February 21, 2001 Wednesday Evening with Aaron
Deep Spring Center: State of the Spiritual Path; Jesus and the Buddha
Aaron: Good evening and my love to you all. I am Aaron. Over 12 years ago a small group of you first gathered in Barbara and Hal’s living room to ask me questions. Out of that simple beginning, Deep Spring Center has evolved . Last night at the board meeting the question was raised, “What is Deep Spring Center?” The president of your country may give a state of the union message, so I would claim the opportunity to offer a “state of the spiritual path” message.
Those in that early group including Barbara had no experience with Buddhism. I did not define myself as a Buddhist and I still don’t. I am a teacher. What I come to teach is very simple: human kindness. Compassion. Deepening wisdom. Liberation in the deepest sense and in every sense. The non-dual experience of all that is.
The Buddha also was not a Buddhist. The word “Buddha” simply means “one who is awake”, and he was awake. Part of what I’m teaching, then, is simply to be awake. Awake to what? To your true self, which has no religious referent.
Many of those at the board meeting last night said it seemed we had become a Buddhist organization. What does that mean? Is it a group of people who are awake? Are you awake? Waking up, perhaps; opening your eyes, looking around. Not yet fully awake. In the act of awakening, you are Buddhas-to-be. Every being, whatever their religious affiliation – Christian, Jewish, Moslem – they are all Buddhas-to-be, or we might state it, awakened-ones-to-be. Actually I would phrase it by saying that they have always been awake but they haven’t yet noticed. That state of bright awakening is just out of reach behind the sleepiness in the eyes. And when you are awake, then the kindness, the wisdom, the skill to live one’s life in ways of non-harm and that support non-duality, are all expressions of that awake nature.
I teach this as drawn from Buddhism because in all my many lifetimes with innumerable spiritual practices, this is the path that most clearly articulated the balance and path necessary to come to this full realization of true being. It is the path in which I found freedom, and so I deeply honor and value this path. I also honor the Buddha, the one who uncovered The Path. But it is not a religious path, in the traditional sense, since it is not based on a set of beliefs and strictures. It is simply the path to awakening, the path to knowing your true nature and the true nature of all that is.
As we journey on that path, we speak of many things, and yet set aside many more. Some of you have heard a story about the Buddha and “A Handful of Leaves”. He was on the edge of a forest with a group of his students. They said to him, “do you teach us all that you know?” He reached down, picked up a handful of leaves from the forest floor and said, “This is what I teach you, and, ” pointing to all the forest: “this is what I know. But this handful of leaves, this is all you needed to know.”
People can become sidetracked and lose their way so easily on the path. In his great compassion, he did not want to support that wandering off the path into detours but to help people stay focused. It’s very simple: you are suffering. Look at the causes of your suffering. See that there is an end to it. And here are some practical steps to lead you to that end. Don’t get sidetracked.
He spoke to a very specific culture, which is the India of 2500 years ago. People there were mostly Hindu and had certain religious beliefs. They believed in the existence of many gods to whom they prayed, so there was a way out of taking responsibility for themselves. They believed in a caste system and that some people were inherently better or worse than other people, dependent on their karma. They saw karma but understood it more as punishment. If you suffer this is the result of past harmful action. There was much ritual, not so much honest purification.
The Buddha did not say, “There is no God” nor did he say “There is a God”. He said, “There are no gods of the sorts you imagine, when you pray to all these deities. YOU have responsibility for what you create. It expresses itself as karma, and you have the choice, always, to perpetuate those difficult karmic patterns or to make a shift and find freedom. At first, this is freedom from suffering on a relative plane, and then freedom on an absolute plane.”
He did not say to his followers, “Now worship me”. In fact, he said quite the contrary, simply, I am a man, a friend on this path. What I have realized, you can realize. None of us are gods. Walk this path with me, he urged. “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.”
