Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 20: Tao Te Ching Series, Verse 33

Again,

In this episode,

We're exploring the Tao Te Ching.

In this one,

We're covering verse 33 and exploring some powerful topics like self-mastery and responsibility and the unmoving awareness at the core and center of our existence.

Have a listen.

Enjoy.

Okay,

So today we're going to continue our,

Well,

Our budding series on the Tao Te Ching with verse 33.

Why are we talking about verse 33?

Because it's a good verse.

It is.

It's one of the 81 best verses in this text.

You want to do the honors?

Sure.

Knowing others is intelligence.

Knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength.

Mastering yourself is true power.

If you realize that you have enough,

You are truly rich.

If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart,

You will endure forever.

So much about the Tao seems like an inherent contradiction.

How do you mean?

Statements like,

Well,

Because it contradicts,

The wisdom presented in the Tao usually contradicts almost entirely our common wisdom about things.

So the idea that,

For example,

Mastering another person somehow makes you stronger or is an exhibition.

You know what I mean?

So it's almost as though it takes our entire habitual worldview and stands it on its head and challenges us to understand ourselves in a way that negates that common orientation to reality and obviously takes the ego out of the equation and forces us to come to the world from a deeper perspective.

Yeah.

You know,

I think that's why we can safely say that the Tao is one and the same as the Logos or the Word and that what the Tao,

What the Tao Te Ching is doing is it's laying out a pattern for comprehending reality in its truest or let's say its supernal form.

And you know,

I often think of the difference between our ordinary sense and the uncommon sense of the Logos as one being the law of the ego,

The other being the law of spirit.

And the law of the ego is governed by a certain set of principles and laws and the laws of spirit or the Dharma is governed by a certain set of laws.

And you're right,

That's exactly what the Tao Te Ching is doing.

It's laying out what the pattern of the true laws that govern our relationship to the cosmos are.

And inevitably that's contradictory to what we've learned.

And it kind of begs the question,

How did we get it so wrong?

Good question.

I mean,

I ponder that one a lot to be honest,

That we can be kind of locked in this illusion of what we think reality is and what we think is rewarding about being in this life,

You know,

Being incarnated in a human body.

You know,

What our goals are,

The things we chase,

The things we think validate us.

And it's almost as though,

Or at least,

You know,

Sometimes I think to myself,

It seems like this entire life is about being dropped into the illusion and it's a puzzle about finding your way out.

Oh,

I think there's some truth to that.

You know,

I don't know if I would call it dropped into the illusion as much as dropped into a classroom where,

You know,

The rules of the classroom are defunct,

You know,

They're off,

They're wrong,

They're skewed.

I mean,

I think you could trace,

Like when you ask the question,

Where did we go so wrong?

I think that you can trace that in a number of ways.

You know,

I tend to think of how we lost the Tao in two different ways.

One psychologically,

How we lose it through the progress of our own individual life growth and evolution,

Right?

How we lose it through our conditioning.

And then I think that it's useful to look at it too in terms of like a metaphysical loss,

Like the loss of Eden,

Like where at one point we were absolutely in connection to our divine nature and where along the scale of history that was lost,

You know?

And both of those are very different questions,

But both very valid.

Do you believe there was ever a time when we were just living according to the Tao?

I mean,

Just,

And it would have been obviously because it wouldn't have been articulated at that point,

I don't think,

But you know,

Just sort of instinctively.

I don't see how,

I don't know if I would say that human beings were at one point in touch with the Tao.

Maybe the way I would think of it is that the laws that govern the Tao,

The Logos itself has always been.

And to some degree that's always been written into our human nature.

So where we lost our connection or let's say interest in that is very mysterious.

I think there's some hints and clues given within the sacred texts.

Oh,

As to when and where it was lost.

Yeah,

Like the nature of how it was lost,

Right?

I mean,

I think that's what the story of Adam and Eve tells so well is how that original nature was lost.

And I think you can look at that with various levels of amplitude.

But generally I like to focus on the psychological component because that's something that a person can actually deal with in their own life.

