Stronghold – 31 Jan 2010

Culadasa: Time for a little Dharma talk. You have a question. You had one, two or three weeks ago.

Student: I did. [Laughter]

I wanted to know based on your experience where the best place for a person to put their efforts in this lifetime. Yeah, just...

Culadasa: The best place to put your efforts. The simplest and truest answer I know doesn't go far enough, because it needs elaboration. The best place to put your effort is in achieving your own awakening, your own liberation and doing that for the benefit of all others.

Student: Where you put your effort?

Culadasa: The question is: how do you go about doing that? But the importance of that is that if you keep that in mind--that's the most important thing to be doing--it will help you to make all of the other kinds of decisions along the way that you need to make. It's a guiding principle.

And so you can always ask yourself, "okay is this the best thing I can be doing? It's obtaining my own awakening." Of course hat's the point at which it begins to be more complicated. If I reflect on my life, an interesting thing happens and that is that it's very clear to me that at each point in my life that when I turned my recollection towards, I did what I did because that's the person who I was at that point.

And I can't really look and say "I wish I hadn't done that." I used to do that. But nowadays, if I look at it and I say, "oh, it's more... oh yeah, of course I did that. What else could I have done?" And in order to answer the question of how should a person live their life to the best effect, it's not so much in terms of the specific choices you make and specific things you do and don't do at any point. It's more the kind of creative process that you become. The conscious creative process, I should say, because every human being is a self-creating process. But to bring a greater degree of conscious awareness to that process, and then it takes on a flow. And so I think, "Okay." Instead if I look at my life in a different way to say, "okay, what, considering that at every point in my life, I was what I was, and I did what I did because that's what I was at that time." And, that's definitely true. "What can I learn from looking at my life that would be useful to me in the future, of course, but useful to other people as a guide for determining how to make the kinds of, how to take the kinds of directions, how to answer the kind of question that you asked.

It's about being fully present as much as you can. I think that one of the things that we tend to do, which leads us down a path of not perhaps living our life as, quite as effectively as we could, is that we're very often trying to push the river. You know what I mean? We're we're trying to make things happening happen. We're developing expectations. We get in that place of thinking that we should be doing something, we should be making something happen.

It takes us very much out of the present moment. It puts us into that whole realm of imaginative fabrications based on the incomplete knowledge and the imperfect wisdom that we have created up to that point.

If you think about your life... I think about my life and those there's been those moments when I was really trying to push through whatever. I just ended up swimming upstream. It of course led to whatever the next place was and it's all part of the process and lessons were learned. But, overall, I think the lessons come by themselves. You don't have to swim upstream. You don't have to exert all that useless effort of trying to make things happen in a particular way, in order to get those lessons. They'll come whether you do or not.

And you're far better off learning to be more fully in the present, do what it is you have to do in the present. I think that is a very important thing to learn. I think most people learn that to some some degree or another just as they get older. We do get wiser and we start to discover to a greater and greater degree that all of that effort isn't really accomplishing any more what we thought it was.

[The effort] creates a lot of change and a lot of excitement, but it's not necessary. And one of the effects that it has is that it tires us. It consumes our time and it consumes our energy. All those hours and days that your mind is locked into this idea of where you're going and how to get there and what you have to do, and dealing with this problem, dealing with that problem.

In a way it's like playing one of those computer games: you've made yourself a set of rules and you're trying to score points and all of your attention goes into that. In the meantime, the world's going by around you and you're so engrossed in that process that you're not even living that part of your life to the degree that you could.

And then of course you wake up from that, but it takes your time and it takes your energy. Even on a daily basis, all of the striving we do: how do you be fully present when you spent the last 10 hours struggling and striving?

Instead, what do we do? We look for some sort of release. Dullness. We want to instead of being fully present in the moment which is where all of the answers are. Instead, we escape into movies, food, sex, whatever we escape. We relax. We let go. "Oh, I'm tired. All of us are. I need to take a break. I need to entertain myself. I need to dull my mind. I need to not be fully present. I need to not be fully conscious because I've expended all this energy chasing these figments."

