What are ‘near enemies to the truth’? Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.
Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I'm going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don't see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the first blog post in this series.
Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that brief orientation, let’s look at this month's Near Enemy.
NEAR ENEMY #3: I WANT TO BE MY BEST SELF
The self-help industry has perpetuated the story that the purpose of human life is psychological and/or spiritual growth, and that this growth—despite being never very clearly defined—inevitably leads to the actualization of your ‘innate potential’ and the manifestation of the best version of you.
This is in fact a very modern idea. The spiritual traditions of South Asia do not hold this view. They were unanimously oriented to the goal of discovering the true nature of reality, sometimes known as ‘enlightenment’, though we could simply call it clear seeing, free of all the mental filters that cause us frustration and misery.
Since the goal of the spiritual life is to see clearly what is already true and always was, the spiritual path requires no growth per se. Clear seeing doesn’t require you to be a ‘better person’ or any specific kind of person, other than one genuinely interested in knowing what’s true. To put it bluntly, the path to truth-realization is a (beneficially) destructive process, not a constructive one. It necessitates ridding yourself of whatever is preventing your clear seeing of what is, such as emotional attachment to your perceived identity, your self-images, stories, opinions, and assumptions.
Let’s be very clear: trying to be a ‘better person’ in the sense of causing less harm and more benefit to yourself and others is a perfectly laudable and noble goal, it just has no direct relationship with spiritual awakening (for more on this see Chapter XX). The whole reason that one works with the moral precepts and values (yamas and niyamas) at the beginning of one’s Yoga practice is because that work forms beneficial habits and and attitudes that are unlikely to be automatically downloaded by the truth-realization that comes later, but also unlikely to be undone by it.
Contrary to what many assume, truth-realization does not come with a built-in moral code (morality being, after all, a social construct), nor does it automatically bring about psychological maturity. For this reason, people who want to have a healthy psyche must do psychological work in addition to their spiritual work. Surprisingly few people realize this, despite abundant examples of gurus and teachers who experientially realized essence-nature and/or the truth of nonduality but never did psychological work on themselves or educated themselves about social issues. Though truth-realization gives one access to an intuitive faculty (described in Near Enemy post #3) that is a reliable guide for one’s own real-life decisions, it does not confer any kind of automatic download vis-à-vis moral issues generally.
Okay, so the project of self-improvement is largely unrelated to the project of spiritual awakening, but it couldn’t possibly undermine the awakening process, could it? Yes, it could. Let me explain. <SNIP>
TO READ THE REST OF THIS BLOG POST, PLEASE BUY THE SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED BOOK Near Enemies of the Truth, in which it appears in a much-improved form.
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Transcript of a live teaching session on this Near Enemy with extensive Q&A:
To emphasize the point made in the blog post, there doesn't need to be a plan, there doesn’t need to be an agenda as long as you're listening. The key is listening to others’ feedback which doesn't mean believing, and buying into, their stories, it just means listening and then letting whatever inspiration for change naturally arises. Everything unfolds naturally and the more awake you are, the more you see that you can see that life does a wonderful job all by itself and you simply surrender to the natural unfolding. So you listen to your body, you listen to others, and then see what naturally arises. If you think that this kind of anxious urge to change is based on “I'm not good enough”, or “I'm not as I should be” take a closer look and you'll see that it is an expression of your conditioning. It is the regurgitation of conditioning because inspiration, which is one meaning of the word Pratibhā, naturally arises when you first abide in the sense that there's nothing that needs to be done, nothing whatsoever. Then you discover that even if you feel that nothing needs to be done, nonetheless life likes doing stuff! Inspiration to move arises, inspiration to dance, inspiration to connect. It just naturally arises even in the state of ‘there's nothing that needs to be done’ and ‘there's no one I need to be or try to be’. If you really give yourself 100% permission then sooner or later inspiration arises and you allow it to unfold. That's how to tell the difference between your conditioning and inspiration. Real inspiration arises from the state in which “nothing needs to be done” and “there's no one I need to be”. It's always an expression of love of the One for itself because you act when you act out of love, not out of a sense of lack. If it's real love then it comes from the innate desire to contribute to well-being. Sometimes, you don't have that desire and that is fine.
Student: I believe that all desire for change is egoistic.
Hareesh: I agree, insofar as we're talking about a mental image. You may have a mental image of what you want to make happen or change. For example, you may be envisioning that you want to be this sort of person, or you want to be this way much less, or you want to save the planet, or whatever it is - when it's a mental image of some change that you think should happen and you're going to try to make it happen, I agree that it is egoistic in nature. The desire to engage life however, in such a way that results naturally and organically in change and growth, is not egoistic. Of course, the ego can wear any disguise so we have to be careful about saying you know what's not egoistic. You can be an activist without needing the belief that there is something wrong that needs to be fixed. I acknowledge that almost zero activists are acting from spontaneous inspiration rather than a belief that something's wrong that needs to be righted but it can happen. You may be inspired to put your body in a position where you march in a protest without any belief that something's wrong that needs to be fixed but it just feels right to put your body.