You know,

How their original godlike essence has been obscured by the conditioning of family,

Society,

What have you.

Yeah,

Obscured and distorted.

But you know,

Last week when we talked about verse eight,

It's got a line in there about competition,

About not trying to compete.

And I've been kind of puzzling over that ever since.

And I mean,

We'll get to the specifics of this verse at some point,

I guess.

But I was thinking about competition and living here in Mexico,

There's a lot of animal life around.

And I've got birds in my yard and the animals compete.

That's part of their instinctive thing.

They hoard food,

They hoard resources,

Sometimes they compete over territory.

And so that obviously is built into animal nature,

Which obviously humans have some component of.

And that almost seems to me like sort of a cruel trick.

If the Tao simply flows,

If the Tao nourishes all things,

And you know,

Animals are not,

To our knowledge,

Subject to things like trying to elevate their own egos or trying to be more important than other animals.

Well that may or may not be true.

But why?

That's my question is why?

Why is it like that?

Why do we have these tendencies toward behaviors,

Instincts that are not in alignment with the Tao that we then have to overcome?

Is that just another part of the being dropped into the maze kind of idea?

Well I think there's two reasons from my point of view.

One is that we are here to overcome them because of the learning that results from that overcoming.

And I also think that there are elements of our human animal nature that are in some sense representative of our true nature.

Like for example,

While we're here in the very beginning where it's talking about,

You know,

Mastering others as strength,

Mastering yourself as true power.

Mastering others as strength is a part of the animal nature.

Mastering yourself in the realization of power is part of true nature.

So in some sense that represents this learning movement in sort of what defines the laws of this plane and what defines the laws that govern the Tao.

And that learning is the fruit.

It's the fruit of that struggle.

Yeah,

I like that interpretation.

Good,

I just made it up.

Very well done.

You made it up?

Who made it up?

The Tao made it up.

Maybe we should get to the specifics of this verse.

Knowing others is intelligence.

I might have a quibble with that,

But we'll go on.

Knowing yourself is true wisdom.

That has been demonstrated to me to be true over and over again.

The things that we don't know about ourselves are the things that cause our suffering,

Ultimately.

Why would you go pointing out the splinter in your brother's eye when you don't see the beam in your own?

Exactly.

Right?

And that's,

Honestly that is a lesson that is so relevant to our times because especially when we look at social media and such,

The acceptability of pointing out others' errors and illusions without understanding one's own is so pervasive right now.

Yeah,

And I think part of the problem is that we,

Humans are social animals,

We like connection.

And it's way too easy to connect with each other by pointing out a third person's failings or mocking them.

We form gangs to dominate each other.

We form armies to war with each other.

And it's a weird mixture of cohesiveness among a group versus another group.

It's a way,

I think,

That we collectively let our shadows out in a way that diffuses the responsibility for them.

So we feel like,

Oh,

This is a place that I can articulate these aspects or act out these darker places in my psyche,

But I don't have to carry the full responsibility for that because I'm being validated by others.

Right.

Yeah,

It's like,

I'm not like that.

Thank God I'm not like that when in truth I'm exactly like that.

Or maybe I am like that and here's a group that will allow me to be like that and it's okay.

Oh yeah,

There's that too.

I think that's kind of the more nefarious thing that I was looking at.

And maybe those are like remnants of our animal nature,

The need to stalk and kill or the need to dominate,

Ostracize,

Diminish.

I think we're trying to figure out how to be in some sense.

I mean,

I think there is a positive motivation behind it.

Because we come into this life and we don't know who we are and we don't know how to be.

I think we're getting off track a little bit.

No,

I think we're on track.

Let's come back to knowing yourself as true wisdom.

There's a line that reminds me of where the Prophet Muhammad,

I think it's in the Quran,

Says,

He who knows himself knows his Lord.

And it's like if you really want to know the essence of God,

Of divinity,

Of truth,

Then the only way to truly and fully know that is by knowing the essence of yourself.

And that's such a,

It's not necessarily a difficult thing to do,

But it's an intimidating undertaking for a lot of people.

