Video transcript from
Nothing to Feel Guilt or Blame About (part 1)
Raw, unedited version, transcribed by DeepGram.com

I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. and why I speak and where it all started. At some point, I don’t know the exact late twenties, I came across a book.

And when I read what was in the book, I felt this is what life’s about. And the book was basically saying that life’s not what it seems. on the surface. It’s actually very different to what it seems on the surface.

It talked about life being an illusion, not being real, that the idea we have of ourself is also based on our idea of life, which on the surface seems very different to what it actually is.

And it said that coming to understand what we really are is to be free. And believing that we’re something else means that we’re going to feel uncomfortable with ourself.

And so when I read this, I figured this is a bit of a riddle, a challenge, and something took over that meant when I finished that book, another book took its place and said the same thing.

And very quickly, it became clear to me that this wasn’t something that I was deciding to do, but rather something that was happening.

I wasn’t in control of it, thinking would happen, and it became very clear that I wasn’t actually creating the thinking. because if I had to create the thinking that happened, contemplating the insights that fell into place.

I would have messed it up straight away on day 1. The the the pointers that were being presented in these books, and these books were wisdom teachings that I very quickly came to know as wisdom teachings in the path of advaita.

Advaita meaning nonduality and in Sanskrit. And so the books were saying that life is a bit like a dream. All of life is predetermined from the beginning of time to the end of time. Now that’s not our experience of life.

As we live it ordinarily. But as we investigate and look beneath the surface, we can come to see that Actually, a lot of the things that we consider to be what are happening when investigated don’t hold true.

And so these teachings give us concepts, pointers, to use for our self to investigate daily life daily living for ourself and then decide whether what is being pointed at is more accurate than the way we relate to life.

The teachings really are about happiness and daily living. That’s what we’re talking about. And happiness for the human being is not what we tend to think it is. Most people in life are moving towards pleasure.

Moving towards pleasure because we believe that pleasure will deliver us happiness on a continuous basis And we we all know from our own experience that we we feel when I achieve this, then everything’s going to be okay.

That’s going to be the answer. If I meet my soul mate, then everything’s going to be okay.

When I get a new job promotion, everything will be okay. And inevitably, from time to time, we get that. And what happens, we suddenly say, well, when I get that, the next that, everything will be okay.

So what it means is that in practice, what we think will deliver us happiness doesn’t. And if we’re lucky, we achieve these things, enough of these things, to realize for our self that maybe my formula for happiness is a little bit off.

So this particular teaching is saying that happiness is not to be found in pleasure. So all of these are concepts that may resonate with you may become part of your being.

And when you’re moving through life, may pop up. And become part of an investigation that you can do for yourself. So the concept that says happiness is not to be found in the flow of life.

Means happiness isn’t to be found in outcomes. Happiness isn’t to be found in pleasure or pain. So the flow of life, whatever it is moment to moment, is either pleasure or pain. For example, if you miss your plain.

That would be considered pain in the moment. If you eat a nice meal, that’s a pleasure in the moment. if your partner doesn’t fulfill a commitment that they said they would, that’s pain in the moment.

So to understand that the flow of life is only ever pleasure or pain is very significant. Because, generally speaking, we don’t relate to the flow of life. as black and white as that. Just pleasure or pain. Love is pleasure.

Someone getting angry with us is pain. Now what we tend to have in built is an attitude to the flow of life. So the flow of life is always pleasure or pain, but where suffering comes in is based on our attitude to the pleasure or pain.

The current attitude we have is the attitude that says my happiness is to be found in pleasure and pain or in pleasure and my unhappiness and pain.

So when the flow of life being what it is and what it will always be pleasure or pain happens. If it’s painful, another reaction happens.

And that is suffering. The reaction says this shouldn’t be like this because my happiness is dependent on it being different. Now the nature of life is that it’s always going to be an alternation between pleasure and pain.

So if happiness was dependent on life being pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, then it simply means that happiness isn’t available in this life.

Happiness on a continuous unbroken basis. However, for 1000 years, we’ve been told that happiness is our birthright. Happiness is our true nature.

And it’s available right here right now without us needing to change anything. So first, we have to become very clear that that happiness that is being pointed at as our true nature is not to be found in outcomes.

To 80% of the suffering that we experience in life is simply because we have the wrong idea of what our happiness is.

So happiness is peace of mind and daily living. Continuous unbroken peace of mind and daily living. And peace of mind is not something, but it’s the absence of suffering.

And suffering is the resistance to pain in the moment. So once we recognize that pain actually doesn’t take away from who I am. Pain is something that comes and goes just like pleasure.

