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Contents:
The Next Sedona Intensive
The next intensive by Gina and Theo will be April 9-11, 2010 in Sedona, Arizona. The DVD of the last intensive will be available in a couple of weeks.
When spiritual teachers suggest that you accept something, they tell you this because to do anything other than accept what already is makes no sense, since it already is the way it is, and that fact can’t be changed. And yet, the egoic mind so often refuses to see this, and this refusal is a prescription for suffering. Some things can’t be changed because they already happened. That’s a fact of life. The egoic mind may try to change things that can’t be changed through thought, but that doesn’t work. It imagines and desires something different than what has happened, but that doesn’t change what has happened. It makes no sense to cling to ideas about things being different than they are. The only effect these thoughts have is to make us miserable.
However, acceptance of whatever is doesn’t preclude doing something to try to change what you can change; you just can’t change a moment that has already passed. For example, you can accept that you stubbed your toe (what good would it be to complain or get angry about it?), and at the same time, you can do whatever you can to prevent stubbing your toe again. Or to use an example that may be more meaningful: If you are unhappy in your relationship, you can accept that you are unhappy, and at the same time, you can take steps to change something within yourself or in regard to the relationship itself.
You may have noticed that I’m big on suggesting that people ignore thoughts and feelings whenever possible. I’ve been asked how this is different from repression, which is considered to be an unhealthy way of dealing with feelings. That is certainly true about repression. The biggest difference between repressing and ignoring is this: When you repress a feeling, you are still believing the thoughts that gave rise to the feeling. This will only cause the feeling to go underground, only to rise again some other time, perhaps with greater strength, or at least with no less strength.
Ignoring, on the other hand, involves recognizing a thought or feeling as soon as it arises for what it is—a product of the egoic mind that has no truth or value in terms of how to live your life—and then turning your attention to what is real and true in the moment. What is real and true is whatever is actually happening, including any intuitions or insights that might be arising from Essence, and also anything being experienced through your senses.
When someone we know is going through something difficult, we often feel that we have to think about their situation, worry about it, tell people about it, complain about it, be angry, afraid, sad or even cry about it. This is the egoic mind’s version of compassion, but this is not compassion but, rather, sympathy. One of the dictionary definitions of “sympathy” is: “a relationship or an affinity between people or things in which whatever affects one correspondingly affects the other.”
Sympathy is the ego’s version of compassion, but sympathy is a poor substitute for compassion. Suffering over someone else’s suffering isn’t actually compassionate. It puts the sympathetic person in the same boat with the person who is having difficulty, and that makes the sympathetic person less likely to be of help to the person in difficulty. The sympathetic ego joins the other person in his or her suffering, which reinforces the ego’s view that whatever happened or is happening is terrible and shouldn’t be the way that it is.
Here's a clip from the recent intensive held in Sedona, Arizona. Two more clips are available under "Video." A 2-DVD set (totaling 4 hours) of that intensive is being produced and will be available on Amazon.com in December 2009.
The Ego Is Just the Thought "I"
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Have you ever noticed how often your thoughts are about wanting something? Usually the mind is focused on one particular thing at a time, not everything in the world you might want. It may obsess about a relationship or a new sofa, a new job, or a new car. It may obsess about being successful or being thin. Sometimes the desires are relatively small—new curtains or a better stereo, but even these desires can feel obsessive and important: You really want it.
The more you think about something, the more you want it. So, even little things can seem more important than they are. The mind has an amazing capacity to focus narrowly, and when it does that, what it focuses on becomes magnified and disproportionately important. It feels like you really need that to be happy or to be successful or whatever.
Much of the time, happiness doesn’t seem like a choice but something that happens to us that we don’t have a lot of control over. Sometimes we’re happy and sometimes we aren’t. Happiness is usually experienced as a feeling that is the result of getting what we want—life finally lines up with our desires, and we feel happy. The kind of happiness that is a feeling, or emotion, comes and goes like every other emotion. It’s dependent on whether life is meeting our desires or not. The feeling of happiness or unhappiness is tied to desires and, therefore, to the egoic state of consciousness. We feel up or down, depending on whether life is going our way or not, according to our egoic desires.
That kind of soaring, giddy, top-of-the-world happiness feels great; the ego lives for it and wishes life would always feel that way. And it resents the fact that it doesn’t. To the ego, anything less than that happiness feels dull, uninteresting—and wrong. The ego’s desire for life to bring constant happiness, when it doesn’t, is actually the cause of unhappiness. Underlying that, is anger at life—anger at not getting our way.
The illusion of the false self (the ego) is created and maintained by the most convincing thought of all: I. When we think I…, we really believe that that is what we believe. For example, when we think I like hot weather or I want a new car, we really believe this preference or desire is true for us. It defines, or identifies, us: I’m someone who likes hot weather. I’m someone who wants a new car. Or if we think I feel lost, we really believe that this is true about us—and meaningful. We don’t see that it is just a thought, which if believed, becomes true—a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems true because we believe it, but it is not intrinsically true. It’s just a thought, after all.
Where do thoughts come from? Thoughts arise out of nowhere. Just because a thought is happening in our own head doesn’t mean it is any more true than a thought that arises in someone else’s head. However, we become attached to our thoughts—we identify with them as how I feel or what I like. But who is this I?
Spiritual teachers tell you to stop all seeking, which makes seeking seem like a problem—like something you shouldn’t do. But what do you do in its place? That is the real question. The reason to suggest that you stop seeking is to help you realize that what you are seeking is already here. It is to get you to stop wanting and striving to awaken, which is how the ego keeps you from noticing what is here, right now, in this moment. That doesn’t mean, however, that something isn’t necessary for you to do to discover that what you are seeking is already here. The paradox is that seeking is usually necessary for you to discover the great truth that what you are seeking is already here.
Seeking arises in us when it is time to return Home. The drive to seek the Truth comes from Essence when it is time in our evolution to discover our true nature. Some people discover the Truth without this drive, but for most, the drive to seek sets them on a new course, away from egoic values and an egoic lifestyle. Without some turning away from the ego and its drives and desires, discovering Essence and staying in alignment with it is difficult. The drive to seek is accompanied by a disillusionment with the ego’s desires and values. It is a seeking for something else to guide one’s life. Seekers get onto the spiritual path because it promises another way of relating to life, one that is happier and freer than the life most people know.
I was listening to a song the other day, and some of the words were “Love is gentle, and love is kind.” The truth of that really touched me. We think of love as being a feeling—an emotion—but true love is more of a doing. Love touches, love gives, love is gentle, and it is kind. That’s how we know it. We know love by its fruits. Love acts: It listens, it caresses, it nourishes, it nurtures. It does whatever is needed of it. Love naturally responds to life as it presents itself.
Romantic love isn’t like this at all. It is a giddy feeling, an excitement, an anticipation of getting something from someone. It makes us feel like a kid at Christmas—“Yippee! I’m going to get what a want!” Romance is exciting, fun, and feels wonderful, but it’s not really love. It’s too self-centered for that. When we are in love, we are often oblivious to the needs of others, as we have only the beloved on our mind. We become fascinated and obsessed with the beloved to the exclusion of everything else. We love the beloved, not for what he or she is, but for what we think that person might mean to us and to our life. We are excited because the beloved is believed to enhance us. The feelings of romantic love are created by an illusion (i.e., psychological projection) and by the release of certain chemicals in the brain. Romantic feelings are a very different kind of love than true love; they are a falling in love with what we hope will be our salvation and happiness forever. That kind of love never lasts; it often disappears upon getting to know someone better. If we are lucky, it turns into something more true, more real, more akin to our true nature.
