December 10, 2005 Saturday Morning, Part 2
Aaron’s talk to Friends of the Casa – Westport, CT
Pain vs. Suffering; Loneliness
(break)
Aaron: So now, a period for your questions, questions related to what I spoke of this morning. I will be talking in more depth about the Casa this afternoon, about the details and the functioning there.
Q: In the first part, you mentioned pain and suffering, and it seems like you think they could be separated. And one is a matter of training and one is a matter of healing ourselves. So, I wanted to know the difference between pain and suffering.
Aaron: Yes, I understand the question, my sister. Let’s try an experiment together, all of you. Hold out an arm, straight out, palm up. Just breathing, holding the arm out. It begins to grow a bit heavy yes? Stay with it. Be aware as the discomfort comes, be aware of it. A slight ache perhaps. Just the physical sensation. For most of you, there is not really a lot of pain, just a slight discomfort.
If we put this in your hand, you’ll feel the pain must faster (places a heavy book on her face-up palm). Do you feel it? Now bring awareness to the physical sensation and to contracting. Disliking the sensation and contracting around it. Can you feel that they are two different things? There is a physical sensation of weight and achy-ness and there is an inner movement of “I don’t want that.” The physical sensation at this point is not real pain, just subtle discomfort, but it would turn into pain if you kept the arm out for a long time.
Watch the way mind shifts from the physical sensation itself into that “don’t want this.” That grasping is the root of suffering. Sometimes there will be pain. This is how your bodies are. You cannot avoid physical pain. And really, you cannot avoid emotional pain—loss, sadness.
Are you feeling the heaviness of the arm now? (Yes) Can you feel the distinction? The physical sensation is just the physical sensation. How do you relate to it? It will be in the habitual way you each have with discomfort.
Say this with me. “Breathing in, I am aware of tension in the shoulder, throbbing. Breathing out, I smile to it.” See how your experience of sensation changes as you bring a sense of openheartedness and ease, real love for this part of your body. Flood with the whole shoulder with lovingkindness, with light. The physical sensation does not go away, but can you feel how much more capacity there is to be with it?
There can be ease with it. It came out of conditions and it will go. Nobody has to fix it. See how you can be with that pain without tension, without fear. You may put your arms down. But when there is fear, and the thought “I have to fix this, I have to get rid of this” becomes predominant, the whole body contracts around it and you shift into separateness. Then you are suffering. Does this make it clearer for you?
Q: Would you then say that suffering is the rejection of pain and of love?
Aaron: Suffering involves rejection and also involves grasping, wanting things to be different than they are. Suffering is not in the physical body, suffering is in the mind. When there is that rejection or grasping, the physical body then contracts creating more physical, emotional, or mental pain.
Sometimes there is a choice about pain, sometimes there’s not. In other words, if you step on a tack there is going to be body pain. If somebody says something mean to you, there may be some mental pain. When you move into the place in the heart that says, “Ahh, so, this is how it is right now,”— the sprained ankle, the cut finger, the mean words—you watch the part of the mind that says “I don’t want this” with a spaciousness and a kindness that does not self-identify with it, does not get into that push-pull fight with it. Simply, a physical object has arisen, or a mental object, and then certain repercussions of that object. You come back to the infinite heart that can hold space for it all and then there is no suffering.
It would be best for Barbara to tell her own story, but I don’t want to pull her out of her trance for this. She related to you how much she suffered around her deafness. So much grasping, so much aversion. It was very difficult for many years.
Eighteen months ago, she was in a bad accident. She refers to it as her “surfing accident.” Struck by a wave and thrown off her surfboard into the bottom of the sea. Knocked unconscious. Many broken bones, especially in the face. There was bleeding in both eyes, a very serious decline in vision. Vision, of course, is very important to her; it is her primary way of access to the world since she has no hearing. She was terrified.
I will not say she did not suffer, but she had learned enough about suffering to be able to take this experience and know, “This is how it is. I cannot escape the experience of diminished vision. This is how it is, maybe for now, maybe forever. But I don’t have to suffer.”
So she was able very quickly, maybe within a week or two, to shift herself out of that experience of acute suffering. She was at her cabin in the country with Hal for the weekend. She went out on the porch to meditate one morning, the first morning at dawn, and everything was blurry in this beloved, familiar forest. She began to cry, “I can’t live like this. I can’t stand it.”