Five hundred years later and in a different part of the world, the one known as Jesus was born. Unlike the Buddha, who came into that final incarnation with the almost-fully-developed potential for full realization, but not yet having realized that potential, the one known as Jesus had realized that potential before in a prior lifetime. He came into a different world than the Buddha. The Old Testament world where the Jewish rabbis were concerned with justice, concerned with kindness, but also where there was the teaching, “An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth”. People had not begun to recognize the divine potential and their responsibility to express it. There was a duality: humans and God. Jesus attempted to break down the dual construct by teaching love and that the divine heart of love is within each being.
Both of these great teachers taught lovingkindness, compassion, forgiveness. Jesus taught it by what he did and what he said. He WAS the essence of kindness, peace, forgiveness. He modeled it in every way as did the Buddha. The people in Jesus’ part of the world at that time, most of them, were not ready for a specific path. It would have been too great a shift for them. First they had to learn the teachings of loving kindness and non-harm.
Here we must recognize that there is a steady progression of souls. This, what I call, spark of God, in one moment recognizes with self-awareness, “I am “, and in that moment it experiences itself as moving out of the “garden”, so to speak, separate from God. “If I am, then I am here and God is there.” This is essential, just as an infant must learn that he or she is not the mother. Such a being could never mature if there is no sense of separation from the mother. And yet, in another way, the mother and the child are never separate.
This self-awareness and experience of leaving the Garden, then, are essential to your growth. But where would you go? How could there ever be an inside and an outside to the Garden in an ultimate sense? How could you ever be separate from God? That would be like taking the waters that pour themselves on the ocean in a storm, and saying, “Well, they’re separate from the ocean.” They’re just the ocean in another form. The water that evaporates and then rains down on the ocean as clouds, it’s just the ocean raining on itself. You, my dear ones, are God expressing itself.
But, there is this experience of separation. You are each unique. For some, there is anger about it, even to challenging God. For some, there is grief. For some, helplessness. For some, dismay or an attitude of “I don’t care”.
Then you move through a period of self-centeredness. All beings do this. No matter what form you express yourself in, mineral, plant, animal, human, there will be this time of self-centeredness. Somewhere along the way there is an awakening, a first awakening, a first glimpse, “When I harm others, I harm myself.”
Buddhism in Buddhist countries is quite different in the way it evolved than the way it is here. In many countries there are not so much practitioners doing a deep meditation practice but people who go to a temple once a week, light some candles or incense, say some prayers, bow a few times, and feel they have done their religious duty, earned some kind of merit. We can’t look down on these people. They’re no different than the millions here who go to church or synagogue once or twice a year, or even weekly, but don’t have any clear sense of what it means to be a spiritual being walking a spiritual path.
But eventually there is an awakening, an experience that one cannot harm another. Barbara looks back with enormous gratitude to the being who was most instrumental in that awakening for her well over 2000 years ago. The being she was was a young man living in poverty on a coast in Asia. Pirates came. They boosted his ego. He looked up to them. They were older and more powerful. They said, “Show us where the gold is. Bring us some and you may come with us.”
So he went to the temple where a priest was sitting in meditation. It doesn’t matter what religion it was. He had known this priest since childhood. He knew there were valuable objects in the temple. So great was his need and his greed, not for money for himself but need and greed to be loved, to be powerful, to be safe, he did not ask the priest, “I need to take these objects”, he just reached out a hand and stabbed him, to move him out of the way of his desire.
The priest rolled over in his arms. He had enough goodness in him to catch this man, hold him, dying, bleeding in his arms. The priest looked up at the one that Barbara was and said, “I forgive you. May you learn to forgive yourself.”
In that moment, the world cracked open for this young man. He who had never thought he had anything to forgive himself for, that the world owed him everything, saw that in killing this priest he had killed himself. Had killed his mother, his father, his teachers, his future children.
