We have an interesting topic today to look at,
And I would reiterate,
As I always do,
Or at least should,
Prior to every talk,
A simple notion.
And that is that you're never going to hear anything by itself that's going to bring about a truly significant change in your consciousness,
In the way you experience your life,
Until you take what you hear and feel accordingly into your life with you and use the new understanding that you have,
God willing,
To prove or otherwise validate what that new understanding brought up in you.
Simply put,
How do I make real these moments when I see and hear something true and the action is required?
No action,
No wisdom.
And it's never more true when it comes to this idea of how troubled we are,
To whatever extent it may be,
By our own past.
So I have a couple key lessons and two stories to help explain and bring into the light what presently sits in the fog of our past,
In the memory of things that we don't understand why when we relive these things that we are lashed the way we are.
So let's get into it.
Katie,
Let's bring up the first key lesson,
Please.
Read along with me,
And then you can come back,
Or if you visit my website where these talks are posted,
You can recapture these key lessons.
It reads,
It is impossible to die to the pain of our past as long as we remain identified with an unconscious nature that can't seem to go through a day without reliving some dark memory it then summarily resists.
Without reliving some dark memory that it summarily resists.
Can you think of things that your mind takes you to when you're driving in your car,
Sitting at your breakfast table,
Laying in bed at night?
How your mind will bring up an image,
A picture,
A sensation of days gone by.
You drive by the coffee store and a certain smell takes you back to the Swiss Alps.
And suddenly the mind that has brought up that memory now resists the pain of revisiting the very thing that it has brought up.
This is what we're going to look at in depth today so that we can start to understand this.
And Melissa,
We all,
To whatever extent it's true,
Suffer this.
We don't even know it's there.
For instance,
Some of you know I like to play golf.
You hit a bad golf shot.
What's the suffering?
Why would one suffer over hitting a bad golf shot?
Unless at the moment that that happens,
The mind looking at the result compares what it has imagined,
What it remembers as being good and true,
Compares that to what just happened and suddenly the pain isn't in the bad shot.
The pain is in the mind revisiting what it could be or should have been and that it wasn't.
All of this can change everything.
So here's the first of the stories we're going to look at.
Nice deep breath,
Everybody.
Let's do the best we can to be as awake as we can so that these impressions can fall where they're meant to and God willing produce at least the wish to make a real change in our life from the inside out.
Here's a mother.
She goes and visits her daughter.
Mother's elderly daughter is getting older.
She's visiting because her daughter bought a new house,
Blah,
Blah,
Blah.
So mother's there for a couple of weeks and after about a week,
She notices something that every morning prior to their coffee,
Her daughter goes down into the basement and seems to be rummaging around down there.
It's not quite clear.
It's none of her business and she leaves it alone.
But the state that the daughter is in before she goes down and when she comes back up are completely different.
Mom notices this and says to her daughter at some point,
Listen,
Sweetie,
Why do you keep going down in the basement every morning?
I mean,
What is it that you're doing down there?
Daughter looks at her,
Kind of smiles,
A little bit irritated,
Even being asked.
She says,
I just,
I don't know.
There's an old photo album down there,
Sort of a treasury of pictures from back in the day when life seemed so much easier than it is now.
Mom says,
I understand.
I have one of those myself,
But have you noticed that there's a difference between you when you go down and when you come back up?
When you come back up,
To me,
You seem stressed.
I can feel it.
I mean,
Maybe even touchy,
No offense,
But why?
The daughter says,
I suppose you're right.
And I suppose it has something to do with what I'm doing down there,
But what kind of person would I be,
Said the daughter,
If I didn't go revisit and honor those memories?
What kind of person would I be?
And mother says,
I think,
If you'll forgive me,
You're asking the wrong question.
Mother,
Taking umbrage,
Says,
What do you mean,
How so?
Mother says,
I think the real question you have to ask yourself is what kind of person does it make me when I revisit the past?
What kind of person does it make you when you revisit the past and relive what isn't anymore or relive what you wish would have been different back in the past?
What kind of person does that make you?
Now we're not,
This,
Please do not,
This is not about judgment.
When change comes,
If we can enter into the place where change is always occurring,
It takes place in that rare illumined space within us where we are for the moment present to what it is that we are giving our attention to and realize that we can't separate where our attention has gone and what it has begun to be attached to and whatever,
In this instance,
The heartache may be as a result of giving our attention to something like what he did or she didn't do or how things could have been different.
