A Taste of the Other Shore

 The Stop

It is very nice to read about how to reach something that you feel you want in life, as well as how to look beyond life for something that is not plainly there in front of you. That is why we are here and that is why we go to such seminars, because we feel there is something valuable which is not obvious. But talking about it, reading about it and thinking about it, will not get you very far. As long as you are thinking about it, reading about it and discussing it, you are staying on the same level where this doesn’t exist. What you are looking for is somewhere else, and the more you discuss it and think about it, the more it keeps you on the level where it doesn’t exist.

To move to another dimension or level where it does exist, you have to withdraw the energy from where it is working now. It is not a question of just saying, ”I want to open to something different.” – that is not enough, because your energy is moving continuously, and always has been, in the areas that are running your life and have been running your life all your life.

Yesterday I quoted a famous Buddhist statement, which I hope you don’t need reminding of, but I will still repeat it. It said, ”Look – that means look with your whole being, not just your eyes – for that which neither comes nor goes.” All the beautiful experiences in life, and fortunately also all the terrible things, do come and go. There is nothing in the passage of your life so far that has not come and gone, and if it still is there, soon it will go. Buddha is saying that on the level that coming and going happens, there is nothing that doesn’t come and go, and it is not that you haven’t found it yet, you will never find anything that doesn’t come and go.

Every time you find something beautiful, you think to yourself that at least this will last – this love, this joy, this good feeling, this health, this strength, this power, this success, ”I just got this great job, I am going to be the boss, fantastic, this will stay.” – it will not. You are all doomed, unless you find that which neither comes nor goes, and then from the place where nothing comes and goes, you can watch everything come and go and say, ”Okay. Aha. So it is.”

When the go’s come, instead of collapsing, suffering and feeling your life has come to an end and is not worth living anymore, you say ”Aha.” My beloved boyfriend has gone off with another woman – Aha. I have lost my job, I don’t have a new job and I have no money – Aha. I feel terrible this morning, I have a terrible cold, I can’t see and I am coughing, total disaster – It will go.

So that is one thing that Buddha says. Now another one, a very simple one. He made this long speech which consisted of one word, just one word, and in that miracle of one word, a great teaching: Buddha has cried halt. Stop what? Stop breathing? Stop moving? Stop the world, I want to get off? Stop the energy that moves continuously, day by day, in the same way, running all the time. Even if your moment stops, the energy is ready to move in the same dimensions, in the same way it has been running your whole life. That is why in all my seminars there are times of silence, times of sitting quietly and feeling the possibility of allowing your energy, your mind, to stop. This is not meditation. Meditation is an active attention to watch your mind, to come to stillness, and that is not what I practice, because in a way I am stopped. I move into that place of stop-ness and silence, and out of that comes a movement.

Normally when I first come to a seminar – although this time I didn’t – there is stillness and silence. Not because it is meditation time, but because I come to a stop and I see whether, through my stop-ness, something can be passed to the people in the seminar that they also slowly stop – and it always happens. The power of the stopping is so strong, that even new people who have just arrived and don’t know anything about me or my work, find themselves simply sitting still.

I stop because stopping is my truth. I am not practicing stopping. And I have the hope that some of you, or all of you, will catch it, like catching a cold, and something similar will happen to you. There is a jazzy energy in you that is thinking and planning the whole time, and which comes to a stop when you have the energy available that connects with this other dimension, or towards this dimension – which is the ultimate dimension where there is no coming or going; a level where you can feel that it goes on forever and it has always been there.

Something else that Buddha said comes to me, and I haven’t read anything by Buddha for years, but he is here today because I am speaking of him again, so maybe he has possessed me for a little while. He said, ”Samsara – which is the day by day life I am talking about – has no beginning – because you have always been in it, through all your lives – but it has an end. It ends when you get enlightened. Enlightenment has a beginning and no end.” – in an instant you get enlightened, but once you get enlightened, you stay enlightened. Samsara is continuous, moving through time, through your hundreds of lives, and then, ”Aha!” enlightenment happens, and Samsara disappears and up comes enlightenment, and that continues on in time. ”But Suchness or tathata – the Sanskrit word – has neither a start nor a finish.” It has always been there and will always be there, and when I say to look for that which neither comes nor goes, I am talking about Suchness, I am talking about tathata.

I am remembering something that an American Goose named Bhaskar said to me when I was doing groups in America about fifteen years ago, ”Michael, if you were to give yourself a Goose name, what name would you give?” I said, ”Tathata,” though I hadn’t really reached this, that was the name which inspired me. I would like to, as far as I can, connect you this weekend with tathata.

From tathata, which is outside your self, you can live your self. It is not a disappearance, but it can be. From tathata, you can move off into disappearance or you can move back into the world. By disappearance, I don’t mean that you don’t exist anymore; I mean that the whole world disappears so you disappear as far as your involvement with the world is concerned. From this line of tathata, you can fall backwards and there is no world anymore, there is nothingness.

I will quote Buddha again, ”From the beginning, nothing is.” He means that in that place, the world disappears. You are still there, presence is still there, but the world is not. If you move forward from that place, you move back into life, but you are still standing on tathata – standing on it as you are acting, as you are relating, as you do your job, when you are coughing, while reading a book, when you are walking down the High Street, when you buy something in the shop, when you are talking to a friend, when you are talking to a group of people like I am and words are coming out of you, you are standing still on the place which is beyond.

So it includes the world, it is not somewhere else. But in a way it is somewhere else, because when you are moving out of the world into this place, then it is somewhere else. In a way the world disappears, but then it comes back again, only it is not the same world. You are based in the oneness. When I look at you, I see seventy people who are all individual and are all one. I can walk around in oneness, and at the same time I can feel somebody there, energy here, something from her here and him there, and that movement doesn’t come from my mind, ”Ah, now I see something over here, and now over there.” I don’t work anything out. The one that is everywhere focuses here and says, ”I am coming here to this lady. Now over here to this guy,” and that movement which is the movement of Michael Barnett, is not just somebody doing something to someone else, it is the channelling of the One energy through this person into the other.

So when I come around – as I will start doing in a little while when I am finished talking – when I make contact with you, please remember that this is what happens. It is a cosmic movement, and through it, cosmic energy will come in and move your energy. It will move your energy because it is the most powerful energy in the world, and because it is also your basic energy – so it will move the energy in you that is not basic.

That is one thing that will happen, and then there is something else that will happen. That something in you which is also right now connected to the cosmic energy, although you don’t know it, you can’t feel it and you can’t experience it, that part of you which is always there will start to vibrate through the process of resonance. Resonance is going on all the time because basically we are all essentially the same. So if I can pop a note like a tuning fork does, then all the tuning forks have no choice but to vibrate. It may be very distant, it may be very quiet, almost imperceptible, you may not even realise it is happening, but it is. It has to happen.

People come to groups regularly to make themselves more and more open for that purpose. The first process which is there for most of you is where energies which are not clear in you get clear. The more the energy becomes clear, the more the second process happens more calmly – the resonance starts happening. So for the people who come regularly, the second process is working. The resonance gets stronger and stronger until it equals the energy that I am sending out, and they know that perhaps without knowing it – they can sense it happening.

As I was saying last night, for those who come once and then disappear, nothing of this happens. You go away with perhaps strong experiences you have had, some insight you have had, some great moment you have had, but it doesn’t lead anywhere, it doesn’t take you anywhere. You have to persevere if you want to finish the journey.

Talk, Prague, 1st of March 2008