He was able to lay the priest down and leave without taking anything, filled with regret. He went back to the pirates and said, “No, I did not get anything there and I cannot join you.” Now, they thought he was holding out on them. They tortured him. “Where did you hide it?” He only would say, “I did not take anything.” And finally as he died, “I forgive you.” So he learned literally to forgive them, but of course not yet himself.
This self-forgiveness seems to be the heart of every spiritual path. You don’t need to remember past lives. All of you have done things in this lifetime for which you feel regret. All of you have experienced greed and anger, jealousy, impatience, even if you didn’t act on it, and felt regret.
In many lifetimes after that first lifetime of awakening, most of you probably acted on those impulses of fear and negativity. But there was something new moving through you which was a deep aspiration to live your life with kindness and with love. An aspiration to come home. The divine, however you named it, might have been seen or experienced as a brilliant light and yourself as shadow. There may have been despair, “I am not worthy to stand in that light, much less to consider myself a part of that light. I am covered with soil”.
Then for most of you in this culture, a new piece of the path developed in that there was the deep aspiration to live your life with love and you didn’t know how. Come back to Jesus, here. So many of those whom he addressed had not really awakened. There was an intention to follow literal commandments but there was always an excuse. “Do not kill”. But if he kills your sister or your brother, then you may kill him.
Jesus was attempting to wake people up. , Barbara feels such deep gratitude toward the priest who was killed, truly considers him her spiritual father, and offers the merit of any good practice or work to him. That does not mean she does not revere other teachers as well, but he was the one who, in giving his life, literally woke her up.
Jesus, because of the power of his being, woke up so many beings. When you are taught to hit back when you are hit, and then somebody not only says, “Turn the other cheek” but does it, not only says, “Love others as yourself” but does it, it’s very inspiring. If done without pride, it can make you feel, “I can do that also”.
His purpose was not to lay a specific path of instruction but to wake people up, to wake them out of the enactment of their fear and negativity. And he did that superbly. And then he said to them further, “I am the way.” This was the path he described. By “I am the way” he did not mean the personal man was the way, but the I Am. The divine within and without. This divine essence of all being, this is the way. When you come to know “I Am”, he said, then you will come to know who you are. And then you cannot possibly do harm any more because this divinity is all-pervading
So he didn’t just wake people up, he gave them a path. And it spoke to the people of his time and of that place. It helped them see the possibility of making different choices. It helped them see the possibilities of love.
I don’t want to single these two teachers out as if they have been the only ones. So many great teachers have taught loving kindness. What I find remarkable about the Buddha’s path is that it directly addresses most of you in your culture and who are spiritual seekers of this level, where you are awake, in part, but don’t know what to do with your negativity. So many of you, millions of you, are stuck in this place where you so deeply want to come home.
If your hands have done harm, you’ll feel you have to cut them off before you can come home. But you are meant to come home whole and not in pieces. There’s nothing to cut off. The power of these teachings, then, is that it invites you to look at the inclination to whack yourselves into little pieces and sort those pieces into good and bad, to let go of all of that and recognize that that is just more negativity, more practicing of fear, hatred and control.
When the heart opens to the human dilemma, the human who has felt it must divide itself and conquer itself, and yet has finally seen, “This won’t work”, is home. It’s just the last mile left to walk. Now, the last mile is steep. I’m not saying it’s easy. The first thing you need to learn is deeper kindness. It is from kindness and not force that we track the habitual tendencies to judgment, control, and even hatred, and commit to the decision, “This has not worked. It’s time to try something new.”
Then the practices taught by the Buddha offer specific ways of attending and finding balance. We watch the arising of pleasant and unpleasant mind and body states, seeing the habitual way we greet those states, with attachment to the pleasant and with aversion to the unpleasant. Then we watch the body contractions around attachment and aversion. Try it yourself. Reach out and pull something into you. Feel your body contract. Grab it. Now turn your hands and push away, and feel the body contract. It’s very strong. But we give it very simple labels: aversion, attachment. There are no stories there, just the contracted state, known just as it is.
