November 1, 2014 Saturday Evening, Geneva Retreat
Brief Q&A at Geneva Retreat
Final questions; first Barbara and John appeared with masks and gave out candy!
(The first question was not recorded.)
Aaron: My blessings and love to you all. Of course you are going to slip back into the illusion. The important point is, after this week you are more aware of the illusion and the reality, and of the tendency to slip into the illusion, and the ability to say no, to stay present. It’s not that it will never happen; it’s that it won’t be as steep a fall, that you’ll catch it sooner.
You will increasingly find your ability to honor the choice to stay with love no matter how strong the illusion of separation. If you never went home, if you stayed here in this loving environment with high energy, you would lose the catalyst that you are ready for, that which comes to you and says, “Come! Come! Let’s bring in fear! Let’s bring in anger!” Just put it aside. But if you get caught, simply know you’re caught. You cannot catch a fish who will not snap at the bait, or who, sensing the hook, says, “No,” and spits it out. Don’t get caught. But when you do get caught, and it will happen, simply know you are caught. That which is aware of being caught is not caught. Right there, you are back to love, back to spaciousness, just as fast as that. Just keep working with it.
I want to speak to this question, what happens after death? The process of dying can be challenging because it’s frightening. You’re going through sometimes body pain and unusual sensations. But as soon as you come to that transition, it’s no longer hard. You’ve done it hundreds of times.
For me, the experience is like flipping out of too tight a pair of shoes, too tight a jacket. Ahh, suddenly you can breathe. There’s space around you. There’s loving presence with you, ease and light.
Here is where your practice becomes important. If you have done a practice that leads you, when something pushes at you, to note pushing instead of moving with the stories of fear and pushing back, then in that transition process, if there is any moment of confusion, disorientation, that mind has developed the ability to simply note “confusion, disoriented” with spaciousness. It will pass. As on the earth plane, it’s all impermanent. So you move through it without creating new karma with it, without being drawn back into a new body.
But if you are drawn back, I liken it to the child who has not fully mastered the arithmetic being taught in his class. He takes the test; he fails the test. The teacher says, “Come in after school and we’ll go over it.” This is not punishment, it’s simply an indication there’s something here that is yet to be learned. Not a problem. Come back and learn it, and then you’re ready to move on. So anything that’s not yet fully understood and integrated will likely draw you back. But it’s not punishment; it’s simply a continued opportunity to follow this path of love, to learn what you seek to learn.
In the time after the transition there will be a rest, a little bit of R&R, a loving and supportive environment. You are not booted into the next incarnation. There is a time to review the life and to decide what is needed next. What is my soul’s plan? What karma is still pulling me? What is my direction here? And what would best support the movement in that direction and the learning?
Let’s pass this on to other questions.
(tape paused during question)
The question is about horror coming up in dreams, and not being able to bring the awakened self into the dream to relate lovingly to the horror. Part of it is simply a matter of practice. (Q: The awakened self is watching but it cannot help.) So there are two things. One is, I think a major part of it is simply depth of practice, repetition of practice. The more often you do this in your sitting where something difficult comes up, frightening, painful, and the awakened self is recognized and able to hold space for the small self, moving through this pain or confusion, gradually it seeps into the dream and you gain the ability.
Eventually some of you will learn how to do what we call lucid dreaming. That is, when you’re dreaming, you know you’re dreaming. The monster is chasing you. The awakened self is watching but the small self is running. But then there’s some moment where you say, “Ah, but this is a dream,” and awareness turns around and say to the monster, “No, you may not chase this self anymore.” So it’s a gradual skill that comes through the depth of your practice.
Resistance needs to be looked at. In what ways, and I’m not speaking just to Q here but to all of you, in what ways is there still identification with something in the self as faulty or bad, deserving of the monster chasing you? Take that into your meditation. After the dream, waking up, just sit in bed. What is this monster? Why do I feel vulnerable to this monster? Why am I allowing this monster to control me? When I say ask these questions, I don’t mean to ask in terms of trying to figure it out with the brain, but simply raise the question and then come back to your vipassana. Just breathing and present. It’s not called insight meditation for no reason! Insights arise. Trust your practice.
Do you want to add anything, John?
John: Just one thing. A practice that I did for a while with dreams was, I had– in those days it was a tape recorder, next to my bed, and when I woke up from a dream I would record it right away. In the morning I would listen to the dream on tape and then sit with it. Sometimes, as Aaron was speaking about, I would have some insight into the significance of the dream, using the meditation practice as a way of more clearly looking at it in the morning.
So if you continue to have dreams like this, and they seem to be significant to you, this may be a practice you would want to work with for a while. It can be very helpful, because it’s the unconscious speaking to us, and we make that more conscious by bringing that into our meditation practice.
(tape paused during question)
Aaron: I want to add just a little bit to that. You are newer to practice. We distinguish between pain and suffering. The wasp stings you. There’s going to be pain. There is not necessarily suffering. Suffering is what grows out of resistance to things as they are. Life is not always going to be the way you want it to be.
There’s also a big difference between resignation, saying, “It’s not how I want, but I can’t do anything about it,” with a depressed and a contracted attitude, or an open heart that says, “This is how it is right now, and I hold it in spaciousness. I support the conditions that will allow wholesome change without grasping, keeping the heart open to things as they are now, to the highest intention to the possibilities for change.”
The fruit of practice is the increasing ability to experience life as it is in this moment without suffering, and also to attend to that which is unpleasant and unwholesome in life, personal and universal life from this open heart. Because only within that open heart and love can there be genuine change for the good.
(tape paused during question)
Are you asking, was it a different kind of journey (spirit canoe) because it was Halloween? Halloween, All Saints Day. There is much more spiritual energy available on Halloween, both loving and negative, so I suppose it would heighten the journey.
But we did not specifically plan it on Halloween. We planned it to be in the middle day of the retreat so that you had Saturday to process it rather than doing it today when there wasn’t enough time to process it afterward. So had this whole thing been a week earlier, we would not have had Halloween as part of it and it would have been no problem. But experiencing it on Halloween, I’m sure some of you had a stronger experience.
Q: I was thinking about the end game, why we do this. For me it’s a very simple thing. It’s such a good feeling to understand myself, to get an insight into myself. And it gives me like a power with life itself, it empowers me. And it’s what my inner heart really wants.
(recording ends)