How many times have you thought to yourself,

You know what,

I just can't,

I just won't,

It's impossible.

So what's the point?

And again,

This isn't motivational.

The root of the suffering in that moment isn't the moment that you're looking at The root of that suffering is that you're looking at that moment through the eyes of an unconscious nature that has had the experience of not succeeding according to what it imagined success was.

And then repeating that failure decides it never wants to experience that failure again.

When what is that consciousness experiencing in that moment except the content of itself,

Not the condition.

The condition has actually come along to help an individual discover something that can't be discovered in any other way.

And again,

That it's not ability that we are being tested.

If you want to use the word life is asking,

Are you willing to learn the truth about yourself in this moment?

Because whatever you will learn that is true about yourself will change the self that you have learned the truth about.

When anybody makes any real progress,

If a person masters anything,

Do you know how a person masters something?

Certainly not by feeling inadequate to the task,

But by understanding the task that they're drawn to is asking them if they will meet whatever the temporary limitations there may be physically,

Mentally,

Emotionally.

So that in the revelation of whatever this limitation is not to come up as inadequate,

But to realize that we are always adequate to whatever the moment may ask of us because the moment is asking us to transcend whatever may be the temporary limitation of our present nature,

Of our present body,

Of our present thinking.

Wanting to be someone else because we failed the test of being who we're supposed to be.

Or if I would give my life to be able to convey to you that any notion that you have going in any given moment,

That you're supposed to be someone who can do X,

Y,

Z,

Come out on top,

Whatever it may be.

You're not created to be who you have imagined yourself to be.

You are created to discover how much suffering is inherent in the constant process of this mind imagining because you grew up,

You were told you should be this way.

And when you weren't,

You got punished.

So along comes another moment and it brings this nature up,

Which you haven't understood,

Let alone transcended.

And when the moment brings up the awareness of this nature,

This consciousness says,

Oh my God,

I'm being tested and I failed before.

I better avoid this condition,

This relationship,

Because look what it's bringing up in me.

I'm inadequate.

No,

It's impossible for a human being to be inadequate to the moment that is coming,

Has come to change their consciousness.

It's impossible to be inadequate to the possibility of change because that's what life is,

Is change,

Constant change,

Except we don't understand that.

So inadequacy,

This feeling is not caused by who we are.

The painful sense of inadequacy is born out of believing that we are what this divided mind tells us we are in that moment.

And so we judge ourselves more accurately.

We listen to something judge us.

And it always judges us based on images that we didn't even create.

Imagine that reporter watching that young girl.

He was tense for her.

Because he had already decided that he was inadequate,

That he would never succeed.

And so he goes through life believing that that feeling of I must avoid and it crosses all the thresholds because if I can't pass the test here,

I'm not going to pass it there and I don't want the experience of feeling inadequate.

So I will allow this comparison that has produced the inadequacy and made it seem real.

I'll allow it to tell me what path I can take and what my possibilities are.

Can you see that?

Bring up the third key lesson,

Please.

Read along with me.

I can't tell you how important it is that you understand this idea.

The only instrument the unconscious mind has to compare the possibility of any new or otherwise challenging moment to is the content of its own past conditioned experience.

So that its negativity toward or summary rejection of that moment,

Whatever it may be,

Is determined,

Predetermined by a lower nature that doesn't want to experience the content of itself again,

Which in return becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A nature that doesn't want to experience the content of itself again.

So here comes a moment and something's telling me what the moment means.

I'm supposed to lead a meeting.

I'm supposed to step into a new responsibility.

I want to try something new in my life.

I'm tired of feeling bound by something that has brought me nothing but misery.

I thought it would be joy,

But I see now it doesn't.

Imagine what it's like for a human being to be a captive,

Literally,

Of their own resistance,

When that resistance is the product of an unconscious mind divided against itself and deciding what the moment means before the moment has even had a chance to educate the soul it has come to educate.

So that our foregone conclusions about our possibilities are the product of a comparative mind that has nothing else to look at that moment through other than the experience it's had of similar moments,

And it doesn't want that experience again,

So it shuts the door on the new moment and its new possibility.