Wisdom begins to develop about how it arises and how it ceases. Wisdom begins to develop that this is not my anger but is simply the fruit of conditions. It is made up of what we call non-self elements. Anger is made up of fear, memories of past pain. Old stories. The desire to be safe. and habit energy. Those are the conditions and when they come together the result will be anger. We begin to see that instead of attacking the result and saying, “I am unworthy of God. I am unworthy to come home as long as this anger is present in me.” We can instead say, “Here is anger.” And just that simple noting characteristics; impermanent; not self; hard and contracted. . There’s a little bit of space and patience and a willingness to watch this anger rather than judging it and hating it. Kindness is in charge rather than fear.
As wisdom and compassion develop and deepen, and also the ability to stay present in your lives, some of you find the Buddha’s path very helpful and some of you are more drawn back into your own religions to explore, bringing in kindness instead of hatred. “In what ways can I find realization in this religious path with which I resonate?” It doesn’t matter; the paths are all leading to the same place.
There’s one more part to this puzzle. Many of you come with questions about all those leaves in the forest. Past lives, beings on other planes, energy experiences, the nature of channeling. Now, I’m not the Buddha, I’m not living in India 2500 years ago. I also do not claim to be right; simply, I’ve learned to trust my own experience. Many of you have heard me say about some questions, “This one I will not answer. You don’t need to know.” But also about some of these questions I do answer because you are older now than you were then, and many of you were alive then. You have insight now that you did not have then. Without going deeply into these answers as a sidetrack, a certain amount of spiritual inquiry seems to be helpful to many of you. My choice has been to make it available. Those who wish to be a part of our meditation program and not be involved with this kind of spiritual inquiry, that’s fine. Those who wish to be a part of it, it’s here.
The discursive mind cannot get at “Who am I “; I don’t mean I-Aaron, I mean who any of you are. Who am I? Who are you?
If you think you’re somebody, who were you before you were that somebody? What were you? Right here in this paper (holding up a tissue) tissue we see the tree, the sun, the rain, the soil. Without those, this tissue couldn’t exist. Is there anything you can point to and say, “This is me, separate from anything else”? This kind of reflection will not bring you to freedom but it will support your meditation practice. So we ask some useful questions. If the questions swing around to beings on the Pleiades, for example, well yes, of course, there are beings everywhere. They all have the same issue-how do I find freedom? How do I express my energy with more kindness, more wisdom, and with non-harm? So it doesn’t matter; you’re here. Don’t worry about them out there. Do what you have to do right here.
What I see as the primary work of Deep Spring Center is that we especially draw to us those beings who are struggling with alienation with the shadow of the self, those who have a very keen sense of the divine, a very deep longing to go home, and feel lost. My wish is simply to give you the tools that have most helped me because I know that you can find your way. It gives me such joy to see deep love, spaciousness, and peacefulness dawning in so many of you, and to see your hearts opening to yourself and others.
It’s not that anger stops, although eventually it will, but rather, anger is seen for what it is, just a collection of conditions. Like a drop of rain falling on the ground and then soaking into the earth. Anger is just energy. You don’t have to be afraid of it. Greed, fear, any of these heavy emotions; as you learn that you can trust yourself not to enact them, and that you don’t have to deny them or hate them, you stop giving them energy. This means you stop supporting the conditions out of which these resultant emotions arise. Eventually they’ll go.
So what are we doing here? In my mind we’re not a religious organization. But we are bringing to people both through discussions like tonight’s and through meditation instruction and practice, an opening to your true nature. It is my experience that once you directly contact that true nature and begin to trust it, you will not be so absorbed in your negativity, nor so frightened by it. Then you will stop giving it energy and it will die away, leaving your true radiant and beautiful selves. The self which is no-self! Not separate. Able to dwell skillfully in the world without attachment or aversion. Able to love passionately and let go fully. Able to be who you are, for indeed you are all divine.
I thank you. I will be happy to speak to your questions. That is all.
