A Taste of the Other Shore

 This Is The Secret Of Life

It is feedback time. You may have some questions, or you may just want to share what is going on with you.

Sataranda: Is awareness a state of the mind? And if so, can we drop it?

Is awareness a state of the mind? Well, it depends what you mean by ‘mind’. Do you mean the part of you that can hold concepts, talk, and relate to ideas? Or do you mean simply consciousness? If you mean consciousness then awareness…Well, let’s go from the other end – if you can imagine something without consciousness, could it be aware?

Awareness, consciousness, mind – they are really quite vague, and I think different people and different teachers use them in different ways. Buddhism says, “All is mind,” but I don’t think they mean what we usually take to be mind, which is the thing in us which can make something of reality for ourselves, using words or not. If we didn’t have consciousness then everything would not have an existence for us. We make things exist. We make the table, a person, the sky, real through our consciousness – we make them real for ourselves. So Buddhism says everything is mind because we don’t know what anything is except through consciousness, our consciousness, which tells us what things are, or even that things are.

Many authorities – by authorities I guess I mean spiritual teachers and masters – say that consciousness is the basis of existence, but for me that is not true. For me consciousness is a primary manifestation of something, but what that something is is unreachable because I can only reach things with my consciousness. I can maybe sense this beyondness apart from consciousness, but I can’t actually absorb it. I can’t bring it in to my mind because it precedes consciousness. Consciousness is a manifestation of it and it can’t go back to its source, but nevertheless I am convinced that there is something beyond consciousness. And I guess if there is then it will have awareness because if it doesn’t then it is not much use, it has no value.

If there is something beyond consciousness then we are a bit stuck in consciousness and incapable of actually reaching back and finding where our consciousness came from. This is because our major instrument for understanding, appreciating, or bringing into reality is our consciousness, but nevertheless we could have a sense of some sort that there is something beyond consciousness.

I don’t know how interesting this question is for anybody else here, but if you want to say something about awareness, consciousness, what we are looking at right now, then I would be happy.

Moksha: Feldenkrais described it as: cats have consciousness and human beings have awareness.

I don’t understand that, Moksha, I don’t get that division at all. I don’t know what you mean by awareness. If one of my cats – we have a couple of cats at home – comes and I put something in front of it, it will either jump over it or walk around it; it will be aware that there is something there. As far as I can understand my idea of awareness, cats have awareness. They don’t have the same kind of awareness as human beings, but I don’t see any qualitative difference.

Moksha: He meant it in the way that awareness is the ability to learn.

Well, see what I mean, everybody has a different idea about what these terms mean, that is why it is rather difficult to unravel them. Feldenkrais is a man I met once. He has theories about the body, dealing with tensions and things, and goes down to the very small elements in the physical body. Anyway, if he says that awareness is the ability to learn, that is not my idea of awareness, is it yours?

Moksha: In German there is a difference between consciousness and awareness – there is Bewusstsein and Bewusstheit.

There are two different words in English too. You should have said in German there is a difference between consciousness and consciousness, but you didn’t say that! (laughter)

I don’t even know if cats can’t learn. Rats can learn – they have done all these experiments where they go through these little channels and so on, they place food somewhere once, and then the rats always go back there. Then they take the food away, they try a few times to find it, and if it is not there they try somewhere else. I think if you have consciousness you are capable of learning. My word, I feel like I am back at university and talking with some professors! (laughter)

I don’t get that distinction at all, Moksha, in terms of learning. A cat may not be able to learn German but neither can I for that matter, so maybe I am a cat consciously! (laughter) But it can certainly learn basic things like where to go for its food, how to avoid things, which people are nice to them and which are not – cats can learn a number of things. I think cats are quite smart actually; I’ve known cats that are smarter than some people!

Cardo: Isn’t it that consciousness has to do with pure life force and awareness with individuality – an individual is aware and consciousness is pure life force?

