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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3071, Saturday, February 9, 2007, Editor: Mark
Addiction and Choice
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(From the Meeting, Immovable Resolve)
San Diego, CA - January 18, 2001
Questioner: I know one hundred percent that this personal
entity, this individuality, is in truth nonexistent. This is
known. But sometimes I completely forget and get carried away,
and I don't like the things that happen. Looking back, I wonder
how I could have completely identified with my thoughts and my
desires and forgotten what I know.
Gangaji: Yes, how did you do it? This is what you have to see,
because there is a "how." For surrender, there is no
"how." But there is a "how" to
identification.
Is this identification also coming from Consciousness?
Yes.
So it's not my fault. (Laughter.)
It is your fault, because fault also comes from Consciousness.
"It's not my fault" is the slippery way out. It is a
trick of the mind.
How can I be vigilant to not re-identify and have it be
effortless?
There is only effort to vigilance if there is a "you"
doing vigilance. Then vigilance is still the property of the
mind. But who are you? If you are not this individual, then who
are you?
I don't know how to describe myself.
I will name you then. You are consciousness. You are awareness.
Vigilance is the very nature of awareness. The moment that
vigilance is effort is the moment the mind has co-opted
vigilance. Then vigilance is bound to be dropped for
identification of yourself with your mind activity. You are not
separate from your mind activity, but you are more than your mind
activity. All mind activity appears and disappears. But you, as
you truly are, is always here. Always.
Take a moment now and look back to one of those instances when
you got totally identified with the drama, with the movie, and
then did not like the behavior that arose. Can you see the moment
that you left the truth and identified with the drama? There were
so many moments leading into it, but there was a particular
moment when there was a choice. It comes with the speed of light.
The ego, which is false identification, appears with the speed of
light. But you are present as it appears. When you look back in
your mind to that moment, what occurred?
It looks like identification just happened, and I...
I understand it looks like that, but I am asking you to look a
little closer at the more subtle mechanisms. When you look from
the outside, it is the wheel just started turning. But if you
look a little closer, you see, Aha, the wheel didn't just start
turning. There was this little thing here, and that little thing
there, and then that other thing. . . and then the momentum kept
it going.
I am asking you now to look deeper for some pattern, fueled by
some emotion, accompanied by some thought.
It looks like a past tendency.
And what is this past tendency?
A habit that might have gained power through the years.
Ask yourself how this habit got chosen in this particular
instant. Maybe it seemed to just appear out of some past
momentum, but there was a moment. It seems like a sliver of time,
but if you actually put your magnifying glass on it, which is
consciousness, you will see in slow motion there were many
choices along the way.
First, there is an emotion, which can be big. Then there is a
choice to indulge that emotion or to repress that emotion. If you
repress it, it will simply squeeze out in another time. If you
indulge it, then it is dramatized. This is universal.
The behavior of re-identification seems to have its own momentum
- I am just being who I am - but in the moment we are speaking of
there is no questioning of who you really are. Instead, you are
acting out who you think you are, and this thought has been built
up by millions of years of conditioning. This thought of who you
are has a force. It has a power. But you are consciousness. You
have the ability to examine in minute detail the choices of
acting out.
First, there arises a very familiar pattern. It comes in blowing
horns. You know it is coming. You feel it in your body. You are
starting to think those thoughts again. You are feeling either
self-righteousness or blame. I don't know what your particular
pattern is, but I will use a pattern of anger as an example.
With a pattern of anger, you may justified in doing whatever you
do, right? Then in the looking back, you might think, Well, I
don't know what happened; it just happened. When there is a
desire to know what happened, then there is the possibility of
seeing that you, as individual consciousness, chose to
re-identify with some old, dead movie. I say it is old and dead
because you no longer have the desire to identify with the movie.
It really doesn't thrill you any more, except maybe in the
moment. You can see its destruction. You can see how it bleeds
the life energy from you and the people around you and uses up
the creative force in you life. Once you see that it is old and
dead, then your power comes from seeing exactly where you are
choosing to re-identify.
So if I am extremely vigilant, I can learn...
It is skillful means to assume that you won't be very vigilant,
because then there is an openness to see how re-identification
occurred. If there is vigilance, then there is no
re-identification. And if there is not vigilance, then there is
something to learn.
What you can learn, what is learnable, is the A, B, & C of
how you re-identify. You cannot learn the Self. You cannot learn
consciousness. You cannot learn love. You cannot learn trust. But
you can learn how you deny all of that. For this denial, there
are techniques and strategies. There is either indulgence or
repression, and with both there is an avoidance of simply
experiencing the power and the immensity of the moment.
There is a power, a force, that when it is experienced is then a
force of light. It is a force of love, of consciousness, meeting
itself here, deeper than ever before experienced. If it is denied
or repressed, it is just the same old habit. When it is indulged,
it is just the same old violence. We are speaking of a certain
kind of addiction, the addiction to a pattern.
With addiction there has to come a point when you see that the
desire is out of your control. Maybe the addiction is
physiological. Maybe it has been practiced for so long that it
has its own groove. But what is in your control, absolutely, is
the willingness to not move when the desire appears. The
willingness neither to indulge nor repress but to not move in the
fire of this impulse of thousands of years. Have you ever
experienced this?
Yes.
Then you know the beauty of this fire. You know that in this
moment, there is actually a willingness to die. Because the
addiction to mind or to habits can be so strong that there is the
sense if you don't feed the addiction, you will die. Eventually,
through the maturity of the soul, there is a willingness to say,
"Okay, if I die I will die. But I am not going to follow
this demon down this road again."