Q: I am experiencing grief for a long time over a divorce. I think it is long enough. It’s distracting me from my work. How to move on? .
Aaron: I am Aaron. First, briefly, we must note that the nature of grief is that it is an expression both of love and of fear. In your English language you have but one word for it. Love-based grief is sorrow. It doesn’t take that which is lost so personally but acknowledges the whole transition, the impermanence of everything in this world and that that which is lovely today will fade.
There is a certain tenderness there. There is a certain sense of equanimity with the grief. Fear-based grief takes it more personally. “Will I be safe? Will I be hurt?” It wants to strike out in its pain. The biggest difficulty is it is never just one or the other; they come together. It’s important, then, to ask yourself: along with the tenderness and sorrow, what anger or other feeling might be here?
The way I like to phrase it is, what might this grief be protecting me from? If we’re attached to anything, we hold onto it because we feel safer with it than without it. In your case I would not think that it’s protecting you from getting back to your work. You have not said to me that your work was unpleasant to you and you’ve said you would like to get back into your work. This is something you’ll have to look at. I think it’s more likely that the grief is protecting you from a deeper anger, an anger that may be fully illogical: feeling abandoned, feeling unsafe. Even if you wanted to be out of this marriage, there might still be feelings of abandonment, feelings of rage, even. It could even come back to that first spark of God, feeling yourself cast out of the garden. (loudly) “What do you mean I’m out!?” But how can I say that to God? If God says I’m out, I must be bad, I must be flawed. And therein lies at least part of the heart of the grief and the pain of all abandonment.
I am not saying this is what it is, only ask yourself this question: if I were not feeling grief what might I be experiencing? What is it that holds me to this grief, painful though it is, because something else is more frightening? If you can ask yourself that question with gentleness and spaciousness, hold your hands on your heart, feel that tender place that hurts, be merciful to yourself. You might say, “I am feeling pain, terrible pain. May I be free of suffering” and then reflect on all the beings in the world who have lost loved ones. They’re all feeling pain. “May they be free of suffering.” Allow yourself to ease gently into it. If you see anger, judgment, any of these so-called negative emotions, don’t pounce on yourself with vengeance. Can there be kindness? Mercy? I think slowly the truth will emerge if you let it and that which has held the grief in place will be seen as hollow. Then the grief will dissolve. Is this an adequate answer or would you like me to speak further? If so, please phrase your question. I pause.
Barbara: Let’s have one more question before the break.
Q: Does Aaron conceive or think of himself in terms of his own shadow side?
Aaron: I am Aaron. No, Q, not at all. I’m happy to say that that illusion of shadow is gone for good. I pause.
Barbara: He says, does that give you hope? He says, it really does go. He says, that’s not to say that he’s always right. He can still make mistakes. He can still be confused occasionally about something or misunderstand. But he doesn’t see that as an out-speaking of shadow in himself, just, “Here is a place where there is not full clarity.” Forgive it. Learn and move on.
Aaron: I am Aaron. As you probably are aware, I am very cautious. I have a very strong intention to do no harm and will err on the side of caution. I’m no longer moved to answer somebody to try to fix something for them; I’ve learned a deep trust of people’s situations and their ability to use them fruitfully. And I’m no longer moved to please people to get them to like me; there’s no me.
Occasionally I have overstepped what I feel is the appropriate boundary of answer, said more to a person than was useful. An example that comes to mind was a person who wanted desperately to know who he had been in a certain past life. He had a strong sense of where he had lived, had seen that lifetime very clearly. He even went to that village which he had driven through and had such a deja vu experience he said, “This is it.” He looked in the old village records at death certificates. There were records about those people’s lives: who they had been, a little about their work, about their families. So he came to me and he said, “What was my name?”