Pleasure comes and goes. once we really start to recognize that my peace of mind can remain unbroken, regardless of whether this pleasure or pain, then the attachment to pleasure and pain starts to fall away.

And as the attachment to pleasure and pain starts to fall away, suffering starts to dissipate also until such time as we become completely convinced that whether there is pleasure or pain in the moment is irrelevant to my happiness.

And at that point, attachment to pleasure and pain has fallen away And we’ll find that our peace of mind remains continuous and unbroken regardless of circumstance.

So is anyone unclear on this notion that the flow of life is always either pleasure or pain.

Pleasure or pain could include physical pleasure, emotional pleasure, or financial pleasure. And pain can be the same. Physical pain, emotional pain, or financial pain.

So someone dying is obviously emotional pain. And nice weather is physical pleasure. And if it rains when you want to have a picnic, then compared to your preference, which is that it’s nice weather, it’s pain.

So something is either pleasure or pain depending on how it relates to your biological preferences. Now, we can all see for ourselves that usually our reaction to pleasure or pain is is not as cut and dry as that.

We tend to resist pain more than just biologically. We have a a psychological story about pain. And that psychological story, which is our attitude to the flow of life, is what I’m referring to as suffering.

Did you? Yes. So somebody being indifferent to something that’s in the middle of this spectrum? If if you’re indifferent to something, it means that it’s neither in line or out of line with your biological preference.

So if, let’s say, a piece of bread you can eat a piece of bread and, you know, it’s neither something you dislike or something you like, let’s say. If you’re very hungry and you eat a piece of bread, then that’s gonna be pleasure.

Even though the taste of bread, let’s say, is neither here or there for you, relative to your preference when you are hungry, which is to have food in your stomach, then eating bread is going to be pleasure in the moment.

So the human being has this attitude to life which is being called in in these teachings, the sense of personal doership or the belief in personal doership.

The belief in personal dealership is an attitude which actually is completely out of line with how life really is. So the belief in personal duorship is an attitude that we have that says, I am a separate three-dimensional entity.

In control of everything that happens through me. And the other is the same as me as separate three-dimensional entity. in control of everything that they do. That’s one one aspect of the sense of personal dealership.

The other aspect of the sense of personal dealership is what I was talking about before our attachment to pleasure and attachment to pain. So We want pleasure and we want to push away pain.

We want pleasure not only because of our biological preference, but because we believe that it’s our happiness. So these are the 2 aspects of sense of personal dealership that creates suffering.

If someone does something that delivers pain, my attitude is you are a separate three-dimensional object a human being that is in control of what you do. And therefore, you hurt me, so I hate you.

And that we can call blame. Now on the basis where we believe that we are in control of what happens and the other is in control of what happens, then we have to blame someone when they hurt us.

And if we do something that delivers pain to the other, we have to feel guilt.

However, if that’s not really what is happening through the human being, and we come to see that this notion of personal doership is flawed, what can happen is it can start to dissolve.

And if it dissolves, the reaction of blaming the other falls away with it. A human being in each moment acts exactly the way they are designed to act.

And there’s 2 factors on which the action stems from. 1 is one’s genes, and the other is the up to date conditioning. So the human is born with us a piece of it’s like a piece of hardware.

And then life starts to condition the hardware moment after moment after moment. And the human being wasn’t in control of the genetic structure that it was born with. And it’s not in control of the country. It was born into the family.

It was born into the school that had went to the friends that had made. And each moment, life is conditioning the human being. And so at any particular moment, the human being is exactly one way, the way it is at that point in time.

A bit like a complex chemical. And when you put 2 chemicals together, they don’t choose how to act. they just react based on their makeup. It’s quite impersonal.

And there’s only one way they can they can react. We don’t see ourselves the way I’ve just described this as an entity that has been shaped by life moment after moment, something that we haven’t been in control of.

And sometimes we don’t recognize that our intellect, if we have happen to have a strong intellect, is something that was given to us, not something that we, you know, we’re in control of.

So and if we have strong muscles or we’re born with an illness, that’s not something that we chose or something that was given And so if we start to see that who I am in this moment is a combination of these 2 factors that I wasn’t in control of, then the reaction that happens in the moment, the words that come out in a in in a moment are the only words or the only action that could happen if we were different.

A different action would happen in the moment. And because we don’t recognize this, what happens is if something goes wrong, if if or there’s a behavior that we don’t like, we say, oh, I should have acted differently.

And we feel guilt. Should have acted differently is based on the premise that I could have acted differently. But in fact, the action that happened is an action based on exactly the way the person was.