Some people may believe that the view that is being explained here, or the view of the awakened being, is horrible. That it’s horrible to not argue that certain things are wrong and need to be changed, and they imagine that people who hold this view are heartless. This is not true at all because being awake, or holding this view, doesn't prevent you, in the slightest, from grieving the tragedies of human existence. It's just that you have ceased to believe that tragedy should not exist and you have ceased to believe that pain is bad and therefore you're actually liberated to more fully grieve that which is worthy of being grieved. This is very very hard for people to imagine until they experience it. For example, if I see someone being abused, I experience a lot of pain but it would never occur to me to characterize the abuser as wrong, or bad, or evil. I know they can't be other than as they are, in that moment, and they're expressing their experience of reality. It couldn't be otherwise and to fault it, would be to fault human nature. From the non-dual view or the awake view, when you see a human hurting another human, you grieve equally for both of them. You don't even see two humans, it's just the One that’s hurting itself out of misunderstanding. It is the same when you hurt yourself out of misunderstanding when you beat yourself up when you denigrate yourself. That is tragic and arises from misunderstanding. So too, when a human hurts another human but it's only your projected mental paradigm that makes it different. From the awakened view, you don’t see one person as a victim, and the other person is the perpetrator, even if for legal reasons you use exactly that language to accomplish a particular goal which is to get that person to stop hurting other people. Again, not because they're wrong, or bad but just because that's what feels right. If I could stop that person from hurting other people, I will out of love, with no hatred of that person whatsoever but it just feels right to stop them. If I call the police or seek help, I might use the language of victim and perpetrator because thoughts are tools not truths and that tool is effective in that context. We don’t get into a projected mental paradigm of essentially good and evil because it doesn't actually exist and is harmful insofar as you believe that person is bad and it justifies your bad treatment of them and then you have become just like what you think they are. When people have decided that a class of people are bad, it justifies sorts of actions in which the victims end up becoming the perpetrators.
Student: What about an inherent desire to change?
Hareesh: Well, I would say there's not really an inherent desire to change. The way it works is that you are drawn to engage in experiences, and perhaps practices, that bring about change and growth. If you have a desire to change, that can only be on the basis of an imagined projected mental image of what you think it should be. Inherent desire comes from essence-nature itself, what the tradition calls pratibhā. This word has become sort of a theme in the Near Enemy's series! Pratibha is the movement of essence nature. The fact that essence-nature is not stagnant but actually moves towards engagement of an experience, of connection of some kind, of action, or of practice. When you engage, you grow and change - it just happens all by itself. So notice your inherent desire to engage in certain sorts of experiences, or to engage the spiritual path.
Student: The risk I find is a kind of passivity because nothing is wrong so no more participation is needed.
Hareesh: That's not how life actually works. Life used here is equivalent to essence-nature or the pattern in which essence nature flows. It wants to flow, it wants to move. There's a very tiny percentage of people who are inherently monastic and quiet and when given permission, they will sit and do nothing, but it is very few.
It turns out that when you surrender to the inherent pattern of life, and the natural unfolding of life that includes surrendering to what wants to move through you, is actually surrendering to your natural desire to engage in some way or another. Ultimately, it's not actually language, it's ultimately a viewpoint, an experience of reality but those who hold this view are generally not passive.
Student: it seems that having a goal and working towards that goal is then egoistic.
Hareesh: Yes, usually except there's also a possibility of setting a goal, just for fun. In the same way, if you're playing a board game, or a sports game, you have a goal. Game makers create a goal just to engage people in the process which is hopefully fun! Obviously though, people take games way too seriously as well! Healthy minded folks play a game just for the sake of playing the game, not as a means to an end. In the same way, you could set a goal in a non egoistic manner just to engage in the process of playing a particular game, such as “let's see if I can make a million dollars!” I agree however that somebody who sets such a goal is almost never doing it for non-egoistic reasons! I'm just saying that it's possible to do it for non-egoistic reasons. If the person actually is awake, when they don't actualize that goal because of causes and conditions beyond their control, they're fine. They are interested in the process that got engaged by setting that goal. Such a person lives the teaching of the Bhagavad-gītā effortlessly.
Student: Is there any value in cultivating a vision for growth? People make visioning boards etc….