So I asked her just to close her eyes, still herself and meditate. She was feeling once again so cut off as she had been with her deafness, now not able to see, not able to read, hardly even able to lip read. Strong fear came, and despair, because she loved the visual beauty around her that now seemed taken away.
So she meditated for a while. Then the sun came up a bit over the trees. She opened her eyes, and it was exquisite. Because of the shift in her vision, everything was softened. Light streamed through the trees with a lack of detail, but everything soft. The quality of light was something she had never seen before with the eyes the way they had been. It was beautiful.
She stopped, and suddenly she was full of gratitude. “These eyes still see. They see differently. As long as I’m attached to seeing things as they use to be, I will suffer. When I can be present seeing things as they are now, I need not suffer.”
Last January, the entities were able to stop the bleeding in the left eye, and that eye has returned to 20/20 vision, with aid of her glasses. The right eye vision is quite poor. The entities were able to help the eye a lot, and then the doctor in the medical center in Michigan said laser surgery was necessary. But the procedure diminished the vision again, so she was literally blind in this eye, seeing only light and dark. But I think in January, when she returns to the Casa, there will be an improvement in vision again.
What she realized is, whether she can see or not see is not what’s most important. If she can see, that will be good. She wants to be able to see; she chooses to see. And yet, if it’s necessary not to see, there will be some way to communicate. She will find some way to live with that. It’s not what’s predominant here. Sadness for the loss, yes, but not suffering. Being with things as they are, with an open heart.
Over lunchtime you can talk with her about this experience, if you wish.
Q: You talked about the levels of training and levels of being this morning. How do you know where you are and where you should go to learn to move forward?
Aaron: Are you talking here about the levels of consciousness? (Yes) Again, it’s not linear. There are times when all of you are in that mythical and magical consciousness, very basic consciousness. Times when all of you are in a relative consciousness, just seeing and experiencing from the physical senses with a barricade, thinking there is nothing beyond that. There are times when each of you shift into vision logic and into psychic consciousness. There are probably times when each of you experience the Christ/Buddha consciousness, or even non-dual and cosmic consciousness. What’s important is, what is the highest stable level that you can maintain throughout life experience?
It’s easy to rest in that non-dual consciousness at the Casa, in the current room, feeling all that energy around you. It’s much harder when you are having a disagreement with somebody. You just keep remembering the possibility of living from the higher consciousness. You slip. You move into the fight and into rational consciousness, or even magical consciousness, wishing that person to go away.
And then you recognize the contraction and you know this is not where you want to be. You open your eyes and you look, and suddenly instead of seeing an enemy, you see a person who is suffering. And the heart responds by saying, “May you have well being. May you be happy and peaceful.”
It doesn’t mean that you give way to the other’s views if they are antithetical to your values. But you also see that the other is suffering. Your heart opens to the other. And in that moment of heart opening, you move right into the Christ consciousness.
You keep practicing with this, working to become more stable in what you know of the higher levels of consciousness. You know when you are caught in the small self and the ego or when you are in that more expanded state. You practice until you rest more stably in that expanded state, if that is your commitment, and move on.
Q: I wanted to get back to the pain and suffering. So what I am understanding is by accepting the pain, it’s softening our suffering. So if we can accept our pain, that eases the suffering?
Aaron: It is both about acceptance, my sister, releasing the fear and grasping of how things should be and being fully present with how things are, but it’s also about the shift into the ultimate reality and the simultaneous holding of both.
This arm hurts on one level, but on another level there is no pain. Do you understand what I mean by that?
For example, anger might arise, and judgment that there shouldn’t be anger. There is not acceptance that anger is present in this mind and body right now, but judgment, mind and body contracted, wanting to get rid of the anger. There is suffering.
With acknowledgment, “This is what is present. I will take care of it, see that it does not do harm. But I will not reject it. I will not hate it,” right there is compassion. The anger is still present, but also compassion.
Compassion, lovingkindness, these are the most powerful forces. You do not have to get rid of the anger to find that which is not angry. Can you see that they exist simultaneously?