Now, I never give people names from past lives. He asked me not 10 times, not 50 times, but 100 times. And I kept saying, “No, I will not tell you. It is not useful to know” Finally, one day I said to him, “Look, you keep asking me this. I keep saying no. In my opinion, it may be harmful to you, but you want to know. If I tell you, you are responsible. I have told you I do not wish to tell you but I won’t deny you this knowledge any more.” And so I told him the name. And then he went and looked and found out some hurtful things that karmic ancestor had done and was very upset and said, “Why did you tell me?”
No shadow, in terms of shame, guilt, anger, but a sadness that this awareness that I am had still not fully learned to trust itself and stay with its own truth, no matter what. That his nagging had pushed me off. Just the little sense of, “It won’t hurt.” I don’t think it did him any severe harm. But I regret that I told him. The difference is, I don’t get caught up in condemning myself and saying, “Why? Look at me. I’m so bad.” Just, “That wasn’t quite skillful.” And let it go. I pause.
Barbara: He is saying perhaps that was something of a public confession! He says, no shame, no guilt, just regret. It’s 8:45, let’s take a 15 minute break for tea and then come back for some more questions…
(break)
Q: In the West, so much psychotherapy is focused on creating a healthy self. What can Aaron say about that?
Aaron: I am Aaron. It’s all about balance, Q. If the sense of self is too much distorted, the being in acute pain, strong feelings of unworthiness, lack of skill, it’s very hard to get beyond those stories. One is so locked into them. It’s no different than somebody in a very poor country who doesn’t have enough to eat. His children are starving. It’s very hard to get beyond the stories of such intense fear, whether it’s an emotional or a physical fear. When there is some easing of that fear by gaining a clearer sense of the beauty of the self, some healing, only then can one begin to investigate the truth of no-self in ways that are not an escape from pain.
If the self is deemed as disgusting, then one may move into these meditation practices and perhaps develop them very quickly; move into a place that sees the truth of no-self and hide out there in denial of the human pain. But this is not freedom, it’s just exchanging one trap for another trap.
On the other hand, to insist that one must be cured is ridiculous. There’s nothing to cure. That’s also exchanging one trap for another trap, deepening the idea that there is a somebody who was broken and must be fixed. That notion serves a separate, a different distortion. So balance, I think, is the most important; coming to a place of enough spaciousness and comfort that one can settle down and do the practice. There may be a lot of turmoil still but not such acute pain. Then one can do the practice and wisdom can develop. And out of that wisdom comes the awareness of one’s innate wholeness and perfection. But it is not a wisdom that serves as an escape any more; one is capable of bringing that truth of one’s being back into the world and attending skillfully one’s own and anothers’ pain.
Q: So, one does not have to fully cultivate or realize a wholesome self?
Barbara: I’m paraphrasing Aaron. He says, the practice leads you into that. You can’t continue to practice honestly without investigating the unwholesome and nurturing the wholesome. He says, for somebody for example who is suicidal, or tremendously depressed, unable to be in reality at all, the practice would overwhelm them. You can’t ask somebody like that to be present; they don’t have any space to be present. That person has to start out very gently. He says, if he as a teacher 500 years ago had somebody like that, he would ask them, he said if it was a lay person he would give them a job to tend animals, perhaps, to do things that were easy and which they could succeed at and which would give them a sense of being somebody who contributes to the world. He says, this is so important.
For example, he was talking recently with somebody who had the idea of creating some kind of, not quite a hospice but an old age home. And he said to them, they were just exploring the possibilities, not at all ready to do it, just a background idea. And he said to them, Why not take people who are experiencing some kind of spiritual emergency and need a stable place to live, and invite them also into this home so that they can take care of some of these older people, feed them and so forth, to help them ground and find some sense of heart-opening to themselves?
In society there are ways to do this. Then once there is just that little bit of stability to build on, they can begin to do the practice. But we can’t begin to do the practice from a place of total self-loathing.
Q: I have been getting confused lately about self and illusion of self and no-self.