So that's one thing. And then very closely related to it is the other mistake that I know I should be careful calling it a mistake. The other less than perfectly wise approach to life that I took, and I think that you might find that you share that in common,is that we surrender too easily. We don't make the kind of noble effort that we do need to make, to be in the present. To be fully aware, to take advantage of the lessons and the opportunities that are presented to us constantly. You can see sort of the other extreme. I think they feed on each other to the degree that... Let's talk a little bit about what feeds that state of mind.

There is a kind of laziness and lethargy that we can experience that causes us not to do more, not to make the kind of effort we could make in the positive sense.

And so [to] a certain degree, we drift along. The phone rings and somebody says, "you want to..." or this opportunity to distract yourself comes up or another. Or the feeling of "I don't really feel like practicing or I don't..." So we can spend long periods of our life in that laxity. There is a laziness and a lethargy involved. There's also a certain amount of doubt and uncertainty. It's only natural we want the things that we do to turn out well, we want to make the right decisions, but being too attached to the outcomes of what we do. If we're attached to outcomes, then what that inevitably leads to is a kind of hesitation, uncertainty, disappointment, because things never turn out the way you expect them to.

They always turn out different. They either turn out better, as good, or worse. But, they never turn out the way you expect them to. If you are not attached, then it's not a major concern whether they turned out not as good as you had hoped. But if you are attached, then to the degree that your expectations aren't met, you start to experience more doubt, uncertainty, and hesitation, and that feeds into the laziness and the lethargy and procrastination and "maybe I need to think about this a little more" and "maybe I need to try something different," chasing Will-o'-the-wisps here and there.

We do that to a certain extent. And then of course we'll say, "oh I gotta do something." And then we launch ourselves into some great complex project, which isn't really the kind of thing we need to do anyway.

It's being in the present moment and dealing with whatever comes up. And if you do that and you get in the habit of that, then what you're going to be presented with to do are... It's not that you never take on anything big: you'll be presented with the most monumental opportunities. But they won't be the fabrications of your not yet that wise mind. They will be the genuine opportunities that the universe is always presenting to you. That by being in the present, you have the wisdom to recognize and to seize those opportunities and to pursue.

So you can do great things or you can undertake great projects. Whether you succeed in doing any great thing or not really isn't important. But you will undertake great projects that are part of the process of your own growth and awakening. And you should never be afraid to do that. Absolutely never, because life is so short and you don't know how long it is.

Whenever your heart and your mind come together and say, "wow, I should give this a shot," you absolutely should do it. You shouldn't be concerned about whether this is the right or the wrong thing, or whether this is a mistake. You're alive, you've come to this point. You have the opportunity. So you go for it. You take advantage of it. You live life as fully as you can. This can take so many different forms.

It's difficult to predict. It's impossible to predict the kinds of opportunities that you're going to be presented with. I was presented with a lot of opportunities that I didn't recognize and I didn't pursue. I can look back and say, "oh wow, that's what I should have done instead of this." But, like I said, I realize now that I couldn't because of who I was.

Why couldn't I and why didn't that happen? It's because too much of the time I was either trying to push the river and make things happen or else I was just spaced out and going with the flow instead of being fully present, in which case I would have recognized that, even if I didn't know the nature of the opportunity, look back. I can see, "wow. That was... shouldn't let that one go." But at the time, some part of me would have sensed that this is a part of applying myself to my own awakening and to my liberation. This is something not to be passed up. This is something to be totally and fully embraced

That was the result of all those little tiny things where all of those moments that make up the days and weeks and years of our lives, all of those moments of not yet having developed the habit of being fully present and being aware. That's why I couldn't recognize those things when they came up.

What kinds of things are we talking about? Let's forget the biggest. Let's talk about the little ones, the kind that we miss all the time. The questions that come up in your mind, right?

Have you ever had the question come up, "maybe this really is all there is. What if this is all there is." Anybody ever had that question come up?

Student: Mmmmhmm.