Is that clear? Yeah. So when we start looking at suffering as it presents itself in daily living, we can start to see that from our own experience, so these are just descriptions for you to take away.

And if they stick, we’re not even in control of when not in I’m not in control of what comes out of my mouth. But you’re definitely not in control of what comes out of my mouth.

So you’re here, and you don’t know what’s coming out. And you don’t know how you’re gonna react to it, whether it’s going to sound like, yeah, that makes some sense, or whether a thought comes up and says this is all nonsense.

So this information comes out, and then we see what happens. So suffering for the human being, tends to present itself in these 5 different ways.

Guilt, blame, pride, worry, and expectation. So if we start with expectation, expectation is the notion that I was talking about, whereby we believe that my happiness is dependent on outcomes.

And because we believe that my happiness is dependent on outcomes, we set up a whole list of expectations of how life should turn out.

And expectations equal outcomes. So the expectations are there because we believe we need them to eventuate. And when we have expectations, because life doesn’t really care about our expectations.

Life is going to unfold the way it unfolds. Very often, our expectations are not met. So even if we apply ourselves very hard to something, the actual outcome is not in our control.

And especially the outcome or the actions of other people, definitely not in our control. So what we find is that life is a bit like an avalanche coming down a mountain.

And we seem to think that we can tell the avalanche to move a little to the left, please, a little bit to the right. And that’s just not how life works. But setting up expectations is effectively saying I can control life.

And this is what I want. And so now, I’m going to stick to my expectations. And inevitably, what happens is when life delivers something out of line with what we want, we resist that.

And that resistance is a resistance to what is simply because our conditioning hasn’t recognized the nature of life and thinks it makes sense to have expectations.

And it that makes sense because there’s this ingrained belief of control.

The idea that we are an entity that is in control of whatever whatever is happening through us, and therefore, thinking that we can control outcomes. So that’s the first of the 5 types of suffering.

I’m checking out some Sure. If you can speak into the microphone, that would be great. A word that was coming up when we talk about expectations was dream. Because that is maybe a softer word or a word with not such a hard call.

I just what what do you think about the the relationship between expectations and dreams? But once again, it depends on our attitude to whether the dream eventuates or not. So Having an idea of what we would like is fine.

As long as deep down, we know that I can do my best to achieve what I would like. But, ultimately, the outcome is not in my control. So having even having expectations, as long as we understand that it may or may not be delivered.

That’s the important part. But expectation by a very definition of the word tends to not include that attitude of understanding that it may or may not eventuate. And dream in a way can also imply that it’s my dream.

It’s something that I crave. But as long as we’ve got the right attitude, even having an intention is not a bad thing. The important part is that to not believe that my happiness who I am is dependent on that happening.

And so as long as we do believe that my happiness or who I am is dependent on outcomes, that’s the movement of trying to find our self and happiness out there. And we’ve heard this for it it’s been written for 1000 years.

That your happiness is never to be found out there, but rather your happiness is to be found inside. So if this habitual movement, which is based on the belief that my my completeness, my happiness, who I am is to be found out there.

If that remains in place, then it’s very clear that we don’t start to turn inwards. we keep seeking outwardly. And we can see our own behavior if we start to become aware of it.

And we can see the behavior of all of humanity. Humanity is continually trying to achieve things And there’s countless countless examples of people who are completely successful and completely miserable.

So we can start to see pragmatic evidence that hopefully allows us to question our formula. Most importantly, we can rely on the uncomfortableness that arises inside of us as a guide that says we’re doing something wrong.

Something’s not quite right. We can only rely on that as a guide, if we’ve if life has introduced the notion, that peace of mind is something that is what we really are our true nature.

If that notion that peace of mind is our true nature hasn’t been introduced, then we might just assume that suffering is normal.

And it’s not. Suffering is based on a belief system that is out of line with the movement of life. So another way of describing life as it comes to be seen once all of these attachments and false beliefs of who we are, fall away.

Is a creation created by source, unfolding from the beginning of time to the end of time, exactly as it’s being created to unfold.

So a predetermined story of life. The sense of personal duisha that believes it’s in control and wants to be in control, because it believes its happiness is to be found in outcomes, hates to hear that.

The notion that life is predetermined is absolutely abhorrent to the belief system inside of us that says, I am in control.

I need to be in control. Whereas, we’ve also heard time and time again that we need to surrender. that’s where peace comes from.

Just let go and surrender. And surrendering is actually surrendering to the fact that we’re not in control. surrender to god’s will. I’m I’m not talking about a god sitting on a cloud somewhere that’s separate from us.