When giving our attention to the moments that we don't want,
What else can we experience other than the experience of not wanting the very moment we just gave our attention to?
Let that sink in for a moment.
I hope that it does.
How about you when you go back in time?
It does seem to us when we are suddenly visited by whatever it is that someone did to us.
Doesn't it seem that in that moment we are encased,
Captured,
If you will,
Struggling with something we don't want,
Something was struggling we wish hadn't happened.
It seems so common.
And the more that we struggle with that moment we don't want,
We don't see that we are reliving it and reliving it in the hope that by revisiting that thought,
That memory,
In the hope that by revisiting that moment that somehow we'll escape the lingering and mounting effect of having visited it.
We're looking at a contradiction in our own consciousness.
And yes,
Anne,
It could be anything.
I fantasize about being a millionaire and then I wake up for a split second and I look at my warped coffee table and realize I'm not a millionaire,
But now I'm depressed because I'm not when what I'm depressed over isn't the fact that I don't have what I imagine I should,
But rather that I'm not the way I'm supposed to be and sit in judgment of myself and then blame life for the judgment that I'm making.
It's quite the,
What's the word,
The conundrum.
We find ourselves over and over again in a full-on state of some kind of resistance,
Not wanting to feel the way we do when by our own volition,
We agreed to give our attention to some photo album,
To something that appears in our mind from the past or that we voluntarily in quotes,
Revisit.
The question that we have to ask ourselves,
If we're honest,
Is what else do I know to do in those moments?
How else do I know to handle a feeling that I have when the feeling I have is one of not wanting to feel the way I do?
It's not a complicated question.
Whether I am,
I don't want to feel this way.
I'm looking at some news the doctor gave me and the more I look at it,
The more into imagination I go and the more into imagination I go into a time to come,
The more I resist the imagined time to come and the more afraid I am of it.
You must fill in the blanks from your own life,
But to start seeing all I know to do when I am in the grip of some thought or feeling,
Something from the past,
And by the way,
Anything that you project into the future doesn't exist without the past and its conditioning contributing to that imagined moment,
What else do I know to do in those moments other than to just not want it?
It's all I know to do.
I don't want to feel this way and when I'm filled with I don't want to feel this way,
What is the other side of that equation?
Do some work with me.
Here I am.
My mind brings up what I did to my brother 50 years ago and the minute my mind brings up that painful bitter memory,
The split second it does,
What do I have?
I have a feeling I don't want and so I'm sitting there not wanting to feel the very thing that my mind has given to me to feel and I don't know what else to do except one thing.
The more I have a feeling of what I don't want,
The more I imagine a feeling that I do want,
That's the or how to escape it.
In other words,
Every one of the actions I take when I am revisited by some painful memory from the past,
Every action I take has one thing in mind and it is born of one reaction.
It is born of resistance and that resistance is born of a strange insistence that the moment ought not be the way it is and that if I just work hard enough,
Think clearly enough,
Somehow or other,
I'm going to be free.
Try to see the big picture with me,
Please.
Can there be the pain of a day gone by without me revisiting the image of it?
Can there be the pain of a day gone by of something that happened I didn't get,
I lost,
They took?
Can there be that pain of a day gone by without my own mind revisiting the image of it?
Now when I go and my mind,
And I don't go,
My mind does it.
Your mind does this by itself.
It is triggered by some impression,
Could be the smell of a coffee cup,
Could be the color of the day and the sunlight,
The fog,
Could be any one thing.
And the next thing you know,
We are taken into a kind of a matrix of memories.
And once having been dropped down into that unconscious nature as we are,
And we start reliving the very thing that we don't want,
That resistance begins to feed on itself.
So that here my mind relives something.
It resists what it relives.
You can see this.
This isn't magic.
This isn't some strange psychological science.
It's what we're just not present to in ourselves.
And the more I have this feeling that I don't want,
The more I try to escape it.
And the more I try to escape it,
The greater grows the feeling of being a captive of my own mistaken relationship to the moment.
What are we looking at here?
This negativity continues and we are complicit in its continuity by a kind of unending loop born of an unconscious mind measuring us according to some conditioned experience and then doing what?
Each time that happens,
Here comes the memory.
I'm driving to work.
I go by that store where whatever,
And I have a reaction.
And that reaction points.
It tells me,
Let's have an example.
Fill in the blanks.
I'm just kind of making this up.
Here I am.
I'm 18,
19 years old.
I go to the beach to hang out with my friends.
And somehow or other,
Something happens and I fall down.
I make a mistake.