Hareesh: In this view, only when you sense something already happening within yourself and you want to nourish it, just like a little sprout. In the ancient texts, Kundalini is sometimes called the sprout of inner fire and so you may feel this little sprout and you want to cultivate it. The sprout that you sense could be your own potential to be radically free, or you sense your own potential to be radically open and unconditionally loving. If you're really sensing it, if you're actually feeling, it's there for real and it's not just a thought. This becomes your vision for growth that you want to cultivate, that you want to open up, that you want to nourish. But when your vision for growth is a mentally projected image of a possible future, then it's disguised self-hatred and it's a way of trying to escape the present moment. You'll never have any good results on the spiritual path by trying to escape the present moment. You might not realize that you're doing that because your projected image of a possible future appears to be so glorious and awesome in your mind.
Student: Is the desire then, to know your true nature, a kind of a paradox because it implies you don't know and you need to change that?
Hareesh: It doesn't have to be that way. You could acknowledge that you don't recognize your true nature, that you don’t have a full experience or knowledge of your true nature and that you long to have that. This longing is inherent within consciousness itself so this is a different category. But if you're imagining, ‘Oh, I'm going to be this sort of person when I realize my true nature’ then that is invalid. This longing to not only know the truth, but to fully inhabit the truth of your being, is the purest possible longing. It's not a longing for growth per se, it's just a longing to wake up to realize that the only thing that could ever be realized, that which makes the whole of human existence meaningful, is literally the only thing to realize. What you actually are, at the most fundamental level, renders all life meaningful. It renders the whole universe meaningful and that meaning cannot be put into words or it already would have done would have been. Wouldn't it be easy if we could just say what the meaning of life is, but you can't! You can experience it however. The deepest meaning of existence is non-conceptual, how could it be otherwise? Trees don't have brains and yet they're part of the deepest meaning of life so of course it's non-conceptual.
Student: I don't know how to accept myself and if I dropped doing the things I do for self-improvement then I'd hate myself even more.
Hareesh: So don't drop them! The thing is that nobody knows how to accept themselves, until they do so. It's something that you can't really teach. So here's what I suggest: every moment of non self acceptance is a sort of tension. If you start tracking every moment of tension, there is an opportunity to relax. As you relax you can use the affirmation “how I am right now is perfectly okay” because how you are, right now, includes doing this stuff for self improvement. I would argue however that even if you characterize it as doing things for self improvement you're not! You're actually doing it because of the inherent longing within consciousness to wake up to itself, to see its beauty which is to see your own beauty. To see the beauty of everything is a deep longing and that's why you keep showing up. You're not gonna lose that longing by accepting yourself.
Student: Since a retreat, I'm finding myself retreating from life and not really wanting to watch the news, engage in any type of activism, or even engage that much with other people. I just want to explore the teachings and practices. Is that normal? Is this okay?
Hareesh: The answer is yes, it's okay. I wouldn't want this to be your norm but it seems it's what you need to do now. Remember that consciousness doesn't like to remain stagnant. It doesn’t remain stagnant by pulsing through cycles of expansion and contraction. Every expansion is simultaneously a contraction of its opposite. So right now, you're expanding into a full focus on the spiritual life which means a contraction of certain behaviors like watching the news. That's great and then at some point that is gonna lead to something else. You can also see it as a beneficial contraction of what's happening right now and you're pulling into yourself more but if you allow this process to happen then there'll be a natural point at which you're ready to expand again. Every contraction is the prerequisite for further expansion.
There's the Indian tradition where people would go on retreat for one to four months out of every year which is not acceptable in our modern capitalistic society. It's natural to pull in and incubate, and then step back out again.
Student: When I was 14, my mother made me read aloud affirmations from Louise Hay’s book You can heal your life that spiralled me into many years of believing I was responsible for all my thoughts. How do we differentiate between actual radical self-acceptance and trying to force suffocating self-acceptance?
Hareesh: This comes back to noticing tension. When you're trying to force self-acceptance that is coming from disguised self-hatred and there's a tension in that you find these moments of tension and you relax. You're not so much affirming but feeling into the possibility that maybe, just maybe, who and what you are right now is absolutely okay and couldn't possibly be better. The tradition uses a metaphor to talk about suffering and how we perpetuate cycles of suffering ourselves. The tradition uses the metaphor of bondage where humans experience the feelings of being tied up and want to escape their bonds. They struggle against the ropes but the only way to escape is the same technique in reality which all the escape artists in real life, like Houdini use. Houdini's big secret was that he would tense his muscles and then they would tie him up and then he would totally relax and he could wriggle and slip out of the bonds. That's how all beings escape bondage, not by struggling but by deeply relaxing so you slip right out of the bondage of your self-image and then you find yourself in a puddle of nectar on the floor, a puddle of bliss.