So how do we introduce God in a way that is not separate from us? And we can look at life like this. Before the Big Bang happened or the creation, the Big Bang is just one way that we can look at the creation coming into existence.

There was absolutely nothing. Consciousness at rest. the consciousness at rest is immense creative potentiality. And at some point, that potentiality explodes into actualization.

So consciousness at rest, absolute nothing, explodes into everything. that consciousness at rest has become all of this. And none of it is separate separate. it’s the one movement, nothing has become everything.

And everything is from the beginning of time to the end of time. So immense creative potentiality has actualized into an amazing story of life, a story of evolution, a story of cause and effect.

A story of forgetting itself, consciousness, forgetting itself, on purpose, in order to experience being something, it can never be in order to experience itself being something separate.

And how it does that is creates a playground where it introduces somewhat like 7,000,000,000 people 7,000,000,000 objects that it identifies with.

And included in the story of life is this false idea of who we are and false idea of what life is that is ingrained in most human beings. And engrain by life itself.

And because it’s a story of forgetting itself and therefore suffering, And then at some point, waking up to the fact that it’s forgotten itself, and that there are a whole lot of false ideas about life and one self.

And those ideas then fall away as part of the story of life.

And when the ideas have fallen away, we find ourselves living in such a way where there is a connection to source, knowing that what we are at our core is actually consciousness.

Understanding that what we are are at our core as consciousness is not something that gets added to or subtracted from. by the story of life.

And that’s when we continue to flow through life, doing exactly what we feel like, which is exactly what is predetermined to happen, understanding that whatever we do in each moment is what is predetermined to happen, and understanding that the outcome is not going to add or subtract from what I am.

So at that point, life has corrected the errors. and life has lived peacefully.

So that is an explanation at this point of what this story of life is. And that’s why we’re not actually in control because it’s a story that is predetermined to unfold in each moment exactly the way it unfolds.

The leaf that falls off the tree falls off the tree at exactly the time it’s destined to fall off the tree.

Why is this so? Because life is a dream arising in consciousness. And this is a a concept that if anyone’s read the bug vogita or Indian scriptures and many other modern spirituality.

The notion that life is an illusion or life is a dream is something that’s pointed at time and time again. And as the false sense of personal doership starts to be challenged by life.

We start to look at it for ourselves and start to see why these ideas I had about being in control, about needing outcomes to be a certain way in order to happy to be happy.

These are actually all false. And as that falls away, we start to see that life is just happening. even when I relax and don’t try to control life.

The prior the mind says, if you relax and don’t try and control life, it’s going to turn to chaos. But in fact, as we let go, we find that life continues to unfold often in a much more efficient way.

Outcomes often tend to become more positive because we’re not resisting and we’re more in a flow. And one thing leads to another, and it becomes obvious that I’m not controlling life.

The others not controlling life, and it is a creation unfolding. We were talking about the 5 ways Well, the act the 5 five forms of suffering. Yeah. So expectation is the first one that we looked at.

If we go to the first one, blame blame is based on this idea that I am the doer. The other is the doer. And when this idea that I am the doer, I am the creator of my actions, is there when the other I see the other the same way.

And so if the other does something that delivers pain to me, then I have to blame them. Blame is a broad way of covering hatred resentment, jealousy, blame for someone parking their car in front of your driveway.

Any any anything that happens whereby, let’s say, someone says they’re gonna pick you up at 10 o’clock, and they don’t show up till 11 o’clock.

And we think, you know, you why did you not come at the time? You said you would come. during control of having been there at 10 o’clock.

Whereas the reality is that we’re not in control of being there at the time we said we are sometimes often, we turn up at the time we say we’re gonna turn up. But something happens, you get a flat tire or you your car doesn’t start.

Or you know, you you’ve someone needs your help urgently. And then things don’t turn out the way we expect. But the attitude is, you hurt me you shouldn’t have heard me.

You could have done it differently, and I hate you. That’s blame. guilt is based on the same principle that we’re in control of what happens. And so when we hurt the other, someone that we love, for example, we feel shame and guilt.

And pride is based on the same principle, but in relation to positive outcomes when we do something that achieves a positive outcome we feel the sense of look what I have achieved.

And so pride is based on this idea of personal doership that I am in control of what happens, and the other is in control of what happens.

And as we spoke about before, the fact that a human being is made up of the genes and up to date conditioning.

We weren’t in control of our genes, and we’re not in control of how life conditions us moment after moment, means that as we see this for our self, as we contemplate it and observe how sometimes things don’t happen, even though we try our very best for them to happen, then the sense of personal doership can start to weaken.

And that means that our guilt, our blame, and our pride also starts to weaken. So all of these forms of suffering are based on certain belief systems.