To really,

I mean objectively,

As much as you can as an individual looking at yourself,

But to really fearlessly go into your own psyche and to see the things you may not like about yourself there.

We spend so much time kind of sending or looking around ourselves for mirrors that show us only the best parts of ourselves because we're afraid of seeing what's really in there.

And yet,

When you really dive in and encounter those things with a spirit of compassion and inquiry,

Ultimately we find out that there's really nothing to fear.

I mean it's what can result from the dark parts that can cause suffering,

But the fact that those parts of our nature exist is not necessarily a threatening thing.

Yeah.

Well,

I find it really interesting here that the text is saying,

Mastering yourself.

It's not just understanding or befriending or,

I mean,

It's mastering.

And that's a phenomenal idea because if we think of ourselves as a bundle of energies or personalities that are unruly and that the centerpiece of our being,

The self,

The core essence of what we are as the master that organizes those.

I mean,

That's a powerful idea that all of our forces and energies and personalities gather together under one true central master,

You know?

It's a very powerful idea.

Yeah.

That line actually kind of puzzles me because when we talk about mastery,

We talk about mastering ourselves.

You know,

We're always talking in yoga and spiritual work about union,

About being one with the divine,

But this implies the split,

Right?

That there are aspects of ourselves that are not,

That are somehow independent,

That somehow have their own agency or their own agenda and that we have to kind of corral them or,

You know,

Make all the horses run in the same direction.

And you know,

That's another thing that's always puzzled me about my experience on this planet is why is that so hard?

Like why is it so hard to eat the right food?

Why is it so hard to maintain your composure in the face of an attack?

Why is it so hard to do the right thing when some minor temptation would draw you away from the path?

You know,

That struggle,

I guess we come back to the idea that life is a school,

But it seems like,

Wow,

That's a really kind of… Would it be better if the school was easy?

Yes.

Well,

It wouldn't be though because then we wouldn't establish mastery.

This is the seriously concerning reason when people dispense with all notion of a spiritual reality,

Because if we don't realize that we're in a classroom and that part of the point of being here is mastery,

And let's for a moment suspend any overt assumptions about what the word mastery means,

But if we dispense with that idea and throw it out,

Then what are we here for?

Well,

We're just here to really be secure a little while,

Achieve as much pleasure as we can,

Get what we want basically,

Right?

And if we don't take that idea seriously,

There's not a lot of reason to confront the difficulty of life,

But realizing that the point is mastery,

That you're here in this classroom to actually become,

Well,

At first a good student and second a teacher in the school,

Right?

It has to be hard.

Otherwise you don't learn anything.

Yeah,

And there'd be very little satisfaction in what you do learn.

Right.

Yeah,

Because if it's too easy then,

I mean,

You're right,

You're right,

But sometimes you just kind of look around and go,

Wow,

It didn't have to be this hard.

It didn't have to be this complicated,

Did it?

But you're absolutely correct.

But I think we do arrive.

I think within mastery we do arrive at a place where it's not difficult.

I look forward to that.

Okay,

Let's put it this way.

Let's use hunger just as an example.

Is it easier to voraciously pursue each appetite we have or to remain in self-control,

Which is easier?

This is a good question.

Because I would say,

I mean,

I'd seriously say that the way of discipline is easier than the way of unruly pursuit.

Easier in the sense that it doesn't cause suffering.

Yeah,

It doesn't cause suffering and it also doesn't cause a lot of harmful unintended consequences.

Well,

There's that beautiful line,

I don't remember which verse it is,

In the Tao where it says,

Desires wither the heart.

And it's true,

Right?

The pursuit of pleasure and desire,

It's an expenditure of life force.

Yeah,

And it doesn't provide much nourishment.

It's like eating junk food.

You can fill yourself with potato chips and jelly beans and at the end of the day,

You feel awful.

I mean,

The reward of tasting it was not worth the upset stomach and the weight gain.

Precisely.

And you feel even more empty than you did before,

The chips and jelly beans.