And again,

Nowhere is this more important to understand.

Of course,

Look,

Pure spirituality is pure practicality.

You want to succeed in the world,

You think that's what it's going to take to make you happy,

Go nuts,

Go do it.

I'm telling you how to do it.

You can go prove to yourself time and time again that there's nothing you can't transcend if you're willing to learn about the nature that has decided before you that this isn't something you can do.

There's no such thing as something you can't do.

Because there's no such thing as something that you can't discover about the limitation of this nature revealed by that moment that you enter into.

And that's the cost,

That's what the young girl was telling the reporter.

The cost is,

I had to meet,

I had to go out there and pick up that bar.

I had to go into that moment and listen again to something telling me,

What's the point?

You've actually succeeded a few times and you're still afraid.

And so the young girl spiritually already understood the point isn't to succeed in quote with the task.

The point is to succeed with understanding the mind that never stops comparing who and what we have been to what our possibilities are.

When the only way that mind can do it is by looking at the moment that's come through the content of what was that has already not succeeded and that doesn't want to experience itself again.

Here is the truth.

I can't prove it to you.

Nobody can.

Christ himself,

If he showed up in your room,

Couldn't make you see this.

This is where free will comes into play.

Even though it requires grace in order to gain the understanding we're discussing here.

No moment asks you or me to do or to be anything you haven't already been given what you need to complete.

No moment asks you to do anything you haven't already been given everything you need to complete.

The problem is,

Is that you think you know what it means to complete the moment.

For us to complete the moment means comparatively that I think if I complete the moment,

Then I succeed.

If I succeed,

I get.

If I get,

I become.

And for us,

Success is becoming.

Spiritual success is not becoming.

Spiritual success is born out of realizing that this test of constantly trying to become what we imagine we're supposed to be cannot be succeeded with.

Because there will be no end to this constant comparison.

You see,

This comparative nature has decided that success means that you take something from the moment that adds something to you that you imagined it could give you.

So that the comparison in that moment is looking at this moment,

And listen to this,

And this mind deciding whether or not the risk of failing or losing is worth what I might gain from that moment if I go into it.

Is that not the definition of a psychological test that's filled with torment?

Because I'm not even in the real world.

I'm in a mind measuring,

Comparing everything that it's been through before,

And all in a snapshot that I have no awareness of the significance of what it's put together.

And then deciding based on whatever that snapshot is,

Yes,

I'll try,

No,

I won't.

And then if I try and I fail enough times,

I hear this all the time from students.

I've been working at this for years.

St.

Paul himself said it.

I'm still doing the evil,

I wouldn't.

I don't do the good I would.

But then for those of you whose minds are bent in that way,

He went on to say,

And yet it is in the midst of that discovery of my weakness that the strength of God is proven to me.

That the truth of Christ's life,

That the possibility of rebirth,

Of transcending myself,

It's all in that moment.

But if I avoid that moment,

I miss the possibility of discovering there's an entirely different set of new way to perceive the moment that I'm in.

If you're willing to go into the moment with a wish to learn what the moment can teach you about yourself,

You cannot exit that moment other than being someone who has learned something about yourself you did not know before.

But this comparative mind does not want to learn anything other than what confirms it as it imagines itself being.

And the spiritual work is not about confirming yourself as you've imagined yourself to be.

It's about discovering the torment in this constant comparison born of trying to live up to what the moment,

What you believe you're supposed to be in that moment.

Try to see this with me.

You're not supposed to be anything that you know in the moment you're entering into,

Let alone what you know coming out of it.

The moment is giving you your life.

The moment is showing you possibilities.

The moment is revealing the things that stand between you and the discovery of new ways in which you can meet these moments.

All of it's built into that moment,

But we're never in that moment because we're living in a structure built by an unconscious nature that's constantly comparing.

Why do you avoid what you avoid?

All the time I ask certain students,

Why try this?

Why do that?

No,

No,

No,

No.

Why?

Because I won't succeed.