Student: For over 15 years I've been struggling with a writing project and I do a bit and then I stop, and I do a bit and then I stop. I kept trying to find the right circumstances and I put so much energy into trying to find the right circumstances and either life didn't support it or my conditioning somehow wasn't supporting me moving ahead. How can I move ahead and not lose another 15 years?
Hareesh: Usually, when we have projects, we are trying to prove our worth as a human - to ourselves or to society. We may not even know that that's our motive but if you look closely you see that's the case. So, I would suggest that there's a much much better project which is to discover the truth that your worth is abundantly proven by your very existence! Your very being generates value. Your existence is not an accident. Out of all the things the universe could have become, it became you. That's because you, each one of you, expresses a unique aspect of the One in so many beautifully different ways like the infinite facets of one jewel. Until you've seen that, you know nothing else really matters. All the other projects are vain and empty. Again, it's not something you see so much as a feeling or experience that the truth is that your very being generates value in this universe, and your worth is proven by your very existence. If you can drop into that, if you can feel that experience even just a bit, then stuff happens, like writing flowing. Whatever is actually supposed to happen, flows. You know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever is actually happening is the best thing that could possibly be happening in that moment - writing; not writing; going for a walk; or petting a cat. Every single moment expresses the fullness of being. The mind has this idea that writing something, or finishing your book is more important than petting your cat or sitting under a tree. Nothing's more important than anything else but the mind says otherwise. When you really are dropping into that realization, then stuff will happen. If you are meant to write a book, the book magically gets written, it gets written through you or it doesn't even feel like an effort. I do speak from experience here! No effort is involved, no effort is needed. If you’re efforting, that's usually a clue that it's not flowing from essence-nature. You are trying to prove something and no-one who discovers their essence- nature has ever thought that a life in which you accomplished nothing that others praise is worthless. When you experience that, you know that you are an absolutely invaluable, perfect addition to this universe and the whole universe will never be the same because you exist in it, even if you do nothing. So when the mind starts reaching for “I've got to gotta do this” and “I've got to create this circumstance” or “I've got to be more disciplined” and starts reaching for solutions that haven't borne any fruit, I should suggest just relaxing and letting go. Step back and into yourself and question your thoughts by asking “wait, is that really true? How do I know that's really true?”. Then you could ask a different sort of question: “what would I do right now, if I simply allowed natural expression? What would I do?”. This can take a while because you're trying to actually change your paradigm very substantially. You can keep doing things but every day you can take some time to step back, question your thoughts, and invite natural expression to simply flow from the quietness of the coalescent nature. You will find your way with it if you commit to the process.
Student: it's difficult to relax the tension when you're experiencing pain in the body and the mind wants to be accepting that the body seems to continuously be in revolt.
Hareesh: There's only one thing to do, which is surrender to the pain and surrender to everything else along with it because if you only surrender to the pain then you're focusing on the pain. Surrender to the pain and everything else simultaneously and relaxation will start to happen because pain doesn't have to cause tension, it's the mind causing tension.
Student: by self-accepting, do I need to accept my reactions and some so-called negative behaviors?
Hareesh: Yes! It wouldn't be radical self-acceptance if you didn't accept your reactions and your so-called negative behaviours. But when the mind gets worried and thinks, “wait, if I accept my negative behaviors then they'll always be there”. No, they won't! If you actually start to love yourself, to love your existence and stop believing you should be different, that in itself engenders a process of beneficial change. So the more love you access in yourself, and it could start as just a tiny tiny tiny seed. For some people, it happens through trusting their teacher. This is traditional, where your teacher says that you are OK as you are, and you trust your teacher so consider that maybe it's true. This can start a process when that love grows naturally and certain non-beneficial behaviors start to fall away, they start to peel off and fall away. Stop trying to get rid of stuff as opposed to simply allowing it all to fall away out of love. I promise that as long as you hate yourself for your negative behaviours they will remain because every self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Student: how do you navigate so that you abide always in essence-nature and perceive it and know that you're being guided in the right direction.
Hareesh: The answer to that question and maybe to the whole spiritual life really is stop believing your thoughts and stop believing other people's thoughts. Thoughts are tools, not truths. Thoughts are not the sort of thing that can be true, they are simply tools we use to communicate.
They're the reason I use words, in the hope that you'll look where I'm pointing. Let's imagine that you're on the road and you come to the sign pointing the direction to utopia and you just sit there studying the sign for decades - this sounds insane! Yet that's what almost everyone does with spiritual philosophy and it's what I did for 15, 20 years before I finally had the courage or inspiration to just look where the sign was pointing and to start moving that way. When I did, it was scary, as it's moving towards the great unknown, and then I realized why so many people study the sign endlessly - it’s much less scary!