And the belief systems that we’ve spoken about are quite simple, the belief in personal duorship and the attachment to pleasure as those two things are seen to be less accurate.

Then the suffering on which that’s based on those foundations starts to reduce.

Yeah. Can you hear me? Okay. So I feel a little bit like my responsibility as a human being to make ethical actions is taking a little bit away from you by what you say.

Mhmm. But if I didn’t try to understand you, then it’s not that I shouldn’t take as much consideration as I can to my fellow human beings.

Mhmm. However, if I do commit some harm to them, then it is not me, but it’s predetermined how the outcome get. Is that correct? To me, it everything in life is part of the story of life. So life is a story that is has unfolded.

Has consciousness at rest has become consciousness and movement. And that can that that includes everything that happens in life. So, yes, if something bad happens, it’s happening not because the individual chooses for it to happen.

But because it’s part of the story of life, and it’s the destiny of that individual to to do whatever they did and for the outcome to be a negative outcome.

Now, the mind hears this, the mind that thinks it’s in control and says, Well, if I suddenly stop taking responsibility, Or if I stop believing that I’m the doer, then I’m going to start acting irresponsibly.

That’s what the mind assumes. But actually, what happens is this sense false sense of personal doership falls away. And what traditionally that is referred to is is the ego.

Now, most negative actions that happen in life happen because of this entity, the ego, that is in competition with everyone else, needs more So the the troubles that we have in life is because this full sense of personal dealership has been ingrained in human beings, which has made them need feel like they need more and more and more.

And if this falls away, the complete opposite happens to what the mind expects. The mind expects there to be a huge amount of irresponsibility in life.

But in fact, what’s falling away is the very cause of all of the problems in life. If everyone’s sense of personal doership fell away, what would be left is our true nature. And our true nature is altruist stick in nature.

It wants to see everyone happy. Whereas the sense of personal doership is not altruistic. It’s egocentric. And so wars simply wouldn’t happen if the sense of personal doership dissolved in in everyone.

So without an attachment to outcomes, sometimes people would say, well, if I didn’t have an expectation of what I want or an attachment to an outcome, what would drive me to do anything?

Wouldn’t I just sit here and do nothing. And the answer is no. We still will have our biological preferences in place.

This attachment to outcome is attitudinal. It’s so when that falls away and we understand that we don’t need outcomes in order to be happy. The biological movement will still be towards pleasure.

But that biological movement towards pleasure will not insist on the pleasure being delivered and doesn’t have the belief that the pleasure that it’s moving towards is its happiness.

So the biological entity, the biological preference will move towards food, when it’s hungry.

When the urge to go to the bathroom is there, it’ll go to the bathroom. when the doorbell rings, the biological aspect that hasn’t fallen away and can never fall away will respond to the doorbell.

And so life carries on quite efficiently based on the biological conditioning that remains in place. Does that answer your question? It’s just that if we are not just driven by altruism because we are not there yet — Mhmm.

— then then isn’t it possible that I could tell myself that they will I’m free of being responsible because I know everything’s predetermined, and I noticed from this set, song.

And then I you know, I just feel a little bit because we are mostly in in my opinion on the first free hackers more than higher up. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.

So what you’re talking about is when the sense of personal doership hears the concept and then uses the concept as a justification or excuse, to keep doing things that are not altruistic or things that are ultimately aimed at getting more and more pleasure.

And that can happen. There’s no doubt at all that that can happen.

But eventually, the teaching, if it’s absorbed as a complete framework, will deal with that issue because what we’re told is that what we’re really looking for is peace of mind and daily living.

Suffering is what we’re trying to instinctively move away from.

So a lot of people in the room here have probably found that seeking for a deeper meaning in life, has started happening. And that happens because, intuitively, we know that suffering is not our true nature.

So there is a movement away from suffering. And if the if the sense of personal dealership grabs hold of one of these concepts, and says, well, I can do anything now because it’s all predetermined.

That’s not going to give them peace of mind. And eventually, they’re going to realize, I’m just using this as an excuse to keep doing what I’ve been doing in order to get pleasure, but it’s not giving me continuous happiness.

So as long as we start to move in a way where we’re looking, where we become aware suffering is not natural. And suffering is what we’re actually trying to bring an end to.

Then if the sense of personal doership picks up on any of these concepts and and uses them incorrectly, what it’s going to lead to is suffering. And then our awareness can land on that suffering.

And we can then ask ourselves how am I using this incorrect If that happens, it’s part of the story of life, also not our doing, but a happening that has happened because the concept were presented, the body and brain as it’s designed, received them in a certain way.