Yeah,

And disappointed with yourself to boot.

Yes,

That's part of the school's lesson.

How easy this seems when you talk about it.

Well,

It is.

We just have to learn how it's easy because the egoic part of us treats it as difficult and therefore doesn't want to pursue it at all.

Okay,

Next verse.

If you realize that you have enough,

You are truly rich.

I am 100% on board with this idea.

I actually think most of us have way too much stuff,

Way too much of everything.

True.

Activities.

We accumulate people,

You know,

In empty relationships,

That kind of thing.

Yeah,

I say that as somebody who's always been sort of an introvert.

You know,

I've always chosen my friends pretty carefully and only had a few close ones.

But way more rewarding than the energy it takes to maintain like this huge stable of people.

And yet there is a sentiment in the world that says,

The more friends you have,

The I mean,

Literally,

I think there's a saying that,

You know,

You're wealthy,

You're as wealthy as the number of friends you have in your life or something like that.

And yeah,

Maybe,

Maybe in a way,

I mean,

That's a lot of human connection.

But human connection takes work.

And it is an expenditure of energy that's not going to mastering other things.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Truly.

This line brings to mind,

You know,

Tibetan Buddhism has all these beautiful techniques and teachings.

They often have numbers associated with them.

But the five Dhyani Buddhas,

And there's this notion of the deity,

The Buddha Ratnasambhava,

Which is the one,

The jeweled one.

And the wisdom of Ratnasambhava,

Which is really just a flavor of our own wisdom nature.

The wisdom of Ratnasambhava is the wisdom of equanimity,

Right?

And it's this quality of richness that is present when the hungry self is seen through,

Right?

So in the five wisdom energies,

The five Dhyani Buddhas,

There's a wisdom associated with each one,

But then there's also a neurosis associated with each one.

So the realm that governs this particular part of the,

This particular Buddha is called the hungry ghost,

Right?

The hungry ghost is just a perpetual body of empty hunger,

Never enough,

Never enough.

And so there's this beautiful,

In tantric Buddhism,

There's this beautiful notion that you can actually take the substance of your hungry ghost and transmute it and transform it into this spirit of equanimity and fullness and enoughness,

Right?

And I think that really reminds me of that because that's one of those personalities that we talked about,

The personality of lack,

The personality of poverty,

Never enough,

Never enough experience,

Knowledge,

Food,

Sex,

Whatever,

Whatever it may be,

Right?

Yeah,

Yeah.

You know,

If I can offer a personal insight into that,

I come from a family that has that orientation to the world.

And quite literally,

We always,

At least when I was a child,

We always sort of lived on the edge of financial solvency.

Money was always extraordinarily tight.

I wouldn't quite call us poor,

But we were very close to that,

You know,

Very working class and just barely making it.

And I realized in the course of my own work over the years,

How much that had been installed into my mind.

Like I didn't,

When I first was offered like a reasonably good salary,

I was shocked.

I couldn't believe that someone would pay me that much money for anything that I did because I had already internalized this idea that I belong to a certain class.

And it wasn't like,

I thought the class limited me,

But I just assumed that that was a reflection of my own emptiness,

Like not having enough to offer.

And there is,

To go along with all that,

This sort of feeling of being continuously deprived and that that will never,

Ever change.

That life is simply that way.

And I'm still like you in my fifties working to overcome that kind of orientation to the world,

Even though I have more than enough.

In fact,

Most days I think I have way too much of everything.

It's extraordinary,

Isn't it,

When we live in such luxury and abundance that we can still be such purveyors of lack and still bear that poverty mentality so deeply.

Yeah.

But there's a flip side to that too,

Because I've met people,

One person in particular,

Who simply said to me,

I don't do poor.

Just like that.

I don't do poor.

And this person's life was kind of structured around an enormous amount of energy going out devoted to this pursuit of an experience of super abundance.

Like not just enough,

But I have all the best of everything.

I've got all the best labels.

I've got all the best vacation destinations on my agenda,

The best vehicles,

Et cetera.