Culadasa: No. Oh, yeah? Because we are... essentially every spiritual path is looking for something beyond the ordinariness that we seem to be mired in. But, inevitably we have those moments when the question comes, "what if this is all there is?" And, that is one of the greatest opportunities that we pass up all the time. Because our reaction will be something like "oh, that would be terrible. I don't even want to consider that. Let me immediately direct my mind somewhere else." Or maybe something like "Okay. If that's what it is, I guess I can live with it." But, you see what we don't do is take the next step.

When that question comes in your mind, it's not an invitation to bring it to an end in one of those ways. It's an opportunity to take it to the next step, which is "all right, supposing this is all there is. Maybe I'd better look into it a little more deeply and see what this is. After all that is all there is."

You see what I there there? When those kinds of questions come up there's some part of you that is actually pointing the way to a deeper kind of practice. And you only recognize them if you start to get in the habit of saying, "okay, here's my mind. Now holding this question and instead of either surrendering to whatever obvious answers present themselves to me in the moment and calling the issue closed, what if I accept the invitation and see where it, it can lead me to,"

There's all kinds of other things that happen all the time that if you're not fully aware, if you're not in the present, you don't notice. Relationships. Our lives are lives of relationship. Even the most hermetic of us, I count myself a monk. I like my times of withdrawal and separation. Nothing better than sitting all by myself in meditation, and whereas some people say, "how could anybody sit and retreat for so long?" To me it's "oh, wow. [Laughter] Nobody around, nobody to talk to." But in spite of, and in spite of that, all of us, we live lives of relationship. And we, the imaginary self that we think we are cannot be separated from our relationships. It's not possible.

We are in a sense what other people make us through our relationships and what we make of ourselves through those same relationships. But one of the things that we do is we go through life, not recognizing that and not seeing where it takes us. If you come in contact with somebody and they want to be your friend, then your emotional reaction is, "oooooh."

And what do you do? I felt "oooh [???]", so I changed the subject, backed off, and got out of there. But you see the question is, why did you feel that way? What inside you was reacting to it? It's not about what was that other person? What were they after? What kind of weirdo? It's not what it's about. So why were you reacting the way you were?

Or some relationship maybe that you really want. What we do is we'll get into that mode, the pushing-the-river mode. We meet somebody and we really want to get to know that person. So we'llstart pushing the river instead of saying, "okay what's happening here? What is the real dynamic that's happening in me and in this other person?" Then you don't have to push the river because you start to come from a real place.

And whatever potential that relationship has will unfold by itself, because you're completely present. You're really there. You're not trying to make something happen because you're attached to some feeling or idea that's come up. You're aware, you're saying, "okay, what is it about thee that wants this and is attaching to this? And what is it that I'm perceiving in this person that makes those things arise in me, and then you allow it to unfold really and naturally. So is this something that happens in your daily lives? That you're always encountering people? You're always reacting to them?

It can be really casual, even. If you meet a stranger and you have an encounter that lasts five minutes and you may never see the person again, but all of the stuff that goes on in those five minutes. Are you really there? Do you really pay attention to what's happening, or are you already worried about getting somewhere else and doing something else?

So if you learn to be in the present moment as completely as you can, and let me point out that when your mind, when your intellectual mind has all of its wheels spinning about "what should I be doing? Okay, here I am in the present moment, what should I be doing? That's not being in the present moment. Being in the present moment is saying, "ah, here I am right now and, oh yes, there's my mind spinning its wheels." That's being... you see, you learn to be in the present moment, everything is going to unfold more naturally.

And you are going to follow a much straighter path to your own illumination and your own awakening by just being with what is actually happening. It's going to get you to that goal. The reason it's going to get you to that goal. And I'm not suggesting to you that the world is this magical device out there that knows what you need and is feeding it to you a bit at a time. I don't believe in that, no. Because the world that you experience is actually a projection from within.

What I'm telling you is that if you are present, then you are allowing that deep source within you to give you the guidance. You're paying attention to what the Buddha, what your own Buddha nature is presenting to you moment by moment. And that's where all the answers are.

