See when we try to control the mind, a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control
 your own mind, mainly to prove to you that you can't do it. There's nothing you know,
 a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. So what they do is they speed up the
 folly. And so you get concentrating. And you can have a certain amount of superficial and
 initial success by a process commonly called self-hypnosis. And you can think you're making
 progress. And a good teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he really
 throws you with one. Why are you concentrating? See, Buddhism works this way. Buddha said,
 if you suffer, you suffer because you desire. And your desires are either unattainable or
 always being disappointed or something. So cut out desire. So those disciples went away
 and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire.
 But then they came back and Buddha said, but you are still desiring not to desire. They
 wanted how to get rid of that. But you see, it works like this. All spiritual discipline
 works this way. I'll show you. It's done in the form of a child's game. You know, there's
 the church and there's the steeple. Open the door and there are the people. And here's
 the parson going upstairs and there he is saying his prayers. Catch him. Catch him.
 Catch him. Catch him. Catch him. You never can because the would-be catchee is the catcher.
 So then, that's like desiring not to desire. Or loving out of a sense of duty. Trying to
 be spontaneous because you ought to be. See? All that is nonsense. Lifting yourself up
 by your own bootstraps. So when you see that that's nonsense, there naturally comes over
 you a quietness. In seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no
 controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What
 you took to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, is
 just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just part
 of the experience. So there isn't any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings. We get into
 that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the
 funny thing about that is that verbs are processes and subjects are nouns, which are supposed
 to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action?
 Obviously it can't. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And
 without a knower, there can't be knowing. Well, that's just a grammatical rule. It isn't
 a rule of nature. In nature, there's just knowing, like you're feeling it. And I have
 to say you are feeling it as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say I am
 feeling it, what I mean is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling it, I mean
 there is feeling there. I have to say even there is feeling. What a cumbersome language
 we have. Chinese is easier. You don't have to put all that in. You can say things twice
 as fast in Chinese as you can in any other language. Well, anyway, when you come to see
 that you can do nothing, that the play of thought, of feeling, etc., just goes on by
 itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly,
 without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal,
 symbolic chatter going on in the skull. Don't try and get rid of it, because that will again
 produce the illusion that there's a controller. Just, it goes on, it goes on, it goes on,
 and finally it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there's a silence.
 And this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence, you suddenly begin to
 see the world as it is. And you don't see any past, and you don't see any future. You
 don't see any difference between yourself and the rest of it. That's just an idea. You
 can't put your hand on the difference between myself and you. You know, you can't blow it,
 you can't bounce it, you can't pull it. It's just an idea. You can't find any material
 body, because material body is an idea. So is spiritual body. This is somebody's philosophical
 notions. See, reality isn't material. That's an idea. Reality isn't spiritual. That's an
 idea. Reality is... So, we find, if I've got to put it back into words, that we live in
 an eternal now. You've got all the time in the world, because you've got all the time
 there is, which is now. And you are this universe. And you feel a strange feeling when ideas
 don't define the differences. You feel that other people's doings are your doings. And
 that makes it very difficult to blame other people. If you're not sophisticated theologically,
 you may of course run screaming in the streets and say that you're God. In a way, that's
 what happened to Jesus, because he wasn't sophisticated theologically. He only had
 Old Testament biblical theology behind him. If he'd had Hindu theology, he could have
 put it more subtly. But it was only that rather primitive theology of the Old Testament. And
 that was the conception of God as a monarchical boss. Thanks. And you can't go around and
 say, "I'm the boss's son." If you're going to say, "I'm God," you must allow it for everyone
 else too. But this was a heretical idea from the point of view of Hebrew theology. And
 so what they did with Jesus was they pedestalized him. That means kicked him upstairs so that
 he wouldn't be able to influence anyone else. And only you may be God. And that stopped
 the gospel cold right at the beginning. It couldn't spread. Well anyway, this is therefore
 to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation
 is frustrated. So long as we think of it in terms of something that I myself can bring
 about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick. Because you see that leads to
 endless games of spiritual one-upmanship and of guru competitions. Of my guru is more effective
 than your guru. My yoga's faster than your yoga. I'm more aware of myself than you are.
 I'm humbler than you are. I'm sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than
 you love me. There are these interminable goings on about which people fight and wonder
 whether they are a little bit more evolved than somebody else and so on. All that can
 just fall away. And then we get this strange feeling that we have never had, you see, in
 our lives. Except occasionally by accident, some people get a glimpse that we are no longer
 this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this
 universe and you are creating it at every moment. Because you see it starts now. It
 didn't begin in the past. There was no past. See if the universe began in the past, when
 that happened it was now. See? Well it's still now. And the universe is still beginning now
 and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now. In the wake of the ship fades out,
 so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears.
 You'll never find it there. Things are not explained by the past. They're explained by
 what happens now. That creates the past. And it begins here. That's the birth of responsibility.
 Because otherwise you can always look over your shoulder and say, "Well I'm the way I
 am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother
 dropped her." And away we go back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something.
 We never get at it. But in this way you're faced with it, you're doing all this. And
 that's an extraordinary shock. So cheer up. You can't blame anyone else for the kind of
 world you're in. And that helps a great deal. Because most of the good things we are trying
 to do are based on blaming somebody else and to improve them. "Kindly let me help you or
 you'll drown," said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. If therefore we would
 stop blaming others, it would be very difficult to go about a war with a straight face. And
 if you know, you see, that I, in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, really
 doesn't exist, then it won't go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that
 you're God.
 (overlapping chatter)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 0.80 sec
Transcribe: 1013.91 sec
Total Time: 1015.35 sec