And I could look at this person and go,

I can see all the ways that this is stressing you out,

Making you miserable,

But it was completely lost.

So the flip side of that poverty consciousness is this.

And of course,

It's a reaction against poverty consciousness,

I think.

But I've got to maintain this sense of I've got more than everybody else.

Yeah,

Right.

I remember seeing a Bob Marley documentary where the interviewer is saying,

You've become quite successful in your work.

He's like,

Are you a wealthy man?

And I don't think a lot of people know how much of a mystic Bob Marley was,

How deeply spiritual the man was.

They often get portrayed as some kind of hippie pothead who sang about love,

But he was so much deeper than that.

I remember he looked at the interview with this kind of fierce confidence and he said,

What do you mean by wealthy?

He said,

Do you have a lot of money?

Do you have a lot of things?

He's like,

That's what makes a man wealthy?

And he said,

Yeah.

And he said,

No.

He said,

I have life eternal and that's what makes me wealthy.

That's wealth.

That's true wealth.

That's beautiful.

It's a beautiful moment.

I watched a movie with my kids the other night and the characters were mostly Asian in it.

Many comedians of that heritage joke about,

You know,

They've got a lot of traditions for prosperity and so forth.

Anyway,

A couple of the characters met up after not seeing each other for a long time and one of the characters had become pretty successful in their career and the other one just with no irony or joking around or anything,

Said,

How much money do you have?

You know,

Like that was a legitimate question.

Like that would signify anything.

You know,

Our whole planet is infected with that.

It's like the value of a person is automatically associated with how much money they have.

It's not truth.

No,

It's not.

We don't need to add things to ourselves to enhance our inherent worth.

And yet we seem to think that accumulating gives us something.

But what?

Just more stuff to manage.

You know,

Here's a good example.

You asked that question earlier,

Like how do we get it so wrong?

And here's a good example because if you take a human being in a survival situation,

The abundance of food or shelter or clothing or supplies is an enhancement of one's survival.

Right?

And if that survival mode gets exaggerated out beyond its scope,

It's now designer labels and Porsches and whatever else.

But it's still driven by that same notion that it enhances your survival,

But it's no longer enhancing your physical survival.

It's enhancing the survival of your egoic sense of self and identity.

Just one of those ways.

If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart,

You will endure forever.

There's a challenging idea.

Yeah.

Well,

I think at the beginning,

If you stay in the center,

Right?

If you deviate from the center and try to embrace death,

You can run yourself into a lot of trouble.

But if you stay in the center and embrace death,

It's a whole different story.

What do we mean by center?

The unmoving awareness and being that are always here and never move.

The presence in us which is not coming and going the way that thoughts and emotions and sensations and experiences come and go.

You see,

To me,

The notion of enduring forever is not like something you will achieve.

It's to recognize that there's already a presence that is constant and already a presence that is infinite and vast.

To stay in touch with it means that everything that dies,

Everything that passes can be observed.

It can be seen as other than myself.

The unmoving presence of awareness perceives the dying thought,

The dying emotion,

The dying body,

The dying day,

The dying circumstance.

But that awareness itself isn't moving.

It's not dying.

It's not coming and going the way that things come and go.

I'm not afraid of death,

You know that?

I'm afraid of old age though.

Everybody's afraid of death,

So anybody who tells me they're not afraid of death is not aware of death.

If you're afraid of anything,

You're afraid of death.

I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation.

That's why I'm so glib about it because when people say I'm not afraid of death,

They haven't properly considered what death means.

I'm pretty sure I've properly considered what death means.

What I'm saying is that if a person has truly encountered death and has become unafraid of it,

That will remove every other kind of fear from life.

So if there are other fears that poke up,

Those are actually the fear of death.

All I'm saying is that,

See,

The false self is always going to be plagued by its inevitable death and end.

The variety of ways that it can experience its own death and end are myriad.

When we remark that we're not afraid of death,

It's because we have some conceptualization of death.

But where the death is actually occurring is in the places where our false self reacts.

I had a guy come to me one time and he said,

I'm not afraid of death.