You don't need thoughts to navigate life and that sounds crazy to most people! You need thoughts to communicate but you don't need thoughts to navigate life because you have an unerring inner compass that we call Pratibha. If you sit in quiet presence and then just allow all there's a gentle pull in the direction that's most beneficial for all beings. You might not see that benefit but the pull is towards harmony. If we were going to put the spiritual path in a nutshell it would be - stop believing thoughts and allow for the natural unfolding of life.
Student: I had an affair with a married man. Do you think the guilt, or the way I felt bad about myself for doing those actions, was a hindrance on the spiritual path or do you think the action itself is a hindrance on the spiritual path? Is it the action or the thought?
Hareesh: That's a great question! It's not the action that is a hindrance on the spiritual path, be it having an affair or doing any number of things that people find reprehensible. Of course, it could be a problem if you had a goal like: you want to have harmonious relationships with everybody. If you do a certain action, like an affair, or lying, or something, then that is counter to your goal of having harmonious relationships with everyone. So certain actions are harmful, in the sense that they are likely to facilitate pain for others and they can be opposed to some particular worthy goal. The actions themselves can't, however, inhibit your spiritual process. Everything that happens in reality is (or can be) more grist for the mill in the spiritual process. But your guilt is a major problem because it inhibits moving forward. It's not to say the action was good, but the guilt is keeping you stuck in a negative self-image. So definitely drop the guilt as there's just no point to it at all. What you can do is take a good look, for your own benefit, and see the impact or consequences of your actions and see where they were actually harmful. If you know the impact because people shared they were harmed and in pain, let's say, then grieve that. Grieving doesn't prevent us from moving on, it's part of moving on when we grieve and let it go. We see the consequences of our actions that facilitated pain for others and that's worthy of grief. Grieve it and then, just like every other emotional process, it has a natural cycle. If it goes on and on, then you're perpetuating it through a guilt, or a self-hatred, story.
Student: I've been very stuck on doing no harm in the world and causing no suffering.
Hareesh: That in itself is a problem because it's not possible! It's not possible to do no harm so if that's your goal, you're going to keep hating yourself. Wanting to minimize harm is a wonderful practice to engage with. You can succeed with this goal as long as you don't have a mentally projected image about what degree of minimizing you can accomplish. You just do your best to minimize harm and that's wonderful because that comes from love. If it doesn’t come from love, it's not going to work.
Student: How can I act in the world with no ego, with no projected outcome, and still not participate in harmful acts?
Hareesh: It's easy because it doesn't feel right to participate in harmful acts. For example, if somebody wants you to be involved in something, and your inner voice tells you that it doesn't feel right, don't go that direction. It's really simple. You don't need the thoughts, or the ego, or anything. The inner voice isn’t really a voice but this inner feeling which says ‘no, no, not over there, that doesn't feel’ or ‘oh, this feels right over here’. You can always sense it if you have a practice of getting quiet. Some people call it meditation. I think we shouldn't call it meditation because then people just go into a trance state. Just get quiet inside, as quiet as you can and feel the direction and then it's absolutely clear. People always ask me how I can tell the difference between my deepest inner intuition and my conditioning. It's such an odd question from the point of view of someone who has a quietness practice because you couldn't possibly confuse them. If you actually learn how to get quiet inside and it's just clear as a bell.
Student: I try to just to be accepting of being in physical pain and tension but this is not a place I really want to stay in. It kind of takes away hope and feels depressing.
Hareesh: So, notice what the mind does. When A is negated, it goes to the opposite of A. When B is negated it goes to the opposite of B. So in other words, if you accept that this is your situation then the mind imagines that this acceptance entails perpetuating the situation. Acceptance is not about approval or disapproval.
This is really important on the spiritual path - hope is a problem. Hope is almost, always, a form of grasping for some specific outcome. When hope is negated, the mind imagines that the only other option to hope is despair. I'm saying no to the whole paradigm - of neither hope nor despair. Rather, you simply acknowledge that you don't know whether the pain will continue for one more minute, let alone for the rest of your life. Your mind might say, ‘well, that's ridiculous because I have this intuition that I have this condition and so it's not really possible for my pain to stop in the next minute’. To which I would say that you can't really know that that's true for absolute certainty. You'll start to enter into the state where there's neither hope nor despair because you’re not grasping towards anything. You also don't know what the next moment holds. Reality never continues the same forever, it's impossible so something will change about this condition. Who knows to what degree but you'll see that you have the good kind of hope. Speaking from the point of view of the spiritual path, the good kind of hope is where you know that anything's possible, literally anything. You could be completely pain-free tomorrow, it is possible but it isn't likely. Who knows but it's possible. So be open to the infinite possibility.