I have some big blunder and there's this immense moment of humiliation.
I'm embarrassed again.
And then that's in the past,
Deep in the past.
And then I'm on vacation and I'm sitting by a pool at a hotel.
And I go to get up from my lounge chair or whatever it is.
And somehow I trip,
I stumble,
I make a noise when I push the chair back.
And just like that,
I'm instantaneously revisited by a flood of strange sensations,
Memories actually.
And in the reaction of those memories,
Those memories now,
That reaction points.
It says,
Oh,
Look,
Look,
Look,
Look what happened.
It's just like that again,
Or it's going to be like that again.
And all we know in that moment literally is to just go to sleep.
Our mind,
Though we don't see it,
If we could see into our own psychology,
We would see our mind shut down,
But it doesn't shut down in terms of the interior activity.
It shuts down in terms of our being able to be aware of what it is actively doing in that moment.
And what it's actively doing in that moment is it's there in the midst of whatever that shame or sorrow or anger or resentment or betrayal.
It's in the midst of all that,
Trying to sort out how to change or escape the condition that it finds itself in,
Unable to see the condition that it has found itself in is one that it took itself into without knowing it did so.
And then the resistance starts.
And as the resistance starts,
It feeds the equation and the more it feeds,
Not wanting the experience,
The greater grows that experience of ourselves that we don't want.
Are you able to put together this example with something from your own life?
Can you see how that happens?
And the extraordinary thing is this,
You and I,
We will question everything about some unwanted moment other than the intelligence of our own resistance to it.
Look at it with me.
When an unwanted moment comes along,
Do you not have 10,
000 questions why suddenly you're remembering what,
How he broke your heart or how she stole this from you or how your friends unfriended you,
Whatever the craziness might be?
Can you see that in that moment,
We'll ask every question,
Why are they that way?
What can I do?
How do I change them?
What do I have to change about myself?
How am I ever going to get past this moment that keeps all these questions except the one question that would provide real relief by releasing us from the consciousness responsible for that resistance?
The one thing we don't ask,
Why does this keep going on?
What is in this pain over the past for me?
What's in it for me?
Where am I getting out of it?
Because surely you have to understand that if something in me not only just keeps revisiting the past,
But rejects and resists summarily anybody or anything that suggests that you don't have to do that,
You're after them.
I'm saying to you at some point,
If you want to escape the pain of the past,
Of these lingering memories and the negativity associated with them,
If you want to do that,
Then we have to reach a point where we say,
What is this unquestioned belief?
And it is that we have that these unwanted moments that we have visited,
What is it that they serve?
What is being served by my pain over the past?
Because clearly something has to be being served or I wouldn't keep serving myself up another serving of that pain.
You're close.
Listen to this.
It's so important to understand if you can see.
The unquestioned belief as we have that the resistance to these unwanted moments is valid is because,
Listen now,
That resistance,
The pain of that resistance affirms who and what we have imagined ourselves to be.
I'm someone this shouldn't have happened to.
My resistance to reliving that painful memory actually affirms that who and what I am ought not have had to go through that or shouldn't ever have to go through that again.
So that my mind is actually taking me back through the very condition I don't want.
And as it does,
It affirms the sense of myself that the moment the relationship ought to have been the way I imagined it should be and reliving it and the pain of it validates the belief,
Validates the believer that he or she,
That you or I know how life is supposed to be.
I'm looking at the comments and I'm not commenting about them because some of these are absolutely true.
But if you've studied with me at all,
I don't want to know what other people know.
I want to know from myself,
In myself,
And due to the effort that I give to make that understanding clear,
Why in the name of God can I be reduced at the drop of a hat to a man or a woman who is drawn into something from the past that no longer exists apart from whatever conditioned memory with all of its sensation drawn into that memory.
And then upon my agreement into entering into a world that only exists in this unconscious nature,
Then feel like I've got to escape the captivity of where I have just brought myself to bear.
That's the question,
And it's a real-time answer because you'll be floored quite literally.
Nothing in me wants to affirm that I am who and what I think I am in that moment,
When what I am is nothing but negativity,
When I am is nothing but resistance.
But I don't think to myself in these moments that I'm nothing but negativity because my mind and the reaction that's produced this resistance has all pointed to something to blame or change in the past in order to change the way I feel about myself in the moment.
And there is nothing you can do in memory.
There's nothing you can do to change the past that is going to ever bring about a real change in real time so that you're no longer the subject of an unconscious nature dragging you back into the past and holding you there.