If you say "I've heard about this emptiness thing. And if I see it directly, then my life's going to be a piece of cake afterwards. Therefore ,I want to see this emptiness." And so you go chasing after it. But what is emptiness? People study emptiness, and they read all about it, and they think about it and they come up with theories in their mind about it. They still haven't got a clue. They still are going after an experience of some thing. They're going to have an experience of this thing and it's going to make them wise, but that's the same kind of mental construct that's been going on all the time, but that never ends.

Where do you find emptiness? In every single moment. Where do you miss your opportunity to experience ultimate truth? Let's call it ultimate truth instead of emptiness. Emptiness. Emptiness is a description. It is ultimate truth that is empty of the illusions we put on it.

Nirvana is the same thing. Nirvana means the cessation of creating and grasping. The cessation of craving and grasping is not a thing. The emptiness of projections is not a thing. It's a fact about ultimate reality. Ultimate truth is free of creating and grasping. Ultimate truth is free of mental projections. So where do you find ultimate truth? Where is ultimate reality? Is it down the street? Is it on the other side of the world? Is it next week or next year? Obviously not. It's right here and now. That's the only place it is. The next moment doesn't exist. And so you cannot find ultimate truth in the next moment, the only place you'll ever find it is in the present moment. And of course, the past is already gone and all it's done is shape the illusions that we live in in the present.

So if you want to become awakened, liberated, if you want your life to acquire the greatest degree of happiness and meaning that is possible, you have to look where it is. You can't do like the Molla Nasraddin story where he's looking under the streetlight and his friend comes up and says, "what are you doing Molla?" "I'm looking for my keys. I lost them." Together they look and look. And finally his friend says "where exactly did you lose them?" "Well, I lost them in my house, but it's too dark in there."

That's the kind of thing. If you want to awaken, if you want to experience Nirvana, if you want to experience emptiness, if you want to achieve liberation, you've got to look where you're going to find it, which is in the present moment. It's exactly where it is. And you also have to realize what it is that you're looking for. You're not looking for something that you are going to objectively experience. And as a matter of fact, the one thing that is keeping you from experiencing it in the present moment is your objective knowing of the projections that your mind has created. That's the only thing that's in the way.

So learn to be in the present. This is maybe a little bit subtle, but maybe I can make it clear. "Okay. So I'm in the present. My mind is creating a projection, the kinds of scenarios I talked about, there's an interaction with a person and everything else." I'm inviting you to take it to the experiential level rather than the objective level.

So whatever's happening. You are here, you experience objectively something, right? And then your mind generates thoughts and you experience the thoughts objectively, right?

If it's a person and you're seeing and hearing them, there is all this construction that takes place. That the act of seeing becomes the, seeing some one. The act of hearing becomes the hearing some words and ideas being expressed.

And what you're doing is you're living in the world of objects of knowing. All of the thoughts that come up, all the concepts that come up in relationship. So you be in the present and then you try to take it beyond the objective knowing to the direct experience. You see what I'm saying? You with me so far?

Okay. So learning to be in the present moment, of course, you're the present moment you're going to be in. It was going to be all cluttered up with these thoughts and projections and everything else, these constructs about what makes up the present moment. But underneath that is the act of being and the nature of being, and that's what we're after. You see that that's what we're after: the immediate experience of being, and that's where ultimate truth lies.

So to get there, we can't get there if we let these projections take us out of the present, but if we stay in the present and then we can keep going deeper and deeper. So what is it in the present moment that is more being than seeing? Here, I use the saying, like it was seeing your thoughts, seeing your concepts and things like that.

What is a more of a being a direct experience in any present moment than that?

Student: Can you rephrase the question, Culadasa?

Culadasa: Okay. So, in the present moment, like this present moment right now, you are seeing, you're hearing words, concepts are being created, you're thinking thoughts. You can see that you are in this objective relationship. There is the the self, the knower, observer, and objects that it's observing. But in this moment, see if you can go beyond that dualistic to what is the less dualistic aspect of your present experience?