Well, this idea of pure life force connects with what I am feeling is beyond consciousness, which is just a pure life force. Consciousness gives us the ability to name things and differentiate one thing from another, whereas a pure life force has not yet gone into differentiation, so that sense I have of something beyond consciousness I could liken to a pure life force out of which consciousness comes. But then after that you said that awareness is…?

Cardo: Is linked to individuality.

Do you mean that consciousness can be there but only an individual can be aware?

Cardo: Yes.

That sounds feasible. When I first consider that, that could be a big factor.

(Speaking to Sataranda who asked the initial question) But anyway, this whole subject which we are working out now, has this some relevance to these days together?

Sataranda: When I experienced myself or felt I was in being then there was the awareness to being, and it looked as if this awareness was also linked a bit to looking and judging.

Aha, I see. Well, another name, I think, for ‘being’ – when I say ‘I think’ it is because it comes from a different tradition and I just think they must mean the same – in Buddhism, Zen Buddhism in particular, is what is known as suchness, which I have read about hundreds of times and which I take to be equal to or commensurate with a feeling of being in one’s Being – that almost concrete but intangible sense of just is-ness. Suchness means is-ness.

I read something in a Zen book many years ago – one of the things that came in and stuck; many things come in and don’t stick – and the quotation is: I found suchness, and I found that there was suchness and my awareness of suchness. Then I said to myself, “But that is still two – there is suchness, a sense of being, and I am aware of it. That is still two and I don’t want two, so I threw away the awareness and became just suchness.”

What I think Sataranda was saying is that when you are aware of suchness it looks like it’s from the same place that actually judges, weighs up, or discriminates between things. When you can look at suchness you can look at your own state of being, but that observer who is looking and saying, “I feel I am in being now,” is in a way also able to discriminate, judge, and choose. Is that right?

Sataranda: Yes.

So you are wondering what its status is if it is the same awareness that also seems to work from your personality mind, your set of values, angles, and so on?

Sataranda: Yes.

So when you feel this, feel what the difference is – when you feel you are in being, when you really are just simply there, in presence, in is-ness, and you say, “Right, I feel I am in this,” then see what happens when you throw away that one that is regarding it, assessing it, and even describing it, and just enter pure beingness and be the beingness. If you do that then the duality disappears. It is hard to stay in that, but if you can stay in that then you don’t need to have the awareness of it because that state is self-aware.

Having the one witnessing in all traditions is considered to be indispensable. No method really works without it except maybe Bhakti, which is pure heart relationship with the master. Otherwise you have to have awareness, you have to watch, you have to see what you are up to, you have to find out who you are right now before you can come to who you really are. So you have to always be aware, always have the witness – that is absolutely necessary on the Path. Then there is a point where you not so much throw the witness away but you don’t need it anymore because when you are at home in yourself, when you are in your basic existence, in your inner truth, then you are self-aware. You don’t need that apartness to watch where you are going. It is like you are walking through a forest at night with a torch and there are all sorts of obstacles, ditches, snakes and whatever, and then you get out of the woods, maybe it is morning now outside, and you can throw the torch away. You don’t need that assistance from outside, you can just walk. Your body is self-aware too, it is not dreaming or something, it will step over ditches, it will avoid things, it will look out for dangerous ponds or soft mud – it will do all this. In a way you as a unit will do that automatically without having to say, “Be careful! Look out, there’s a tree! Now there’s a ditch!” You can do that and some people do do that, but in fact it is not necessary. An instinctive climber would not do that at all, he would just move by instinct and avoid the difficult places as far as they could be seen.

Andarina: Is oneness and is-ness the same thing?

Would anybody like to answer that?

Dana: Is is-ness more like a special state, whereas oneness would be the absolute? Is-ness or suchness could be any state that you experience fully.

Do you mean the oneness of the person or the oneness of life?

Dana: I mean what Andarina was referring to.

No, what are you referring to?

Dana: I try to refer to the same thing as she does which would be the absolute, the last basic source of everything. And then suchness could just be different states.

So do you think to be in a personal state of oneness or suchness is not the same thing as being part of the oneness of all life, that there is a hierarchy there?