Just notice that non-acceptance only makes things worse. There's just no reason for non-acceptance because it just exacerbates whatever is unpleasant about your situation. So how do you accept it when your body is screaming? It’s like a survival mechanism, this is pain. Your body's telling you that this is not a state to stay in, so how do you accept that even in the moment, when there's a natural resistance of the body? Don't conflate the resistance of the body with resistance of the mind. The body has a natural biological urge to stop pain, if it can but that doesn't need to translate to a mental lack of acceptance of the situation. Lack of acceptance can only make it worse. You don't even know how much your pain is being amplified by your lack of acceptance because you haven't yet experienced full acceptance of the pain. I would wager that you're going to discover that it's the non-acceptance that is amplifying the pain far more than you thought. You can still take practical measures through this acceptance, such as using a weighted blanket . It's about inviting the body into a surrender, even though there's pain, and the quality of that pain will absolutely change. Surrender to everything, not just the pain, so you're not focusing on the pain more than everything else. For example, if you could lie on the grass, in the sun, under your weighted blanket, you can practice surrendering to the pain, to the sky, to the earth, to the sounds such as the bird calls. You're surrendering to absolutely everything and that's a crucial practice because if you focus exclusively on the pain it tends to amplify it. I am speaking from experience too because I used to have severe back pain.
People, in general, have no idea how much of their chronic pain is coming actually from mental states and from assumptions and beliefs that are often very deep, underlying, unconscious ones. People will point out, ‘but wait! I have a condition! I have this fibromyalgia and this causes pain’. Yes, but if you actually look at the full range of humans with that condition, they're in radically different states, a huge spectrum of states. John Sarno’s work discusses this. I think his work is fundamentally correct in a lot of ways as he states that the mind amplifies physical pain as he worked with back pain patients. They had issues like a disc pinching on a nerve, or they had scoliosis, or they had various physical issues and everybody said well the physical issue is causing the pain. Sarno looked at a group of patients who had the same physical issues, compared MRI scans and case notes. Some had severe pain and some had almost none. So, even if you have a physical condition, and even if it doesn't change, your pain levels can change. This upsets people because it seems to be implying that the pain is somehow their fault as their minds are amplifying the physical pain. That's not what's being said because you have the sort of mind that you do and that's not your fault.
Student: Five years ago, I was in Bali, and I was meditating, and then I just heard this voice inside of me saying that you don't have to do anything and your only task is to love. You don't have to start a business, or accomplish anything. I think this voice has been with me this entire time but then I've also worked a lot on these personal development things which talk about the need to have a sense of purpose and meaning with their life, so for me I feel a bit torn.
Hareesh: There is an entire self-improvement industry that makes a lot of money by making people feel temporarily fired up. Sure, some people do go and make big changes in their life, but none of those changes necessarily correlate strongly with actual increased happiness. I would say that life is already unfolding through you, it is already flowing through you, it can't really do otherwise. The only thing you need to do is to allow the natural unfolding and that includes listening or sensing if something new is wanting to come forth. Stay curious with this feeling, ‘that's interesting, something new is wanting to come forth, I wonder what that is”, and you just hold space for it. Little by little, it starts to show itself and before you know, it's leading you in another direction. The socially psychologically construct, the person, that you think you are is never in control of anything. It cannot determine any outcome, ever. So when people seem to have done remarkable things, it's not because of the constructed personality self, which is just a fiction, it's only because an inspiration connected with an opportunity arose. Those remarkable things that they accomplished doesn’t make them more worthwhile because for each and every living being, their worth is proven by their very existence and cannot be proven by anything else. On the spiritual path, we know that the people who accomplish remarkable things are exactly equal to somebody who accomplishes nothing, or seems to accomplish nothing.
If you have a longing, for example, to be of service, well I have some good news for you. No authentic longing can fail to actualize. You just don't know when. You just nurture that little seedling of longing to be of service and wait for ripeness. At the right moment, that longing and that inspiration is going to connect with something. Life is way smarter than us!
Please examine what you believe to be your longings. If you want to be of service for example, take a good look and make sure that this is not coming from the desire to be seen as a good person, the desire to prove yourself because if the longing is coming from that place, it's not a true longing. When you tap into your true longing, then you are content to just experience the longing until that moment of ripening.
We can never really know the impact that our existence has on anyone else or anything. We solely construct meaning and purpose - it is all conceptual and not reality. When you long to be of service, you might already be of service without realizing it. This is especially true if you spend even a minute a day abiding in the truth of essence-nature.