Student: I'll take a stab at it. If one is completely in the moment ,or is as close to that as one is able to be, then you are not projecting onto that person your connections to your memories, to your judgments. You are absolutely seeing and hearing what's being presented to you in that nanosecond present [???]. There the non-dualism comes in because you are not creating a distance. You're not creating countless layers of projections.

Culadasa: Mmm hmm.

Student: So that moment can take shape based upon what it actually is. You're not bringing in all this superfluous stuff into your mind. To me, that is emptiness. The paradox there is that the emptiness is the opposite of empty [emptiness ???]. So that in that moment, anything becomes possible. There are no strings attached. To your memories, your expectations, to your judgments.

Culadasa: Mmm hmm.

Student: Paradox. It's a paradox.

Culadasa: It does definitely have a quality of a paradox. Because what it is, the things that you directly experience, it is being a self in the present moment. You are being, you are conscious. There are concepts and ideas and things like that arising. It's not about denying anything that has happened. But it's all it is. It's all about the relationship, your mind creates of the dualism of the subject and the object.

And the fact of your being is an irreducible experience. And the fact of consciousness is an irreducible experience. If it so happens that you are in extreme physical pain in the moment, the experience of the physical pain, is that reducible to anything else? Instead it is something that your conception is built up out of. "Oh, there's pain. Oh, there's concept of leg. Oh, there's this concept of scorpion sting on my leg, or whatever it is." And so you build it all up from there, but the direct experience in the moment, that is direct experience.

Student: A couple months ago, I got smacked in the eye with a racketball, with my eye open and had to get... I had three retinal tears had to get cryosurgery and it was excruciating. They had to stick a needle in my eyeball to anesthetize it. And then they did the cryosurgery, which actually froze that part of the eyeball. At first I was tense and there was nothing I could do about the pain. I completely relaxed and just went into the pain and totally allowed it and it made it tolerable.

Culadasa: Mmm hmm.

Student: It was just surrendering to it. I couldn't fight it. There wasn't anything I could do. I needed to go through the process.

Culadasa: What you didn't do is you didn't add a whole other layer of mental suffering to it.

Student: Yeah.

Culadasa: That's a good example of it. Yeah. So what I'm suggesting that you need to do in terms of being present is to get more into the direct experience, even when you're adding other layers onto it. If you know that you're adding other layers onto it, then you're in the present moment and you're not entrapped in the same way.

The Buddha spoke of the builder when he was enlightened. He said "builder, you have been seen. I know you now never again, will you--he was referring to the construction--never again, will you create the same construction? The ridgepole has been torn down and never again. Are you familiar with [???] This is in one of his descriptions of his own enlightenment. He wrote a little verse about that: what is being built and who is this builder? What he was referring to specifically there that was being built was this separate, subjective self.

And of course, what later Buddhist philosophy expanded upon is that yes: in the dualistic, knowing of things not only is the separate, subjective self a construct, but so are the ways that we perceive what's going on. That's what's being built.

And [???] "Builder you have been seen, you are known." Now, in this case, the Buddha was completely enlightened. He had torn down the ridge pole and never again, would that same construct be put up. But, even while the ridgepole stands, the builder can be seen. The builder can be known.

Student: In the movie Avatar, that's how I understood when the Navi would say, "I see you."

Culadasa: Yes, that would, that... I don't know what the writer in that movie intended by that...

Student: Exactly, that's how I interpreted that...

Culadasa: Yeah, there was some really popular book back in the sixties where you had groked people

Student: Oh, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It was... [chatter] where you groked someone?

Culadasa: Yeah.

Student: But when you have interactions with other people, they have all these projections on you...

Culadasa: Of course.

Student: ...that you can add to your own projections. It's like building up of that image that you have of yourself that you are trying to leave behind.

Culadasa: Isn't is that exactly what we do? Don't you go to your friends so that they can help you construct the sense of who you are that you want to believe in?

Student: Absolutely.

Culadasa: Yeah.

Student: [Better illusion???]

And so that just gets built up and built up more and more. So in every present moment, you almost have to reject what you're creating yourself. You're creating these projections that come and talk to you and tell you what you are and who you are and what they think and everything then, and in every moment you have to almost see that. That seems to be really difficult. You are watching your mind all the time and realizing what you think and what you're saying so far, it's a lot easier when you're by yourself, but when there are other people that build up all the illusory thing with you, then it, it seems more difficult.