I've gone beyond death.

There's no me left.

And yet this guy would become extremely reactive toward me.

Why was he so reactive?

What was reactivity about?

If the fear of death is gone,

Then what's there to be reactive about?

Death is just the ultimate end of every insult.

Yeah,

I guess one of the ego's last tricks is to try to convince itself that it doesn't exist.

Yeah,

That's a good trick,

Isn't it?

Very clever.

But I do think that that's probably an indicator of the ego being close to dead or close to gone is that it's one of those extinction bursts.

Its senses,

It's imminent to end and then its strategies become finer and finer and more insidious.

Yep.

It's always vying for survival because at the root of every ego is the notion that I am a thing and I will die.

Yeah.

And I think that also relates to the problem I have in meditation sometimes when I come up on that membrane and I feel like I'm this close to being free but the fact that I still have a concept of self prevents it.

Because if I were free I wouldn't even be able to articulate that I were free,

It would just simply be a state of being.

And that's where that unmoving center of awareness comes in because the unmoving center of awareness is what perceives that happening.

Right.

It's that giant step back.

See all too often in spiritual realms people are looking for immortality.

It's like they're looking for the immortality of their ego and they get it all wrong.

It's not the ego that achieves immortality.

It's the inborn essence that is immortal and becomes known.

It becomes consciously known.

So what do we mean when we say if we stay in the center of that essence and embrace death with our whole heart?

I mean I think a lot of us on the path already kind of understand that our true nature endures forever but we don't understand that on a level that's palpable all the time.

That's not like a fundamental part of our orientation to anything.

Yeah.

Well this is where it's very useful to examine our experience and look and see,

Okay,

So I have an experience of being a five-year-old boy and I have an experience of being a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirty-year-old boy and forty-year-old boy.

Man,

Whatever,

Boy.

And with all of those experiences there's been a very different body present.

With every one of those experiences there's been a different set of desires and motivations,

Different emotional textures,

Different thought processes and ideas and beliefs and yet there's something unimaginably true and consistent through all of those experiences.

What is that?

What is that,

Right?

Because every thought process from the transition of five,

Fifteen,

Thirty,

Forty has come and gone and the body's not the same anymore and the emotional life isn't the same,

The desires and motivations aren't the same and yet there's still something fundamental that I call me.

What is that?

What is that?

You see,

So we don't see our most fundamental self as palpable or practical because we don't refine our attention enough to perceive it.

But when we examine and look and see what is it that really is me?

What is myself really?

Who am I really?

And we're able to parse it out from the body,

The emotions,

The beliefs.

We can really sense in and feel there is an essence of what I am that is continuous.

It's here all the time.

It's here not only when I'm five,

Fifteen,

Thirty,

Forty,

It's here in the morning,

The afternoon,

The night,

It's there in the dream,

It's there in deep sleep,

It's always here,

That sense of the self as pure consciousness,

Pure being.

I took a webinar recently that made that point and one of the statements that the presenter made that really kind of stuck with me was this idea that death is a continuous experience.

Something is always dying in our experience.

And he used the example of his own son who was an infant,

But then the infant died and there was a toddler and then the toddler died and there was a school-aged child and so forth.

And so there's always some aspect and I think that's where some of my personal grief comes from sometimes as well because like my dog is quite elderly now.

He's got some health problems.

He's gone deaf.

His kids are about to give out.

And that's just one more aspect of my experience that's about to leave,

That's about to be disappeared,

For lack of a better word.

And that is a dying.

The thrill of some experience you had yesterday doing a sport or something,

That's already gone and died.

And I think we have as humans these,

Part of our egoic structure is a whole set of defenses that we've built against experiencing those things as a death.

We're just kind of like,

Oh yeah,

Or sometimes we'll make excuses.

It was boring anyway.

I didn't really like this so much.

Or my old house,

I didn't really like it.

I like this new thing better.

And so maybe that's kind of what propels us in some way forward in life is this idea that we don't want to encounter the death of the things we knew.