Student: What's difficult sometimes is that I can have an idea of something that I want to do, and then I'm questioning whether this is what I really want to do or is it just a thought about something?
Hareesh: If you're thinking about it, it's just a thought; so if you had an idea of something that you want to do and then you're questioning if that is really what you want to do, it’s just a thought. When the longing is true, it's an expression of your essence-nature, and there's no question. It's an energy, it's palpable, it's a magnetic force. So, if you're debating in your head whether you really want to do something then it's not coming from that deeper place.
Student: Does it take practice to know essence-nature, to experience it?
Hareesh: This is maybe the hardest question of all! Does it take practice to know and experience essence-nature? Yes and no! The way people conceptualize essence-nature almost always keeps them out of it. So to talk about it is dangerous because it leads to the conceptualization of it. Then all those concepts are just keeping it, or appear to keep it, at a distance from you. Essence nature is incredibly simple, it is that which cannot be simpler. It's so simple, and it's so immediately present that when you actually realize it, the usual sort of reaction is: ‘oh my god! How could I have missed this the whole time!”. Almost everything that people do, spiritually, is distracting themselves from the fact that they already are their essence-nature. It's not the practices themselves so much but the way in which people do them: to distract themselves from what's always, already, true. So the irony is that to become a seeker of God, or a seeker of the truth, you must begin by denying the presence of that which you seek, whether you know it or not. Let's be clear, essence-nature is what you already are, what you're experiencing at every moment but you're just distracted by thoughts. There's a meta-thought that comes with the thoughts, and the meta thought is the belief that you are the thinker of the thoughts. When you believe that you're the thinker of your thoughts, you are successfully distracted from essence-nature which is always, already, right here as your fundamental being, your fundamental presence. You can't find it because it can't be lost! You can't see it because it's the point from which all seeing is done! You can't realize it, in any conceptual sense, because it's not related to concept!
This is what the great beings mean when they say these apparently bizarre things. The awake person looks at all humans and sees only Buddhas pretending to be something else. From the awake perspective, it's like ‘oh you guys want to pretend you're not what you are, you want to pretend so successfully to be unenlightened that you have a miserable time? Okay, go for it! You're doing an amazing job!”. You just feel like applauding all the humans, ‘wow! You are really playing that part to the hilt! You're absolutely going for it, being a miserable person, or a charismatic person, or whatever you do but it's all a distraction. When are you going to stop distracting yourself with this game of trying to improve yourself, grow and be a better person? That's another distraction! Even meditation can be a distraction! There you are meditating, trying to find yourself but the one you are looking for is the one who is looking! Are you trying to attain some higher state of consciousness or an altered state? Of course, Samadhi states exist. You can experience them, they're lovely, and they come and go like everything else. You don't need a Samadhi state to realize your true nature. You actually don't need anything but the mind finds that so hard to believe.
The near enemy, ‘I want to be my best self’ is a function of ignorance because by saying ‘I want to be my best self’ you're denying that you already are your best self and you're also identifying with your thinking, or your socially constructed identity instead of what you actually are.
Student: is the ignorance of your true nature the result of past life karma or the Gunas?
Hareesh: There's no problem with the gunas. You can be free of all ignorance but that doesn't mean being free of Tamas-guna because you need Tamas-guna to fall asleep at night! So there's nothing wrong with Tamas-guna itself, it's that at a certain point in the process, consciousness is ready to wake up to itself and starts to suspect you've been looking for truth in the wrong places - in your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and memories. It can't be found there! It's that within which all those phenomena are arising and subsiding. It's so hard to see only because it's so obvious! All the gunas have their play, they can just play endlessly and reap combinations and recombinations.
When people believe that because of their karma, or because of their constitution, they can't wake up, it's the belief that you can't that is the actual, and only impediment. There are no karmic conditions which prevent awakening except you pretending that you're not awake, it's kind of ironic.
Student: does essence-nature carry one's karma?
Hareesh: No, essence-nature doesn't carry anything, nothing can stick to it. Karma is just a word for the momentum of processes that are set in motion. Sometimes, these processes spill over into another body but that's neither here nor there when it comes to Awakening.
Student: What about those seeking essence-nature through substance or plant medicine?
Hareesh: Some people are taking plant medicines for good reasons such as healing trauma but that doesn't have anything to do with waking up to your essence-nature. No drug, or plant could help with that! The only thing it could do is to show you that what you've assumed to be reality is just one particular mode, out of many possible modes, of consciousness. These psychoactive drugs expand your sense of what's possible and for some people this helps them open to the possibility that they might have an essence-nature and in that sense, it could be facilitating. If you're interested in awakening, plants and drugs have nothing to do with it and the experiences from those plants and drugs have nothing to do with it.
