Awareness heals.
Awareness transforms.
Awareness puts us in touch with reality.
But that goes with understanding.
Understanding how our mind functions and how we are being deceived by words and concepts.
One more thing I want to say about our perception of reality.
Let me put it in the form of an analogy.
You've got the President of the United States.
Now he has to get feedback.
Well you've got the Pope in Rome who has to get feedback from the whole church.
Now you've got millions of items that are supposed to be fed to the president but he could hardly take all of that in much less digest it.
So he has people whom he trusts to make abstraction,
Abstracts,
To summarize things,
To monitor,
To filter and then some of it gets to his desk.
Now this is what's happening to us.
From every pore of our living cell of our body and from all the senses we're getting feedback from reality.
But we're filtering things out constantly.
Who's doing the filtering?
Very important to find out.
Your conditioning,
Your culture,
Your programming,
The way you were taught to see things and to experience them,
Even your language.
Lots of filtering going on so that you will see things sometimes that are not there and sometimes you don't see things that are there.
That's so common.
You've only got to look at a paranoid person who's feeling all threatened by something that isn't there,
Who's constantly interpreting reality in terms of certain experiences of the past or certain conditioning that he or she has.
And there's another big crook inside there who's doing the filtering.
It's called an attachment.
Desire,
Craving.
The root of sorrow is craving.
Craving distorts perception.
It destroys perception.
You've got your fears and your desires.
As Samuel Johnson said,
The knowledge that he has that he is to swing from a scaffold or that he is to be hanged within a week wonderfully concentrates a man's mind.
You blot out everything else.
You're concentrated only on this fear or desire,
Craving.
Look how we have been brought up.
We were drugged when we were young and we were brought up to need people.
For what?
For acceptance,
For approval,
For appreciation,
For applause,
For what they call success.
Here are words that do not correspond to reality.
They're conventions,
Like political realities,
Conventions,
Things invented but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality.
Success,
What is that?
That is what this particular group decided is a good thing.
Another particular group will decide it's a bad thing.
What is good in Washington might be considered bad in a Cartooshan monastery.
Success in political circles might be considered failure in other circles.
These are conventions but we treat them like realities,
Don't we?
Now,
What happened to us when we were young?
We were programmed.
We were taught.
We were programmed to unhappiness.
This is amazing.
You cannot not be unhappy.
Why?
Because they taught you and they taught me,
They taught all of us,
That in order to be happy you need money,
Success,
A beautiful or handsome partner in life,
A good job,
Friendship,
Spirituality,
God,
You name it.
Unless you get these things,
You're not going to be happy.
You need them.
Now that is what I call an attachment.
An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.
Once you get convinced of that and that has gotten to our subconscious,
It's got stamped into our nerves to the roots of our being.
How could I be happy unless I have good health?
You know,
I'll tell you something.
I have met people dying of cancer who are happy.
But how could I be happy if I know I'm going to die?
You all know of people who are happy when they are meeting dead.
But how could I be happy if I don't have money?
You know something?
This guy has got a million dollars in the bank and he's feeling insecure.
The other guy has got practically no money and he doesn't seem to feel any insecurity at all.
He was programmed differently.
That's all.
Useless exhorting the first guy about what to do.
He needs understanding.
He needs to understand.
That's where I was talking about awareness.
Exhortations are no great help as I'm going to tell you very soon.
You need to understand.
You've been programmed.
It's a false belief.
See it as false.
See it as a fantasy.
And so what are people doing all through their lives?
They're busy fighting.
Fight,
Fight,
Fight.
The conflict to what they call survival.
But you know when you talk to the average American who says he or she is making a living,
It isn't a living they're making.
Oh no.
They've got much more than enough to live.
Come to my country and you'll see that.
You mean you don't need all those cars to live.
You really don't.
You don't need a television set to live.
You don't need all that makeup to live.
You don't need all those clothes to live.
To live you don't need them.
You really don't.
But try to convince the average American of this.
They've been brainwashed.
They've been programmed.
So conflict,
Work,
Effort,
Strife to get the desired object which will make them happy.
Now listen to this pathetic story.
Your story,
My story,
Everybody's story till we understand it and break out.
The story is this.
They told us until I get this object I'm not going to be happy.
Whatever it is.
Money,
Friendship,
Anything.
So I've got to strive to get it.
And when I've got it I've got to strive to keep it.
A temporary thrill.
Oh I'm so thrilled I got it.
How long does that last?
A few minutes.
A couple of days.
At the most.
When you got your brand new car how long did the thrill last?
Just as long as your next attachment was threatened.
There's a funny thing about an attachment you know.
If you have a thousand attachments you could satisfy 999 but if you haven't satisfied one you're miserable.
So all right I've got it.
Thrill.
Now A,
Get tired of it after a while.
They told me prayer was the big thing.
They told me God was the big thing.
They told me friendship was the big thing.
Not knowing what prayer really was.
Not knowing what God really was.
We made things out of them.
After a while we get bored.
Bored with the car.
But we're still holding on to it.
And we're still fending off threats.
Isn't that pathetic?
And if you've got one attachment that's bad enough when you have a couple of thousand.
We're crazy.
We're just crazy.
And there's no way out.
There simply is no way out.
It's the only model we were given to be happy.
We weren't given any other model.
Our culture,
Our society,
I'm sorry to say even our religion gave us no other model.
This is happening in all religions too you know.
Like you've been appointed Cardinal.
What a great honor that is.
Honor?
Did you say honor?
You used the wrong word.
Now others are going to aspire to it.
You lapse into the world what the Gospels call the world.
And you're going to lose your soul.
The world.
Success.
Honor.
Non-existent things.
Power.
Prestige.
Winning.
Especially over others.
Popularity.
You gain the world but you lost your soul.
Your whole life has been empty and soulless.
Nothing there.
There's only one way out and that is get deprogrammed.
Get deprogrammed.
How do you get that?
Become aware of the programming.
You cannot change by an effort of the will.
You cannot change through ideals.
You cannot change through building up new habits.
Your behavior may change but you don't.
You only change through awareness and understanding.
When you see a stone as a stone,
A scrap of paper as a scrap of paper,
You don't think that the stone is a precious diamond anymore and you don't think that that scrap of paper is a check for a billion dollars.
When you see that,
You change.
There's no violence anymore in attempting to change yourself.
Otherwise what you call change is moving the furniture around.
Your behavior is changed but not you.