Dana: Yes, suchness seems more relative. It seems to me it could be an emotion you feel inside, like sadness, anger or whatever, that you could feel the suchness of that state – but it could also be outside.

No, I don’t think so Dana. You can feel the essence of that state or the quality of that state, but I don’t think you can call that suchness. Well, in a sense you can because if you take the English word ‘suchness’ – well, there is no such word really, but the feeling of what suchness means which is a kind of total essence – then you can say I am totally crying or I am totally sad, there is nothing outside it, so there is suchness, but that is not my view of what suchness means. For me suchness means that you are so totally in your being that you have connected with all being – which is what Andarina was asking.

Mehaba: Couldn’t we say that you cannot experience suchness, that it is not possible?

I say you can experience suchness.

Mehaba: But experience is a matter of a person, and suchness has nothing to do with the person.

It has everything to do with the person. It has to do, if you like, with the original state of things without form; where the form is irrelevant, the shape and size are irrelevant, the emotions are irrelevant, the personality is irrelevant, the individuality is irrelevant, but we all contain them because all these things I have just listed are manifestations of that. So you could in a way return to where all your own personal manifestations came from and be in a state of almost neutrality prior to form, and one can be in that state, so one can most definitely, in my view, experience suchness.

But what one can’t experience, which is what I was talking about at the beginning, is the place where our consciousness came from. When we look inside ourselves, it is very hard to go deeper or further than consciousness because when we are looking inside ourselves we are using consciousness. When we look and explore ourselves we all use consciousness for that. As the Indians say: neti-neti – this is where whatever you think you have come to as yourself you say, “Not this, not this.” And it ends up with the famous India phrase: tat tvam asi. Does anyone know what that means?

Vandan: Yes – Thou art that.

Yes, thou art that, which means that everybody is suchness, everybody is that thing that is behind everything.

I am reminded of a story my teacher Bhagwan used to tell about an Indian king who sent his son to the West – this was maybe four or five hundred years ago – to the early universities which were around then – Oxford, Cambridge, and also other places in Europe – he sends him there for some years. He gets messages every now and again from his son saying everything is going fine, now he has learnt this, now he has learnt that, everything is great. After some years the son comes back home and his father says, “It was a long trip, you must have learnt a great deal?” “Yes, I learnt geography, history, English, five or six languages, and this and that,” he replies. Then the king asks him, “But what did you learn about the One?” “The what? I have never heard of it!” the son answers. “You didn’t learn anything about the One?” “I don’t know what you are talking about Dad.” “Then you wasted your time. You learnt nothing of any value. If you don’t know what the One is then all your learning is Scheisse!” (laughter)

I guess when you are doing the exploration that we are doing here, these kinds of questions that are coming: What is awareness? What is suchness? What is being? What is consciousness? – these are the dimensions that we are exploring, so in a way it is good that they are coming up. But now just drop all these terms, and all these interpretations of these terms – of suchness, being, awareness and consciousness – because that is just the mind playing with all these things. We are working on these processes, the TOBAL Process and your own processes, with your mind, and looking to find the depths of the mind, or to allow the mind to find the depths of yourself. But if you drop all that, then what do you come to? What are you coming to in all your efforts these first three days? I can see you are working, exploring, and maybe defining and naming: Is this being? Is this suchness? Is this consciousness? Is my consciousness different from my awareness? – etcetera, etcetera; all these questions you want to know, and it is important that you ask these questions, but now I am taking a bit of a jump – I am not sure whether you will be able to take it or not but let’s try.

If you drop all those terms, then in the moment when you are sitting, as most of you are – or lying as some of you are also doing – what are you faced with? What is the reality?

Andarina: Nothing.

Well I hope not otherwise Sutiro is going to be a widower! (laughter) So I hope you haven’t disappeared altogether into nothingness!

In a way you are right, Andarina, because that is how it appears. This is the famous “nothingness”, the famous “emptiness”, but in fact the nothingness and emptiness is really the disappearance of all that you were full of before, of really the whole story.