May I have a piece of paper? An unwrinkled, perfect sheet of paper, yes? (Aaron wrinkles it, wads it up, then opens it out and displays it ) Where did the unwrinkled sheet go? Can you see it’s still there? It has wrinkles, and the unwrinkled sheet is right here. Where would it go?
Your innate loving kindness is there with the anger. That which has the infinite capacity to be present with the pain is right there along with the rejection of pain. You don’t have to get rid of the rejection of pain to find that place of acceptance. Rather, you acknowledge the aversion to the pain and know the simultaneous presence of the infinite heart that can hold the space for the pain. They are both there together. As long as you think it’s got to be one or the other, you get into a war—get rid of this so I can get that. And then there is just more contraction and more suffering.
Q: Isn’t there some way to accept the possibility, I mean, I think that we all get so caught up in anger or the grasping or whatever that we forget the possibility of that piece of paper, that non-duality is there. So, what I am taking away, what seems to resonate with me, is the word possibility. That I should remember that.
Aaron: What you are asking is…?
Q: I forget that I can move from that space. I forget the space exists.
Aaron: Yes. You are amnesiacs. You all have amnesia. With your birth, you accept the condition of amnesia. You wake up, and you are in this world and then say, “Who am I? Where am I? Where did I come from?” You look at the faces around you, some of them smiling, some of them frowning; who are they? It all feels so familiar, but you can’t remember it. Who am I? How did I get here?
You agreed to the amnesia with the birth. You agreed because if you remembered that you were spirit from that moment of birth then your life would be the expression of self-discipline. If something was difficult, you would say, “No, I am spirit; I will do it this way,” and push through. But you are learning faith and love, not force and will.
Imagine, all of you, that you slipped on the ice outside today. As you were coming in the door you each hit your heads. Other people helped you sit up. You came inside and said, “Where was I going? Is this the house I was going to? What am I doing here? I have amnesia; who am I? I don’t remember who I am.”
What we are teaching you resonates with your truth, so you decide to stay. But if your experience was different, you might listen and say, “This is not for me. Is there a bar somewhere? Is there a sports arena? This is not where I came to be.” You are finding through your experience what fits, who you are.
What if instead of coming into this house, you were downtown in the town square and you hit your head. You opened your eyes and woke up. Concerned people surround you, asking if you are okay. There is a bruise here, but yes, you’re okay. The people leave, and suddenly you say, “Who am I? Where was I going?” You look around the square and there is a church, there’s a bar, there’s a coffee shop, a movie theatre, a sports arena, a meditation center, a yoga center, a park. Where would you go? Q, where would you go?
Q: Here, right here, to be with you.
Aaron: (to another) Where would you go? You don’t know that I’m here; would you go into the meditation center, the church, or the park? Anybody drawn to the ice skating rink? The sledding hill?
Q: The beach.
Aaron: The beach. The beach, yes. Where else? Anybody going to the movie theatre? You are moved by a deeper truth. The heart knows where to go, and you are led by your heart. You find the deepest truth within the heart. Other questions?
Q: Why do so many people have to suffer with loneliness?
Aaron: Many are people who came into the incarnation with the strong pre-incarnative determination to remember their innate connection with all that is. The catalyst of experienced loneliness and separation spurs you into an inquiry, is anything really separate? And if not, why is it experienced so intensely?
Then you begin to understand the relative situation of the lone human and the ultimate situation of interbeing. The experience of loneliness pushes you to investigate. You are suffering, so you look for a way out. To learn it is not necessary to suffer, only to pay attention. But often you do not pay attention until there is suffering.
Barbara spoke before of her experience of losing her hearing. She felt as if she was separated from the world by a glass window, everybody else on the other side talking to each other and she was cut off from it by the lack of sound. There was intense loneliness. And she asked herself, “Despite the deepest meditations that teach me we are all connected, I experience this loneliness. How do I resolve this incongruity, this paradox?” This is what led her to go into the deeper levels to find and know that place of connection so deeply that she could not lose it.
Most of you who experience this kind of loneliness have this intention. The difficulty is that you get caught up in the loneliness, thinking it’s a problem, something that has to be fixed. There are no problems; there are only situations that need your loving attention. When you relate to it as a problem, you relate with a contracted energy that pulls you more and more into separation, separation from others and separation from yourself.