And so we're always trying to replace them with something even better and greater and it feeds into our greed and it feeds into our.

.

.

Well,

We have this,

Yeah,

Exactly.

We have this desire to endure,

But we see that endurance as part of our ego and separate self as opposed to the universal fabric of being,

Which is being born and dying constantly.

I love that what you're sharing with that presenter where the infant dies and becomes the toddler.

The toddler dies and becomes the.

.

.

Because if you look,

That's the microcosm.

And if we look at the macrocosm,

It's like Adi is born and dying.

Kathleen is born and dying.

The flower is born and dying.

And it's not just the individual experience that's going through that constancy of death.

It's the whole of creation that's going through that constancy of death.

Yeah.

I mean,

We could even extrapolate that all the way out to the universe going through the yugas,

Which is sort of like a system of seasons in the Hindu cosmology.

So going back to this fundamental law of impermanence,

Without being able to perceive impermanence with clear eyes,

We lose the center.

So the center is where we perceive that impermanence with clear and stable eyes.

Right.

You know,

This is totally off the wall,

But you know what I like about action movies is the characters never stop to evaluate or analyze anything that's going on.

It's just like they know what has to be done next.

And obviously it's scripted,

But one thing follows another and whatever tumult or battle or intense car chase or anything else that's happened,

They come back to a place where things are calm for a minute before the next thing happens.

And you know,

And it's like normal.

There's not a lot of self-evaluation.

And I just think that's interesting.

Like I wish I could live my life that way.

I wish I could simply keep going from moment to moment and you know,

Not.

.

.

Why can't you?

Well,

I'm working on it.

I mean,

I can,

I guess,

But.

.

.

Maybe you should stop working on it.

Absolutely stop thinking about working on it.

Because that's the self-evaluation part.

I know,

I know.

So,

Well,

Shoot,

You live with this brain.

I mean,

It's hard.

It's hard to be me with my brain.

It is hard to be a me.

With a brain,

I know.

For everyone.

Well,

Maybe we should talk about impermanence.

Well,

I think a lot of people,

What they do when they consider impermanence.

Well,

I see people either arrive at resignation or some kind of pseudo-acceptance of the notion.

Kind of like,

Oh,

Here we are.

We're human beings and everything's impermanent.

It's like,

Okay,

We'll guess.

We'll just have to accept it.

I don't think that most people actually break through to the other side of that realization.

To realize that the recognition of impermanence happens on behalf of a permanent being.

And it's like we don't seem to stumble upon that realization in our contemplations.

I see people when they practice Western Buddhism,

Embracing the notion of impermanence,

But without any real penetrating factor to arrive at the significance of understanding impermanence.

And I think that's the piece that leads to that last line here about enduring forever.

You know,

That's the really necessary piece.

Without impermanence,

Nothing could exist.

I mean,

If there were simply permanence,

If there were simply stasis,

What would that mean?

Yeah,

You couldn't have it.

There would be no such thing as change ever.

Right.

No such thing as time for that matter.

Right.

Which is where we can say that the unmoving presence in us doesn't experience time.

It doesn't experience change.

It's what perceives change.

It's what perceives time,

But in itself as the subject,

No time,

No change.

Yeah.

It's the only thing that could possibly be permanent.

Who was it that said,

The Course in Miracles?

Anyway,

The line was,

Nothing that changes is real,

Nothing unreal exists.

Therein lies the peace of God.

Did I get that right?

Yeah,

That's the course.

Yeah.

The introduction to the Course.

Yep.

Okay.

Nothing unreal exists.

So look around at your life.

Look to all the objects in the room and even the people around you.

Yeah.

I take caution with that approach,

Although I understand what you're saying.

I take caution with that approach because what it often does is it leads people to believe that the things they experience are illusory and that they don't exist.

I think that's a wrong approach because I think what we need to recognize is not that the things we experience don't exist,

But that the things we experience are all made of the same substance and that I myself am made of that substance.

Because I think a lot of people get themselves into a strange quandary when they're living in a world where they feel like nothing that they're experiencing is real.

It's not that it's not real.