What does that mean you won't succeed?

I've already imagined what it's like to fail at this task.

And the pain of failing is too great for me to go through when the pain of that failure is all imagined.

It's a construct of the past brought forward into a punishing package that produces an identity that we think is who we are.

And it's a lie.

And the only way you will ever know that it's a lie is when,

Like the young hero in our story,

You realize that you're not meant to succeed the way you imagine.

You're meant to discover inside of yourself something that can't do anything but succeed if you bring it with you into that moment with the wish to discover the truth of yourself.

The moment is not asking you or me to be more than you are.

That's where we fall down.

The moment is asking,

Are you willing to see more of yourself than you have seen before?

Understanding that anything in you that wants to judge you can't do anything but judge you through comparison.

Do you remember?

They don't have this anymore.

I'm sure they don't.

When I was growing up,

It was a big laugh to put a piece of scotch tape on a piece of paper that said,

Kick me,

And then pat your best friend on the back with that piece of paper.

So your friend was walking around with a piece of paper on his back that says,

Kick me.

And then it's humorous,

But some students would then go ahead and kick the person with the sign.

And the person would say,

Why are you kicking me?

Because you've got a sign that asks me to do it.

I'm telling you that when we live from a mind that decides before we go into the moment whether or not the moment holds anything of value or it's too dangerous,

We are living from a nature that says,

Kick me.

Because we're being kicked all the time.

We're being kicked out of the moment of the possibility of discovering what we're here to discover.

Let's bring up the last key lesson,

Kate,

Which summarizes what we've just looked at together.

Again,

Read along with me.

And by the way,

All of these key lessons are reposted on Insight Timer and other places where my material appears.

Read along with me.

What is limitless hides within and just behind limitation.

So anyone who will agree to stand patiently within the quiet awareness of any painful sense of inadequacy,

Refusing to bow before it will be crowned with a new and unimaginable strength.

And you know what the new and unimaginable strength is?

It's the understanding that if you're willing to discover the truth about yourself,

Every truth that you discover liberates you that much more from what you mistakenly took to be true about yourself.

A nature that never stops comparing what it says it knows and who you've been.

Wanting to say something.

Wanting to find out for myself what it would be like to take this on or to go through this.

Because I understand without having to take thought that whatever I go around in this life,

As sure as I have a body is coming back around.

We call it karma when we meet moments that we thought we had escaped.

When the real karma is the beautiful justice inherent in a nature that will never stop giving up on trying to get you and I to see that God did not ever make anything inadequate to the moment.

It's blasphemous if you understand the implications of that.

How could the divine make something inadequate to the very moment that the divine brings together for the purpose of allowing whatever that nature may be to transcend its present limitation?

But there it is.

It's like some kind of dark cloud and it is.

It's a dark spirit.

You have to face something whatever it might be.

Maybe you have to go meet someone and you know that they know something about you or maybe you have a health issue.

And what's your mind doing?

You want to go and try this new activity.

What's your mind doing?

It's already saying,

No,

Don't do it.

Avoid this because this isn't going to work out.

It's going to be too painful.

And what's going to be too painful?

How does it know what's going to take place?

That mind,

It doesn't.

All it knows is it looks in the mirror of the past and sees a reflection that's similar to what you've imagined may be coming.

And then all of a sudden you're standing there,

A captive of your own imagery,

Believing that this mind that compares itself to itself actually knows how to transcend itself.

It can only reincarnate itself.

That's all it can do.

If you want to discover whether or not there's a truth that sets you free,

You're going to have to enter into that moment wanting to learn the truth no matter what it may be in that moment about yourself.

And that changes everything,

As you'll see if you'll do that work.

Life has so many regrets,

But I can promise you there will be one part of your life that you will never regret.

And that is discovering the truth about this comparative nature that always tells you don't do this,

Don't go there,

Don't do that,

It's too much.

And then you spend your life looking back and regretting the very thing that that mind convinced you was too much for you to do because of your inadequacy.

It's all a lie,

And you have to find that out if you want to be free.

Thank you for watching.