When you recognize you are contracting around this push of loneliness and trying to push back, you recognize another choice. You may dance with this push I call loneliness; just be present and know the experience. In the physical body and in the mind, know this direct experience without rejecting the experience. Ask the question, who is lonely? Can you find any ‘who’ here, any separate individual? Yes, on the relative plane, certainly you are a separate individual, but on the ultimate level you are not.
This experience, “feeling lonely,” came up in this mind and body and we respect and recognize that with kindness. And yet, at a deeper level, that ‘who’ is feeling it can lead us into the heart of connection when we see this is the pain of all beings. In that moment you know connection. It’s very powerful.
Q: How do we heal the pain?
Aaron: Another of Barbara’s stories. Many years ago she had a severe leg infection. The leg was very swollen, very painful. She had been in the hospital for perhaps weeks. They were trying different antibiotics, but the drugs were not working. The infection was moving up the leg. They began to talk about the possibility that if they could not find an appropriate antibiotic, they were going to have to remove the leg so the infection would not move up into the body.
She found herself cutting off the leg in her mind, rejecting the leg; not embracing, but rejecting it. Of course it could not heal, because it was not brought into the heart. She was feeling sorry for herself and also experiencing excruciating pain, and the medication they were giving her did not eliminate the pain. For some reason, they were concerned about giving her too much painkiller medication.
In the middle of one night, they wheeled an elderly woman into the bed next to hers. As they were working on her, the curtain between the beds got pushed aside and Barbara could see that the woman’s leg was freshly amputated and that the other leg had been previously amputated; one with a raw wound and one a healed wound; no feet.
Barbara sat meditating in semi-darkness on her bed, not behind the curtain, because the curtain was pushed aside, but next to the curtain. In meditation, she so clearly saw beings all over the world who that day had lost a leg to war, to accident, to illness, and the heart opened in compassion for all beings that sought healing. Suddenly she realized, “This is healing not about my leg; there is just this one leg to heal for us all.” So this woman’s conditioned awakened the compassion in her.
The compassionate heart is able to hold it all; no longer “my pain” but “our pain.” As soon as you make that shift there is healing. Not surprisingly, the new antibiotic began to work, the infection subsided, the leg healed. Interestingly, when she awakened in the morning, the next bed was empty again.
How do you make that shift from “my pain,” which statement is steeped in fear, to “our pain,” which articulation is merged with compassion? It becomes part of the habit energy. If you have the habit energy for fear, then your pain becomes “Oh, my pain, fear; how will I get rid of it”?
As you work harder to nourish the compassionate heart, to watch yourself moving into fear and work with it, there is space. Say, “No, I know where this fear is heading and will not follow the stories it offers. Breathing in, I am aware of fear; breathing out, I smile to fear. I hold that fear in a spacious and loving container.”
Right there with fear is that which is not afraid. But if all you can see is the fear, you can’t see that which is not afraid. You absorb into the fear and become myopic. As soon as you remember fearlessness is right here, love is right here, you know you don’t have to get rid of the fear, the anger, to open to these—they are right here. This is your birthright. This is your choice. It doesn’t mean that the fear goes away, only it’s no longer all-powerful because there’s a big container for it.
I like this image, and it may help some of you. Imagine yourselves, as you are sitting here, sitting in a small box, each chair in a box. I come into the room with a box full of tarantulas, approach your box, and I’m going to put the tarantula in your box. Can you stay in it? Of course not.
Now imagine yourself in a room that’s about 10′ x 10′, a big box. I approach with a tarantula. Maybe you could stay in for a second or two. I put it on the ground. You watch. As soon as it starts to scurry toward you, you hop out.
Now imagine yourself in a space three times the size of this room, with no furniture in it, a bare open space. I come with the tarantula and I put it on the ground in the far corner. Can you see that you would be able to stay present with it? If it headed toward you, you’d get up and move to the other side of the room. You’d live with it; we’d take it out at night so you could sleep. We’d put it back the next morning. You’d live with it. You’d get used to it, you’d get to know it. There would be a spaciousness with it. Eventually, you might even reach out and embrace it.