You don't need practice to recognize what you are but the practice is to integrate the implications of what you've realized. For example, everything, all these experiences, are always coming and going. There's nothing to hang on to in the realm of experience, so stop hanging onto stuff because it's crazy to do so! You don't need to push anything away either. What do you learn about how to be with reality from abiding in essence nature. You notice that essence-nature, which I'm now feeling, doesn't push stuff away, it doesn't grab onto stuff. Rather it is the mind that does this. The mind is part of the field of experience, the mind comes and goes too, it also arises and subsides. You realise that you had it all mixed up! You realise that essence-nature is perfect and pure in every moment and it is the mind that is doing its stuff but mind is part of all the other stuff, and you thought it was “you”. Even now, this body is trying to study these words so that's all that's happening, its an experiential event within the consciousness. You are not the words, you are not the gestures, you are not the body, except, insofar as you are everything in the universe. You don't need to believe that you’re the speaker of words, for the words to come out well you don't need to believe youre the thinker of the thoughts. That's all the contents of consciousness. You are the consciousness within which all the contents are appearing. It’s incredibly simple.
It's so simple that a massive spiritual industry had to be built to distract you from how simple it is because if you realized how simple it is, you might not buy any more spiritual books so we've got to keep you distracted! This seems like an ironic thing to say, since I, from time to time, write books, but that's just for fun! It's not that you need a book but it could work because the book could just facilitate a state in which recognition is possible, but it can't cause it! These words, that I'm saying, right now, could facilitate a state in which you can wake up! You can stay awake, it's very simple, just stop identifying with anything other than what's always present which is your natural being, your simple natural being which every child had.
The main reason you don't realize the truth and awaken to your essence-nature is because it's playing hide-and-seek! The drama of personality and life experience, and the suffering and triumph - it's fun until it's not! So don't worry about it and just enjoy the ride! When it's not enjoyable anymore, get off the ride! It's really simple! What you are is unborn and undying so just let go of trying to make anything other than what it is.
The truth is always simple. If stuff is complicated, you're nowhere near the truth and that's okay too because you can't get it wrong, you can't mess up life, you can't fail at life. Yes, you can suffer and the weird thing is, when you're done with suffering, when you're really awake to what you are, which is free of all suffering, and you're done with suffering, you will look back and say that it wasn't so bad. Actually, there's nothing wrong with suffering but when you're in it, it seems like the wrongest thing in the world.
To evolve from being a person means you have made a shell out of yourself. If you break the shell, you will no longer be a person but simply be a presence, as God is just a presence. The shell though is not the body, it's the conceptual shell. Alan Watts says: ‘So you think you're in control? But you don't even know how to work your pancreas and in the same way you don't know how, you shine the Sun!’
He was pointing to the fact that the you that you think you are is not in control of anything. This is proven by the fact that you don't know how to make a thought, and you don't know how to work your pancreas, or anything else and yet you think you're in control! Your deeper nature, your real nature, your essence nature is doing everything automatically, spontaneously, freely just as it blows the wind, it shines the Sun, it rains the rain. Everything is spontaneously emerging from what you are and as an expression of what you are. You can notice this in your direct experience, this is not a concept, it's not a belief, just notice that everything you perceive is equally a part of the One field of consciousness. The sound of my voice is equally a part of the field of consciousness as the feeling of your knee. Do you realize that you've been drawing an artificial line and saying ‘this is me’ and ‘that's not me’. Everything is equally a vibration within One field of consciousness, so how can you divide it? There is no division except imagined division.
I noticed, years ago, that one of my teachers would, when people came up to him, he would just looked at each person with this expression that, without words, spoke ‘you're God right here, you're perfect, you're wonderful, you're whole, you're complete’ and then the person would say ‘well, I have this problem’ and I would see this expression on his face change to: ‘oh, okay, are we playing that game? Okay, I'll pretend you have a problem - let's do it’. But he couldn't see people as anything other than whole and complete, beautiful, perfect, expressions of the One.
People get the wrong idea that the teacher of a spiritual community is the awake one and everyone else is trying to be awake. No, a whole bunch of people in this community are already awake - I'm looking at some people right here who are awake. It's no big deal and that's the weird part, as you'll wake up and then you're like, ‘oh, this is just lovely’ but it's not a big deal and if you think it is, that's stopping you from waking up. It's not a binary, it's not just awake or asleep, it's sometimes compared to pregnancy - either you're pregnant, or you're not, that's definite you can be more pregnant and in the same way, you're either awake or you're not and you can be more and more awake.
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