And then acted on them in that way. And so that was part of the story of life. And then whatever happens from then then on, the correcting of that will also be part of the story of life.

The most important thing is that we have a start to have an awareness about what is happening, and an awareness that peace is our true nature, and suffering is a result of a misunderstanding that’s in place.

This thing you spoke about earlier about the sense of personal to a ship. Mhmm. And you said that it’s really a myth or something like that or a misconception.

Mhmm. Is that your own personal first hand experience? Yeah. Sure. it’s that particular term is a term that was coined was coined by Ramesh, but it it’s the term that he used in his teaching.

It actually goes back to Shankarra, talked about non doership. And it was very clear to me in my path when I started reading the text that’s all they were pointing at. that the idea that that that unhappiness is an attitude.

It’s a suffering is not suffering is not something that life creates. Life in its in in on this in the flow of life is only of a pleasure or pain. So suffering is attitudinal, how we relate to that pleasure or pain.

And the attitude of personal dealership, which includes this attachment, this belief that happiness is in pleasure, relates to pain in such a way that says, this should not be like that.

And so once the concept becomes understood intellectually, So once we know what the concept is is is really saying intellectually, that suffering is an attitude to the flow of life.

And not actually in the flow of life. Then we can start to see that for ourselves. Wow. the flow of life is that I stubbed my toe or that someone didn’t come and pick me up at the right time.

And that’s pain. That’s all pain. But my attitude is turning it into a story about why is this happening to me why did they not do what they were meant to do?

And that story is all attitudinal. It’s additional to the pain in the moment. And so as we see this more and more, the concept, which starts off as an intellectual concept.

And is understood intellectually, then gets starts to go deeper and deeper into the system, because we’re observing the concept to be accurate.

And as that understanding goes deeper and deeper, what it does is it starts to kick out all of the misunderstanding that exists deep down in the body.

The misunderstanding is exactly this this belief and personal dealership that’s been locked away in the body based on past events. and our relationship to past events.

So when the understanding is simply intellectual, we can sit here and think, yeah, I get this, and it makes sense that, actually, when someone does something, it’s pain, and it doesn’t mean that I’m incomplete.

And so I don’t need to suffer.

And then we go out into daily living. Someone does something to us. And that understanding sort of goes out of the window. And what happens is this reaction of blame. And that make the that’s perfectly understandable.

Why that happens is because the intellectual understanding hasn’t yet penetrated deep enough to start kicking out the ingrained beliefs of personal dealership that are in the system. And the process works exactly like that over time.

As we observe these reactions inside of us and understand what they are, then, yeah, the understanding goes deeper and deeper. I don’t see a lot of oh, sorry. It it’s okay. No. Just just for the recording.

For the film. Oh, really? Sorry. Is people tend to bond by mirroring a lot? Like, for example, do you feel my anger, or do you feel my pain? I mean, often people come to you, and then they want you to be on their side.

I agree with everything you say, but sometimes it’s very hard to know how to how to do these things without, I don’t know, seeming indifferent or seeming callous or I mean, if you wanna live a solo life, then it’s super fine.

But if you wanna, like I don’t know. Connect to people a lot, then you have to, like, go into all these suffering emotions sometimes for them to feel that you see them.

Yeah. But what happens is you then become codependent with their suffering, which really means you believe it.

You believe the you believe the story they’re saying inside your deep down. Because when you don’t believe it, you just you you can be empathetic and understand that their makeup is such that they’re forced to suffer.

And therefore, you can do what you can to help them out of that suffering. But there’s no way you would agree with the principle that they’re talking about and saying, this is this is real.

It because it becomes recognized that in agreeing with it, you’re actually maintaining your own suffering. And what we really want is an end of suffering.

And the Buddha’s principle is enlightenment is the end of suffering. the cause of suffering is desire. So that’s Buddhism summed up in you know, 10 words, 5 words, whatever it happens to be.

In light enlightenment is the end of suffering. In some style. The cause of suffering is desire. So desire is the belief that my happiness is to be found in pleasure.

So this I have a desire for love. I have a desire for material possessions. The belief that my happiness is to be found in love the belief that my happiness is to be found in material pleasure.

So that’s the cause of suffering, desire. So if enlightenment is the end of suffering, it means enlightenment is the end of the belief that my happiness is to be found in pleasure.

And then the question is, so do I give up my happiness in order to fit in? Yeah. And the answer is no.

It might not be no for a while, But eventually, if we really become clear on what we’re giving up in order to be accepted by some people. And that’s why when people start on their spiritual journey, relationships end.