It's that the real substance of it is different than what we think.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Exactly.

There was a famous social media incident not that long ago where Jim Carrey,

The actor,

He's gone through an awakening that's pretty obvious from things he said.

He was on a red carpet for some awards ceremony and an interviewer came up to him and he just started like she put the mic in his face and he just started laughing and she was completely baffled by it and a little upset,

I think.

And she said,

What are you laughing at?

And he looked at her and he said,

You don't exist.

And he just cackled.

And so the social media storm after that was like,

What's wrong with Jim Carrey?

Has he gone completely nuts?

A few people pointed out that,

Well,

He's going through a thing.

It sounds like a thing.

I think he's mellowed out since then.

I hope so.

Yeah,

I think that's one of those places that I think spiritual practitioners can get stuck in,

Is in disembodying the world in a way that truly becomes a disconnection from reality.

But impermanence is a troubling thing because it does force us to confront the idea of death and the impermanence of the body.

There's not a precise moment when the body goes from growing and evolving to decline,

Sort of the downside.

But there is a moment where you notice it.

There's a moment where all of a sudden everything you assume to be true about where you were going and what your life,

I don't know how it would proceed.

I don't know.

I think when you're young,

You just assume it's always going to be like this.

I'm never going to get old.

Those old people that I see over there,

Whatever,

They're just like another class of animal that I don't understand.

And then at some point you kind of go,

Oh,

That's going to be me.

Oh,

This body will dissolve.

The wrinkles start to appear.

The creakiness comes into the joints.

And it's a wake up call.

It's a real shock to the system.

And since that's happened in my own life in recent years,

Part of my work has been imagining impermanence in a way that is comforting as opposed to threatening.

That engenders,

I don't want to say engenders hope,

But in a way that's acceptable as necessary and beautiful somehow,

As opposed to decline and becoming useless,

Losing one's faculties,

Connections to things,

Viability in the world.

Those are pretty intimidating concepts.

We can kind of lump it all under the idea of impermanence and it sounds sort of poetic,

But the nitty gritty of it is that things kind of come together with,

Shakti forms things,

But then Shiva wipes it all away in the end.

And that's sobering for one thing.

The ego doesn't even want to look at it,

Of course.

The ego would rather keep itself distracted with other things.

Well,

There's something so beautiful about what you're saying because what makes the sunset beautiful except the fact that it's going to die?

What makes the flower so beautiful except that it's going to wilt?

What makes the infant so precious but that it's going to change and grow?

In some sense,

It's the impermanence of things that marks them with their beauty.

Yeah,

I like that.

It's so hard to stay in that orientation,

But I am beginning to understand that the decay is as necessary and beautiful as the becoming.

We kind of see this in life anyway where certain objects,

Pieces of furniture or whatever that are well worn that seem to have a depth of,

I want to say meaning but that's not the right word,

Wisdom.

Things that are well worn seem to accumulate,

Even if they're simply inanimate objects,

They seem to accumulate a sort of wisdom to them that can anchor us to something larger than ourselves that can instill a sense of maybe that permanence that we're talking about,

The permanence of awareness as opposed to the ephemeral nature of very temporary things.

You've just answered your own query about the difficulty of the classroom.

You just answered the reason why the classroom is so difficult.

Why does the chair have to get worn so much?

Why is the human being tested so much?

Because it's the production of beauty.

It's the production of wisdom that brings that's what the hardness of the school facilitates.

Oh,

I love that.

Thank you so much for summing that up nicely.

You're right.

I think that's exactly what it is and that's exactly what this verse is telling us in very few words.

Yep,

Exactly.

Our wisdom and our immortal essence are won by the bruising and the beating and the stripping away.

Khalil Gibran has that wonderful image of being like bread in where you are kneaded and thrown into the oven and you are baked and used for consumption.

Our life will be finally in some sense some act of service toward the divine.

We feed creation.

We are the food.

That's the lesson of the Tao.

That's the lesson of the classroom.

It's that we are here to be made a vessel for truth.

That's the lesson of our life.