This, too, is the mind, but it is the mind in service to what was
betrayed. Vigilance was betrayed, and the mind humbled by this.
It feels like a descent into hell because with any addiction, the
impulse is strong to get rid of the craving, to get rid of the
fire. How? How? How? There are millions of ways how, but to not
get rid of it, to not go numb with it, to let it burn - this is
the fire. This is the Buddha and the temptations of Mara. This is
Christ in the desert. Everyone has to experience this - Oh my
god, I am dying. Okay, so I am dying. I surrender. I surrender -
and there is peace, there is freedom. You recognize what has
never left. You recognize what is always here. In that moment,
there is a break in the habit pattern. The habit may reappear,
but there is something bigger than it, so it does not have the
same hold on you. Do you follow this?
I want you to recognize that there are many moments before the
acting out. There are many choices. They happen very fast. But if
you will slow them down in your mind, just slow the film of this
movie down, you will see where the choices were made.
Justification can arise, and a kind of thrill from the adrenaline
and the power that comes with justification. There can be quick
excuse making, such as, "Well, so-and-so did it," or,
"It doesn't matter," or, "We're all one, it is all
the Self," but this is all thought. It is all the sirens
saying, Come, come back, back into where you were all-powerful,
where you were in control, where you were God, where you got to
say what happens. Don't follow any of it. DON'T MOVE. And an
exquisite experience is revealed that can never be taken from
you.
Yes, but those moments have happened, and the thoughts still
come back. As you said, it is a conditional pattern.
Yes, good! This means that there is something still unseen, which
is even more deeply humbling for the mind. Because all we are
speaking of is the humbling of the mind. This is what the fire
is. It is the resistance, the friction of the mind constantly
seeking control of a particular situation. The refusal to follow
the mind creates the fire, the burning, and if it comes back,
well good! Then there must be more here to see.
But there is a lot of suffering at that moment.
Yes, but it is conscious suffering. This is very different from
attempting to delay suffering. This is very different from
following, indulging, or discharging suffering. Then suffering is
spread out over time, and the suffering of the misidentification
continues.
To get to paradise there has to be a descent into the hell
created by the mind so that you recognize you are more than that.
It can be a scary descent. There is the tendency to think, No,
no, I don't have to do that. It is all Self. It doesn't matter.
It is all just a movie. Well that is great if it is true, but if
it is just another strategy, or a covering, then the habit
patterns continue. If it is all Self, then what have you got to
lose?
When you discover that in the midst of hell, here is God,
radiant, then hell itself is liberated. Your demons, the hungry
ghosts that have been haunting you and waking you up at four in
the morning, get liberated. Self-criticism, self-hatred, and
self-torture are liberated. The Self is not liberated. It was
never bound. What gets liberated are the demons of your mind, as
well as the gods of your mind. Set them all free. You are sick of
them. You are sick of playing with them and being played by them.
The way to set them free is to be willing to not play the game.
This willingness takes enormous resolve. Resolve is a little
different from vigilance. Resolve comes after vigilance has been
betrayed, after re-identification has set in. It is the mind's
resolve to recognize the hell that has once again been created
and to be here, to burn here, and in that burning, there is
naturally redemption. No one is needed to come and redeem you.
Redemption happens naturally.
You recognize that it is all a movie, God's movie, a huge movie,
and it has corner, and surprises and slopes that are undreamed
of, unheard of, that even our greatest movie makers and
playwrights have never touched. It is your life.
If consciousness is playing this movie, why is consciousness
making me go through this suffering?
Why not? In every movie there is someone suffering. Would you
really be interested in a story if there was no suffering? The
resolution occurs when there is suffering. Suffering and the
resistance to suffering are one and the same. Isn't this what the
Buddha said, "Life is suffering, and there is a way
out"? The way out is in. Meet the suffering directly,
consciously. Christ said, "If you know how to suffer, you do
not suffer."
If you will recognize how it is you suffer, you will not suffer.
But this must be recognized. Questioning "why" is an
avoidance of knowing "how" it is that the suffering
continues.
Right here, in this universe, patterns of war still appear, and
war is what we are talking about, right? Even though you have
tasted peace, even though this universe has tasted peace on
earth, how is it that conflict still has its way? This is true of
every mindstream, especially in humans. War is inbred, and it has
gone unmet. Now war is being made on war, and the child of that
is more war. So meet that war within yourself consciously, awake,
refusing to budge. In meeting war, you will find peace. If you
have tasted it, then you know it is so. If you have not tasted
it, it may seem impossible, but taste it anyway and see. Just
take one moment in the midst of one attacking pattern and don't
budge.
Beneath the behavior is the energy of an emotion, and that
emotion is fueled by some thought of protection from being
wounded or hurt or not being seen. In the willingness to
experience that wounded or hurt or not being seen, to really be
wounded, really be hurt, really not be seen, then it is no big
deal. Then the wound is nothing, the hurt is nothing, and you
realize that you will never be seen. You are the Self. You cannot
be seen. You are not an object. Do you understand?
I need the strength to find that resolve.
Give me your hand. Just take the strength from me to you, and
with this strength, I give you the strength of my teacher, and
his teacher, and his teacher, and all teachers throughout all
time, dead or alive, past, present, and future.
It is very courageous to ask for help, but what is often
neglected is to first check and see if help is already here. You
have asked for help. The next thing is to see, is help here? In
this moment of the need for resolve, help is here. It is here!
There is a hand outreached to all you. The greatest and highest
teachers from the past are alive in you. They don't die. They are
your own heart. They are the Self, as are You.
A hand is being offered you throughout time. It is always there
for you. I promise you this. You will see.
- Gangaji