So I will ask this question again. Andarina gave me an answer and I rejected her answer, although up to a point it is true. If you don’t use any terms, even like nothingness, in the moment, when you are sitting in this room, what is there?

(silence)

We are talking about consciousness, awareness, suchness, nothingness, and people are asking questions about them, but where do you get these terms from? Me, I know! (laughter) What I mean is we get them from the language, from teachers, from reading, from our minds. They have a meaning for us, we can talk about them and discuss them – as we have been doing for the last half an hour – so in a way they are all part of the story, they are part of all of our stories. We all have different stories and the story is your life, the way that you see what is going on. Being conscious is not part of your story; being conscious predates your story. But the content of your mind, which is all about who you are, what you like, what you prefer, where you want to go, and so on, all this is your story. When you think about what consciousness is, what awareness is, what nothingness is, and all these things, you are thinking, “How can I use this in my story? How can I throw light on my story using these terms?”

Sitting here these days, I would think, is difficult. Is it difficult or not? Who finds it really difficult?

(Some people raise their hands, some say at times it is difficult and at other times not, and others don’t find it difficult at all.)

Asadhi: I find it easy.

I also find it easy, that is good to find it easy. If you find it easy, if you really find it easy, not just not-difficult but easy, then you have found the secret of life. I say that because normally we are in our stories. We are full of activity, doing the things that we like to do, have been doing or are used to doing, or we have been thrown into the world in certain ways and move in certain directions. We get up in the morning, get on with it, and don’t really have a chance to stop and say, “What am I up to? What is life? Who am I?” Nobody asks these questions. Even you guys who are in a way serious seekers most of the time don’t ask these questions, and this is because you are involved in life. It might cross your mind, “Who am I?” but then, “Wait a minute, my train is coming in ten minutes so I will leave that for another time,” and you’re off. We are caught up in our stories, but here your stories can’t continue in a normal way. I don’t feed you with things, well I do a bit, but I don’t feed you with things that you can think about, deal with, or try out. There have been no meditations yet, apart from this TOBAL Process I gave you which you can work with, so you are thrown back on who you are; not who you are in activity, not who you are in relationship, not who you are in work, but who you are without anything added.

Who are you without anything added, with just being here? When you find you can be that with ease then I say you know who you are – and that is the secret of life: the answer to ‘Who am I’.

Karista: Michael, I have a question. You said that we were here to find our face before we were born, and I was wondering if that face was the same for everybody? But that is because we are talking so much about the One, or that we are all from the Source.

That is a very good question Karista. Zen says: Show me your face before you were born, and now Karista is asking if that is the same face for everybody – what do you think?

Sataranda: In a way I think yes, because how I experience my face before I was born is that life is just moving by itself, so there is no personality in the way.

That is so beautiful! I am not sure if I agree with you but that is really beautiful Sataranda. It is such a great credit to say that when you look for your face before you were was born you find really it is not there because it is just the stream of life, the Tao is just there, and that has no particular person in it, it has all in it. But if I asked you and you showed me that, and then Nagami also shows me it, would I see the same thing?

Sataranda: No.

It is a paradox. Sataranda is quite right, in a way it is all the same in the end, it is just the flow; like in the Wild Goose song on the Tiago CD I played yesterday: In the end it is the river flowing to the ocean that decides – these are words that I spoke at some time.

When Sataranda feels to be truly his face before he was born in a way he is not there because it is just the flow of life, the Tao, and that is great that he has experienced that, terrific, so then his answer to Karista is that it must be the same face. But then I said in practice, if he shows his face, Nagami shows her face, and Karista shows her face, would it be the same face? And he said no.

All I can say at this stage is that I think you are all heroes for being here, and the people who come regularly to this are especially heroes. I think that all Wild Geese at some time or other should do at least one of these groups because only in this group do you really get your face deeply examined as to who you are. And it can be hard, but that for me just proves how valuable it is.