Now listen,
Holding you there by your own agreement.
And what is my agreement to be a captive of the past?
My agreement is my resistance to reliving it.
That's what I'm a captive of.
I'm a captive of my own unseen resistance to a moment that my own mind has brought up and then says,
Look at this,
Re-experience that.
I look at it.
I don't want this.
I want to change it.
I want to change it where other than that.
And now I'm not anywhere remotely present to myself.
I'm imprisoned quite literally by a dream that hates itself.
Imagine a dreamer that brings up a dream so that it could wish it could escape what it is dreaming because that is a fairly accurate description of how it is that we are punished by these memories,
By these past experiences.
Let me tell you a story,
Set up the key lesson and the summary of this study time we have together.
Imagine for a moment,
We'll go,
I set up a French cafe and here's the newer,
A new owner of this French cafe.
He's owned it for,
Let's just say,
Six months a year.
And French cafe has these nice places where you sit outside,
All cafes do,
Where you can sit outside and watch the people that go by,
Enjoy the warm air.
People drink their coffee and have their croissant.
So here's a waiter,
Relatively new,
And he's noticed that there's one particularly sorrowful woman who sits every day at the same time in the same place and that cafe orders the same coffee and the same croissant and does 100% the same thing day in and day out for three months.
And so finally he goes to the owner and says,
I'm just wondering,
I'm happy to serve,
But who is this woman?
I've never seen anybody do this.
He said,
You don't understand,
Said the owner,
You've been watching her for three months.
I've been watching her for a year and the former owner told me that this woman has been coming to the same place at the same time and doing the same things in the same chair for 25 years.
What?
25 years?
Why?
That's,
That's,
That's crazy.
The owner said,
I can't verify this,
But I was told that this woman comes here and sits here and,
And has the same thing over and over again,
Because this is the place where someday 25 years ago,
Some lover of hers broke her heart and just left her in the lurch.
They were going to get married and he broke it off the day before the event.
And so she sits there day after day,
Year after year,
Going through everything that happened back then.
And the waiter says,
I get it.
That's tough,
But geez,
You know,
I mean,
That's unimaginable.
How could someone do that?
This is strong,
But it's strong necessarily.
The owner says it's pretty evident to me she lost her mind.
And where she lost her mind is in a terribly painful belief that if she can relive the past enough times,
If she can just re-experience all that she thinks she lost and now regrets,
That the time will come when she re-experiences it,
That somehow or other it will change.
He'll show up like out of some movie.
Somehow or other,
Everything will shift and she'll be released from the pain of the past.
Unable to see,
I might add,
He said to this new waiter,
Something that you and I need to understand so that that never happens to us,
At least in the extent to which it's happened to her.
Because I can tell you,
He said,
That this is true of all of us.
She believes that she lost and regrets having lost what she believes should have been hers.
And so now her life is about alternating between the resistance to that moment and re-imagining a new ending to it.
She alternates between resisting that moment and imagining another kind of outcome by which she'll finally be released from her pain.
Why else would she go into that kind of dream if she didn't think that somehow or other she could change the nature of that dream?
You can't change the nature of any painful dream without changing the nature of the dreamer.
And the dreamer is not interested in changing the past.
The dreamer is interested in reliving it.
Now I don't know,
Does that sound dramatic to you?
How much more dramatic can it be than to see a man or a woman?
And I can't even begin to discuss in the short time we have together,
Be dragged down into some kind of instantaneous resistance.
Now I drew out this big picture of dreams and lost hopes and all that business.
What if we understood that any time we have a sudden knee-jerk reaction and feel enmity or anger,
Frustration with anything that starts to take place around us,
That what we are resisting around us begins with something within us that is resisting any condition that isn't part of what it has dreamed itself to be and to need in order to be free and safe and secure.
Why else would I have instantaneous defensiveness towards anybody that doesn't do what I think they should be doing?
Where does all of that anger come from other than in that moment,
Literally this unconscious nature is revisiting the image,
The conditioned ideas,
Beliefs it has about itself.
And when anybody challenges that dream,
Which it is,
Then in that moment the dreamers challenge and I am identified with that movement.
And the next thing I know,
I am a captive of a painful moment that doesn't exist without this nature resisting it.
I hope I've made a few connections.
Let's bring up the last key lesson,
Which is a summary of this material.
Read along with me,
Please.
The weight of any heavy lingering negative feeling is only as hard to bear as is the extent to which we are identified with the pain of our own resistance to it.