This is what you must develop with that you have judged as negative in yourself—fear, anger, greed, impatience, whatever it may be. You create that bigger container not because you “should,” not from that force to fix yourself, for there is nothing broken, nothing you need to fix, but from a place of lovingkindness that knows your work here is to learn compassion.
Your own difficult emotions are the most potent teacher you have. Here is anger. “Thank you, anger; now I can practice compassion.” What a different attitude from anger as enemy.
Q: I’ve been listening to you carefully, and I have been searching for a way to establish for myself what teachings you are giving us today. And the word that keeps coming to me is acceptance. That the first stage is acceptance, then enabling the heart to open. I’m wondering whether or not I’m on the right track?
Aaron: My brother I would say that on the relative level the first stage is acceptance and on the ultimate level the only need is to recognize the innate compassion of the already open heart. The human needs to accept; the spirit has nothing it needs to accept. There is nothing separate from it, nothing that frightens it.
This must be learned in sequence to some degree, so there must be some level of acceptance and easing of contraction before you can move to that place of resting in spirit, resting in love. But do not think of acceptance only, because acceptance is a doing, and the doing keeps you trapped in the relative human.
Q: How can you have compassion for people when you feel they are possibly not respecting your space and you are vulnerable yourself and you want to have compassion, but you also want to learn how to protect yourself at the same time?
Aaron: There is a misunderstanding of compassion, my sister, that thinks of compassion as weak, spineless. Compassion is strong. Compassion knows how to say no.
You are all habituated to think that only anger can say no. Love knows how to say no. When you say no, it will come from both places. Your work is to see that right there with the anger there is compassion, there is kindness, there is love.
Allow the no, for it’s not kind to let somebody abuse you. You must say no to abuse. Love says no. It takes practice.
The confusion is that the anger can be so strong you almost see the anger and feel its heat. You lose track of the possibility of love. Then you may judge yourself for not being more compassionate, or even for being too spineless to speak your truth. However it comes, it is still judgment and contracts you further.
Let’s try something else together. Hold your hands six inches in front of you face and wiggle the fingers. Here’s anger, wiggling its way around (wiggling one finger), here is doubt (wiggling another) , here is some pain in the belly (wiggling a third finger), here is confusion (fourth finger), here is hate (fifth finger wiggling). They are all dancing around. Focus on them.
Now, while they keep wiggling, look through; look right up there to Barbara. If you can see me, so much the better. You don’t loose sight of the fingers, do you? You break through into that vast spaciousness that was always there, but the fingers remain. Return focus to the fingers now; broad focus, then fine focus again. See how you loose the spaciousness immediately when you focus in on the fingers? Break through again.
The anger or the bellyache remain, but there is also that vast space. You are so use to focusing in on one pain or emotion and making it into a problem that needs to be fixed that you forget you can rest in that spaciousness, rest in the loving heart, rest in truth, rest in awareness.
Much of what you have to learn is acceptance, but equally important is moving into spaciousness. Look at the objects—people here: one person, two persons, three persons. You don’t deny they are separate people. But between them is space! Does anybody see the space?
Look through the fingers; there is space, there are fingers in the space. What is the predominant thing is this room? Space. We take it for granted; we don’t see all that space.
Breathe in, breathe out… Breathe in, breathe out… Breathe in, pause, breathe out… Breathe in, breathe out, pause… Breathe in, pause… Breathe out, pause… Breathe in, pause… Breathe out, pause. Can you feel that space? The breath arises and falls away within the space.
(Rings bell) Listen to the bell. The room is not silent. Little movements of people, perhaps sounds from outside, but there’s the spaciousness of no speech, semi-silent, then the sound of the bell.
Stay with the bell until it dies away. Go with it into the space. (rings bell again) Can you feel that space? This is one expression of the Ground of Being, what you might call the Unconditioned, or Divine. In this conditioned world, objects that arise out of conditions are impermanent; they pass away. A physical object, a thought, when the conditions are present they arise, and when the conditions cease, they cease.
Beyond that there is what we would call the Unconditioned, or call it God. It is that which exists without any conditions, That Which Is. The Native Americans call it Grandmother Awareness. That Which Is. You live your lives forgetting that Heart, and forgetting that you are That. You are not these thoughts; you are the Divinity. This is the path of remembering. Wake up from your amnesia.
(lunch break)