Barbara: He says he knows people who have gone very deep in their meditation practices, had all kinds of profound experiences, and live in complete denial of their emotional system. They insist, “There’s no self. Thus, I don’t experience anger. There’s no self to feel anger.” And there’s so much anger and there’s just no contact. They’re using these experiences as a hiding place. So he says there always must be balance.
Aaron: I am Aaron. But no, one definitely does not need to find a full and healed self before one can experience a no-self. The terms are different. Again, it is the flaw of the English language. The best we can do is “self” with a small and capital “s”. The drop of water raised up by a teaspoon out of the ocean, you might imagine it experiences itself as a separate drop of water. There’s nothing there that was not the ocean, whether it’s in a spoon or back in the ocean. Just Ocean and ocean. We call that drop a separate drop of water. We fail to recognize that right here in the spoon is ocean. When we put it back in the ocean, we call it the Ocean. The drop doesn’t cease to exist, it just lets go of its boundaries, its sense of separateness.
For the human, this sense of separateness is both the greatest torment and the greatest gift. Gift, because it is the torment of that sense of separateness that pushes you to investigate the illusion of separation and find out that there’s nobody and nothing that has ever been separate. You are just these aggregates: the form, the feeling, the thoughts, the emotions, consciousness. And yet if you take all of those away, you don’t cease to exist. The drop of water placed in this pot (indicating a flower pot) doesn’t cease to exist; it simply emerges in the energy of the leaves. Another form.
When you come to that place of no-self, the direct experience of it is so different than any concept you can hold of it. In the direct experience of it, nothing could cease to exist. You experience all of these aggregates sloughing off and you rest so firmly in that which remains. But it’s no-self. There’s not ego there; there’s not even a body there. There may not be thoughts in terms of conscious thoughts; certainly not preferences. There is awareness, and awareness simply rests in Awareness. There are certain characteristics of kindness, spaciousness, light.
After a few immersions into that experience, you can’t deny it in yourself any more. It would be like the human saying, “No, I don’t have any blood in me. Look, there’s no blood.” But after you cut yourself a few times or prick your finger, you have to acknowledge, “Yes, I guess there’s blood in here.” There is this ground of being. It is not my ground of being or your ground of being. When we’re there we’re in the same place. But it is not a void, not annihilation of being.
The other thing one experiences while resting there is, there is nothing broken there. There could never be anything broken there. The illusion of brokenness exists in these impermanent expressions. We have to be responsible for those expressions that they do not do harm in the world, but also not to get caught up in them. Just to make space, to note them, to work skillfully with them. Eventually they’ll go. When you rest in this Ground of Being, then increasingly you are able to be with these difficult expressions of being, not to take them personally; to see them as result of conditions. Either just not to pay a lot of attention or, if it’s a repetitive energy, greed, for example, or jealousy, to begin to note, “This is a result of certain conditions. How can I better attend to the conditions out of which this mind state grows, because it’s painful for me and others?” It’s very different than saying, “It’s bad and I have to fix myself.”
It’s rather like preparing a meal and saying, “Oh, it could use a bit more salt, a bit more sugar.” How do I attend to it skillfully to serve the best possible meal? The nutrition of the meal is already there, the perfection of the meal is there. Do you understand? I pause.
Barbara: He says, so much suffering is caused by people who think, “I have to fix this or that in myself.” That that’s such a difficult place. Not to fix doesn’t mean that we can enact our negativity in the world, but to attend to it is not to fix it. When we see anger or jealousy or any emotion, we attend to it. But not with that thought of, “Oh, got to fix that.” That’s just perpetuating the anger and judgment. He says the He says the whole heart of this work is to begin to replace the habitual patterns of judgment and anger around negative thought with kindness and patience with negative thought. He says, don’t get caught up in being somebody who is broken and has to get fixed.
Another question?
Q: Aaron spoke tonight about addressing people’s concerns and accessing past life information. Was he saying… is this generally useful?