In other words,
It is the weight of not wanting the experience of what we're actually doing to ourselves in that same moment.
The weight of resisting what we're actually doing to ourselves in that moment.
Write it down,
The weight,
W-E-I-G-H-T,
The weight of not wanting.
That's the pain of the past.
The weight of not wanting it.
The weight of not wanting to have been that person or to have to go through that.
The weight of not wanting to lose something that was precious to me in the past.
Resistance is a form of unseen insistence that produces in the moment when that demand is challenged this sudden suit of armor,
This weight,
W-E-I-G-H-T,
That only exists because something in us doesn't want what actually we have just taken ourselves into doing.
This is why it requires the capacity to be observant,
To attend to oneself,
To own one's own attention sufficiently enough to see that here I am,
I'm getting angry at my husband.
I got set off by this person at work.
You can't justify a negative state without the past.
You can't justify lingering negativity without the past.
It's impossible because there is no justification for harming ourselves unless something in us takes that moment and that reaction and then finds a way to affirm who we are.
Imagine affirming who and what I am by setting myself on fire because I believe that this heat,
This anger passing through me is the actual assurance that I know what's right and you don't.
So you can't justify a negative state without the past.
Why?
Because there is no justification for a negative state without comparing it to what you believe should have happened,
Like the woman in that cafe.
That never should have happened.
If I just go back and revisit,
Relive it,
Maybe somehow or other I'll find another kind of ending.
There is no happy ending to an unconscious nature that keeps dreaming up the life it believes it deserves,
That keeps dreaming up how others should be to affirm how we think we ought to be treated.
The more we keep seeing this,
The clearer it will become to us the moment.
There is no painful past to drag into the present moment without you and I being deceived into caring for and then carrying into that moment the weight of not wanting.
Write those words down if nothing else,
The weight,
W-E-I-G-H-T,
Of not wanting.
If you will merely,
As best you can,
When you start to feel this resistance to life,
When you start experiencing the negative outcome of a daydream,
What is this weight?
What is this pain?
My mind tells me the pain is because of X,
Y,
Z.
But it's not the pain of X,
Y,
Z,
Because X,
Y,
Z doesn't even exist without a mind that has revisited it,
And then when it revisits,
It doesn't want what it revisits.
The weight of not wanting.
You start waking up to this unconscious complicity with the conflict that you and I have with these moments that we don't want,
Whether they seem to come out of the blue,
Or we take a deep dive into some blue state of ourselves,
And you'll see.
What sense does it make for me to suffer over what I don't want,
When the more I don't want it,
The more I suffer?
What sense does it make for me to suffer over what I don't want,
When the more I don't want it,
The more I suffer?
You start asking yourself that question based on seeing the fact of it in yourself in that moment,
And you will be launched into a new kind of awareness that you will want to take with you into every moment,
So you can be present to the fact that this mind takes you into a certain kind of past event,
And as soon as it does,
It starts to formulate the prison of its own making,
And that you don't have to walk into,
And certainly that you can walk out of the moment you see the truth of what we're looking at together.
Have we meshed at all?
Have we understood something?
And let's not call it insanity,
Unless we understand the word insanity to mean a moment in which this beautiful natural sanity,
Clarity and sanity are a singularity.
Insanity and clarity is sanity,
Because the only way I act against myself is when something has muddled it up so much that all I see is what my mind is pointing to as the reason for my pain,
And then I'm lost,
Resisting the pain that literally I'm complicit in creating.
Use the moment it's given to you for,
And it's always to wake up.
There's no talk I will ever give that isn't about some way in which we can clarify and strengthen our wish to be present,
To be present,
To be present enough to see the expression and the experience of what happens when we hand ourselves over to whatever our attention takes as being the sum of the moment.
You have another nature within you.
It can see what your present nature is doing to itself.
And when you see,
When you have that clarity,
Then the conflict and the captivity of that unseen activity is stopped at the moment.
You won't participate.
What you will do is begin to perceive how extraordinary I see the truth of this.
I don't want to linger in this painful past,
But something really wants to stay there.
That extraordinary.
Something wants to keep reliving what I now know can never be resolved,
No matter how much I resist it.
You see that,
And you enter into the most beautiful,
Potent,
Powerful,
Spiritual struggle that you can.
And out of that spiritual struggle to lay down what something in you refuses to,
What something in you wants to cling to,
You begin to gain an understanding that is unlike anything in this world.
And that understanding will release you from the world of that imagination and the self that lives in it.