Because new ways of seeing life start to engrain themselves, and then the gap between, you know, your friends that you had before starts to get bigger and bigger.

And it’s not really that sad. It’s just a movement of life and what gets replaced is or things that fall away get replaced, and they usually get replaced by something that’s more appropriate to us at that time.

Okay. But if you’re not convinced and and this something you want to explore further we can.

Yeah. No. It’s just that, of course, you want your friends to feel the best they can. So for me, it would be I would feel guilt if I didn’t, like, try and help them the way that I feel they need to be hold.

But, of course, you have a point that that it’s not by feeling their suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the difference is between empathy and sympathy.

So sympathy is to actually feel sorry for someone because you believe the basis of their suffering, empathy is to understand that they are suffering, but not believe the the not believe the story they’re telling.

And from that place, we can actually help someone.

You can guide them out of the story maybe. And there are some cases where it’s very clear you can lead a horse to water. But you can’t make a drink. And that’s when you actually have to understand that I’ve done the best I can.

But I’m not in control of the outcome. And be available to do do what you can next, but without you know, without insisting that they change, because then that becomes our suffering.

I agree. Mhmm. When you had this or assuming that you had some kind of a experience when you realized all this.

What did you do that led up to this insight? Well, to be honest, as I mentioned, when the I started reading these books, nothing else in life was important.

This this quest took over. And these books have an amazing amount of information in them. And it doesn’t have to be books if you find yourself in situations like this.

You don’t have to understand everything that’s being said. You don’t have to listen to this from your head. It can just be open, and something will hopefully, click in.

And we only need to work on one thing at a time. We can’t incorporate it all at once. But one thing might stick. And then tomorrow or the day after, you might find yourself in a situation, and the thought arises.

A thought that says, ah, I see that I’m chasing after this as if it’s my happiness. I’m chasing after this outcome as if it’s my happiness, or you might blame someone for not doing what they said.

And the thought might arise. that says, this story I have going in my head, which we can feel as blame as an uncomfortableness with oneself, is based on the idea that I believe they could have acted differently.

So as that pops up, it means that something has the the concept has sunk in and is now functioning on its own. So Life has then created new up to date conditioning, which it’s doing all the time.

And that new up to date conditioning is now functioning. and cutting off the story of blame. And that’s the process that happened, is that more and more new conditioning came into the body.

And that new conditioning, which is what you could call wisdom wisdom as opposed to misunderstanding, started to well, started to kick kick out the misunderstanding, dissolve the misunderstanding.

And the way that the process used usually worked is there’s a particular subject or topic that would become thought about, and I’d read something.

And then thinking would happen, like, what exactly does this mean? And then life would conspire to deliver a circumstance that, wow, explains it. And wow. That’s what it means. And then there’s ins insight happens.

And insight is where what is being contemplated just clicks. And at that point, it all becomes clear And there’s hundreds of those insights that lead to, in the end, the the puzzle becoming more and more complete.

And the the ultimate shift is this. peace of mind is something that is available on a continuous unbroken basis.

That’s human happiness. Where it stems from is the recognition of our connection to source. The Continuous unbroken recognition of our connection to source means continuous unbroken peace of mind.

Why our connection to source is not recognized is because of the beliefs of personal doership. The beliefs of personal doership say, I am a separate entity in control of everything that I am doing. That basically creates separation.

It doesn’t actually make us separate. It doesn’t mean that we’re ever not connected to source. But it’s a belief system that veils our connection to source obstructed the seeing of our connection to source.

When that belief in personal doership falls away, it becomes very clear that whatever is happening through me is a movement of consciousness.

And that I am effectively what Roger is is impersonal consciousness identified with a particular body functioning through that body as personal consciousness.

And every one of us is exactly the same. It’s a unique body with unique genetics and unique up to date conditioning.

But that’s just a vehicle, a vehicle into which impersonal con the one singular impersonal consciousness identifies and then functions through So you and I are actually 2 vehicles through which the 1 consciousness are functioning.

So consciousness is speaking with consciousness, and consciousness is listening to consciousness. Whereas, that’s not how we generally before this process of inquiry happens. That’s not how we see ourselves.

We see ourselves as separate and unique without recognizing that the core of the human being is this undifferentiated consciousness a consciousness that doesn’t have an age or a sex, doesn’t have personality.

The consciousness at the core is like electricity. Electricity that plugs into the light and creates light, plugs into the fridge and creates cold, plugs into the heater and creates heat.

The electricity that goes into all the different appliances is the one undifferentiated, uncorrect noncharacterized energy or electricity.

It then functions through a particular instrument and comes out the other side in a unique format.