Barbara: I would like to answer that, Q. His feeling seems to be that once we learn to meditate, if there is something we need to know, we begin to see it. And we may not see it in the authentic details. In other words, we could have been a being who in cave man times saw somebody with an ax and said, “They’re going to hurt my child” and killed the one with the ax. And then realized the one with the ax was stalking a fox and felt tremendous shame. What we might see instead is somebody with a knife doing the same thing in modern clothes. It doesn’t matter. But at some level it will come into dream and meditation. If it’s a past life issue which keeps coming up in this life repetitively, and which we keep repeating in the same unskillful ways, over and over and over , a past life will shine light on that. In meditation we ask to see something which will help us better understand our present situation. If we both are ready to see it, which means we have the spaciousness to deal with that and it has not just become another ego trip, and if we’re ready to see it in terms of really ready to let go of some of those habitual patterns, having investigated what holds me in this space; then we’ll see them. If we don’t see them it doesn’t mean we aren’t ready, it may mean we just don’t need to. What we see in this life is enough. There’s nothing else that we have to see.
Does that answer your question?
I have seen many past lives very clearly. When I see a past life, it’s always because it directly relates to a present issue that I’m working with and gives me clarity about how that being was stuck in a certain unskillful pattern. And that I don’t have to be stuck there.
Aaron: I am Aaron. Please join me here with a reflection. Imagine yourself to be walking in the spring woods. May apples are coming up and the first green is on the trees. The wood is open and you can see a good distance. You see a rabbit, stop to watch this small sweet creature. The woods feel so peaceful. Suddenly there is a flurry of movement and a fox runs out so fast and grabs the rabbit. You hear it squeal in pain and terror. The fox literally rips out its throat. Contraction. Watch aversion arise. Judgment. “Why did he have to do that? Murderer.”
Let those thoughts come up. There is judgment, the idea of how things should be. Can you feel the hardness that would come with such thoughts. The whole body energy is tight and contracted. Then you watch the fox. You have good binoculars and the woods are very open, the new growth barely started. You watch her carry food, carry this rabbit across to a den, whose opening you can just barely see into from the direction in which you sit. And you can see that there are babies in there. Babies perhaps just weaned. Peering out of the den and watching their mother bring back the food. Is it still “bad”? Certainly there was pain. Can you feel your heart open to this situation where one being dies so others may eat?
With judgment there was suffering. As the judgment diminishes, there is understanding. There is still sadness. Can you feel the difference? Not suffering any more because the mind is not hard and contracted thinking, “This is how it should be.” But still there is sadness because the rabbit did feel terror and pain. Because he had to die so others could eat. There may even be anger, “Why does it have to be like this?” But can you feel the possibility of spaciousness there, no suffering, even with anger and sorrow?
Speaking to the rabbit, “You have suffered. Perhaps you had your own den, your own babies, and they will starve. You have suffered. May you be free of suffering. May you have peace.” Really allow your heart to open to this small creature, its vulnerability, its softness. Breathing in and out kindness to the rabbit.
And then turn your attention to the fox. Note how scrawny she was, and she had a small limp. Hard to find food here in the woods. Her babies are hungry. And now she is nestled with them safely in her den and they’re fed. “May you be free of suffering. May you know safety and comfort. May you have peace.” What would it mean to let go of judgment and offer such loving wishes to this fox?
Turn your attention now to yourself. You are the rabbit and the fox. Life devours you and you devour life. You disappear and reappear again. Others strike at you and hurt you. And sometimes you do the striking and the hurting. Sometimes it’s out of fear or anger. Sometimes there is no intention to hurt, but simply the need for yourself to be safe. “I have suffered. I have known sorrow, fear, uncertainty, hunger, lack of safety or stability. I have suffered. Wanting it to be otherwise, I have suffered. May I be free of suffering. May I come to rest in this ground of being which can see how things are, how it all changes, letting go lightly and opening the heart to things just as they are in this moment. Attending to what is unskillful, letting go. As with the rabbit and the fox, may I be happy.”
(Recording ends)