If it is easy, and a few of you seem to find it easy, is it easy because you go into a kind of trance and are floating? That has happened to me many times for hours on end – you don’t notice it, there are no more manifestations to give you any trouble, you in a way rise above the problems. That is a very beautiful space, you simply go into another dimension and then you can just float through the five days, or most of it. But that is not yet the solution because when you are in that place you don’t care what consciousness is, what awareness is, what oneness is, what being is, what suchness is, what the world is, what fish and chips is – you are in a certain kind of oneness in that; there is a quality of eternal universal energy. So you can do this group, in a way, off the ground, floating. I have done it myself and it is very beautiful, but after that you have to do it on the ground and that is different. On the ground you are faced with things, phenomena, stuff, emotions, feelings, people, time, reality – consensus reality, material reality – and then to find that same state of ease and okayness is something else altogether.

Vandan: I would like to say something about thoughts, my experience of them. Is it possible?

Yes, sure.

Vandan: In former times I heard you have to drop them, like water from your fingers, but these thoughts stick. You can shake your hands again and again to get the water off but it is an endless fight. Now it is my experience that the more I have looked into this space, or the more I am in this space, the space absorbs my thoughts; the energy of the thoughts switched into the space and are absorbed more and more. There are always thoughts but these thoughts are in the stream like leaves, they don’t disturb.

You are saying two things – they don’t disturb, which is great, that is how it should be because you can’t shut the mind up, but then you said that the energy of the thoughts actually adds to the flow that is apart from the thoughts. Is that true?

Vandan: No, I mean the energy that I need for the thoughts.

Ah, that’s different. So the energy that you need for thinking now switches to be in the space?

Vandan: Yes, for awareness.

Yes, sure, great. Super duper! Absolutely right!

Vandan: And the thoughts are always smaller and they don’t disturb this experience. Every moment is to look and to look, and to be and to be, and there is no time for thoughts.

Yes, no time, no space. Great, tick, tick, tick! Super! Great realisation! Great process: not fighting the thoughts and letting them be there – but if you let them be there too soon then they interfere. It is only because you have been in this space so often that now it has won the war over the thoughts, it has taken over from the thoughts. Now the thoughts have very much a subsidiary role; their role gets less and less important. In the end they are just there, “Aha, okay,” and they don’t disturb.

Vandan: Yes.

Hinduism says neti-neti, which means ‘not this, not that’, via the negative way. Zen says…does anybody know?

Benjamin: Iti-iti.

Thank you, iti-iti, which means ‘just this, just this’. But this, not abstraction, not awareness, not suchness; the chair, the table, the fear, the love, the hate, the joy, the anger, the relationship, the phenomena all around, the time marching – boom boom boom – the pain, the illness, the cough, the bellyache, the tiredness, the aging – all these things, all the phenomena on this level. And you are in the moment and these things can also be in the moment, and if not in this moment then the next moment, or the one after that, and there’s you and these things. And to make that become, in a way, okay, easy, with no flight, no hiding, no running away, no cutting off, no blindness, but just facing the totality of reality in the moment with okayness, with ease, and with a smile and a laugh – that’s Zen. But of course the ‘just this’ as I described, the whole long list of examples of what is just here often in our lives facing us in the moment, a lot of it is substantial stuff – things, people, jobs to do, anger, confrontations, relationships, sickness, hurt, all sorts of emotions coming up – and you will find they are absolutely there if you don’t hide, you don’t pretend, you don’t turn away, and you don’t cut off. They are all there, but not only that is here for people who know about other dimensions. The Energy Space is here. The possibility of unconditional love is here. The place where bliss is the case, that dimension is also here. The relationship with the Divine is also here; also here – not the other to be transcended into that, but hand in hand, all these things.

So any moment, in any instant, if one can open to it and be with it, there is too much! Not choosing one over the other – not avoiding ordinary reality, not dismissing alternative realities. You have the whole parcel of possibility present, but no longer choosing the part of reality which suits you as you are now, that you identify with, but simply being open to whatever comes and finding in you a way in which you can just say, “Yes. Okay. This is what is happening now. This is what is with me now. This is what is here this instant.” When I say ‘this’ I mean ‘these’, these things, there is so much!

Feedback Session, TOBAL, 26th of September 2008