And so humans are the instrument Consciousness is like the undifferentiated electricity that comes in one side and then comes out the other. as a unique expression of a combination of consciousness and the body.

And so each of us are that. And what we know of of what our experience of life is is the personal consciousness. We get to experience the personal consciousness, which is our experience of life.

So the falling away of the sense of personal and dealership allows us to realize that what is actually happening is consciousness functioning through a vehicle.

And so when the vehicle dies, the consciousness that is functioning through it is not affected by that.

It just returns back the source. So understanding who we are at our core means that death then becomes much less of an attack on who we are. Whereas when we believe that I am this entity, primarily, I am the body.

Death is the ultimate assault on who I am. And when we’re afraid of death, we’re afraid of each moment in life. And when life delivers a pain, it’s like a mini death.

And that’s why we resist pain in the moment. Because pain to the body on a physical level is like an is an attack on the physical because pain is out of line with the biological preference.

And So a a resting in being, resting in what we are at our core means that pleasure or pain can happen. And yet, we know that we’re not affected by that, except on a surface level.

Well, you talked about the human as the vehicle and that the consciousness the one consciousness isn’t I I believe and animals, are they also just vehicles for and and nature and or where is there a kind of a a life.

Or Sure. So the human isn’t the vehicle, but the body is the vehicle. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. The human is the combination of the body and the consciousness. So yeah. And then an animal is the same thing, but it’s a less complex vehicle.

So the body of an animal, is less complex than that of a human, particularly the brain. And so consciousness functioning through an animal is the same one consciousness functioning through humans.

Before humans came into existence, there were dinosaurs. And the one consciousness was functioning through dinosaurs as an as an instrument. And at that point, consciousness was experiencing life through the complexity of a dinosaur.

And now, it’s at a stage where consciousness is experiencing life through a biological instrument that is complex enough to recognize the consciousness functioning through it.

So an animal doesn’t have a complex enough makeup to recognize the consciousness that is functioning through it, whereas a human seems to be the first organism that’s conscious enough to recognize itself to wake up to its true nature.

Yes. So I often felt that we didn’t have, like, a particular soul but we were just like everything was energy. Mhmm. But there is, like, so many opinions on that, like, okay.

This is my soul, and this is my energy and and previous life, I was like this and that and all that. What is your take on that? Do we have a specific soul, or or are we all just floating energy? Yeah.

I I don’t subscribe to a soul. So is another form of separation. So there are 7,000,000,000 souls. And it’s even so there are certain spiritual schools that are necessary because we’re not ready to give up our individuality completely.

So we’ll we’ll for example, the School of Sacred Contracts, Gold Soul Contracts. where it said that, you know, before we’re born, we enter into agreement with other souls about a life that we’re going to live.

And it’s sort of keeping hold of control in a way. but I’m controlling this life. I just controlled it before it happened as as the soul. And this isn’t the criticism of those schools of spirituality.

They’re part of the story of life. And it’s fantastic because it gets people to start believing in something grander than what they may have believed in previously. It can bring them to to connect to the divine.

But that concept at some point will evolve. And when we ultimately come to a realization of self, it’s not a realization of a soul. It’s a realization of a consciousness and awareness that is ever present.

It’s the awareness that recognizes each moment that it’s the awareness that was always present when we were one year old, when we were five year old, when we’re forty, when we’re eighty.

Awareness is the one thing that is ever present in daily living. So we can say, awareness is the one truth in the manifestation. everything else is changing. That which changes isn’t true. That which changes isn’t real.

And that becomes one of the concepts that’s very useful for us to start understanding what truth is because when we find ourselves on a spiritual journey, we often get to a point where we say, all I want to know is the truth.

Because we realize that we’ve been living a lie, actually, doing what other people have wanted us to do not honoring what we want to do. And that feeling creates a sense of uncomfortableness inside.

And at some point, we say, I’m not gonna do this anymore. I just want to know the truth. And that is coming from an understanding that what we are at our core is truth, what we are at our core is something that doesn’t change.

Something that’s ever present. And we’re given a hint that says that which is real, doesn’t change. And then we’re told that the body changes, the emotions change, the thoughts change, everything in the flow of life, is changing.

And and what that allows us to do is to realize, oh, I’m not that. I’m not that. I’m not that. I’m not anything that changes, which means I’m not the body. And whereas previously, we were convinced what I am is the body.

So coming to see that I am not that which changes what I am is that which remains ever present and unchanging, means that at some point, we’ll ask ourselves what is it that is ever present and unchanging, or at least we’ll go through and see everything that is changing.

And what we might then realize is that, which doesn’t change. And that is the awareness that is aware of each moment.