Culadasa: Yeah, it does. To summarize it, I think--and you correct me--is when we interact with people we're helping each other create our illusions. It makes it much more difficult to see beyond our illusions when we're in this active, interactive creative process where we're letting everybody else help us.

So, for those reasons, it's good to go into retreat, to get away from that, or just spend some time meditating every day, or to withdraw. Because it does help there. Then you're left to your own builder without the assistance of everybody else's.

Student: It also keeps you grasping to yourself as something...

Culadasa: As something, yeah.

Student: ...as some kind of a person or as what we're always trying to do anyway, is see ourselves in this best light. And then when you meet other people and they start piling on their own projections of you then, you can get in saying, "oh, yes. Yeah. That's who I am. I didn't even know I was that."

Isn't the danger in taking it too seriously? The danger of that. We build these illusions.

[???]

Our friends add to that. And if we take it too seriously and we give all the credibility to it, that seems like the pitfall. As long as you can take it with a light heart and know it's a joke.

Culadasa: Yeah, that's right. The only thing I didn't like about what you said is the too part. If you take it seriously at all.

Student: [laughter]

It seems like that happens more with people because of this illusion of separateness. And so if you're separate, you're almost leaving yourself behind. In this interaction it's easier to do that when you're in retreat, you're just with yourself. But when there are others, there's this kind of dispersal of your energy. And so...

Culadasa: Right.

Student: ...it's almost that it makes it harder to stay with yourself.

...[crosstalk] but then when you're with others...

[???] Mindful, then, that's the challenge of being mindful in the moment when with anybody you're just, you're still with yourself...

Culadasa: Beth.

Student: ...then those illusions don't get built up.

But then you can see it all as illusion. It helps me to see it all as like a movie that I'm in with all the other characters are there and how, what an interesting creation it is. And that it is all a joke. It's all just really funny.

Culadasa: That's it too. There is a really important thing that is served with being with other people. We could take this the wrong way and say, oh the best thing to do is completely withdrawal and having no contact. That's a big mistake. The greatest deceiver of all is your own mind. The other service that contact with other minds does it can help to make you aware of your delusions. Whereas they, it contributes. Yes that's but that's the only part of the story, it can help to take you out of your own delusions as well.

But back to what you find in the present, let's take it the other way. Being is essentially synonymous with just consciousness, pure consciousness, not consciousness of something, but and you can think about this and see where it takes you. But essentially where consciousness is not present being has no meaning. We infer, we construct, we imagine, that things are when there is no consciousness there. Subjectively you know, you can not separate being from consciousness in terms of your own subjective experience.

And consciousness itself, as I mentioned to you previously, this is something that you can practice. Hone your awareness of what direct experience and direct knowing is because your experience in the moment of being and of consciousness is totally immediate. Im-mediate, as in im as in negation and mediate, is mediation. It's unmediated and it's not subject-object. You can't examine your consciousness, you try examining your consciousness and you're like a dog chasing its tail. You can never quite catch up with it. A dog can see its tail in the mirror. I don't know. That's not a good analogy for that... [students chattering]

We can reflect on our consciousness, but is that the same as experiencing consciousness? It's not, and it's obviously not. So that's a direct experience we have. There are other direct experiences that we have that permit a far more objectivity. Although you can't objectively examine consciousness, there are feelings that you have your emotions.

Most of our emotions, we experience them directly. And in fact we can experience them objectively. And as a matter of fact, it's a really good thing to experience them objectively because your emotions are built in compulsions to cause you to behave independently of any kind of rational analysis, or understanding, or moderation by precepts and virtue. You know what I'm saying? Okay.

The sense of self, the inherent sense of self, that sense of self that only Buddhists are free of. We experience that directly the same way we experience emotions. And we do objectify that, and that is the construct. When we experience the inherent sense of self "I am," and then objectify it. And we say, "okay, who am I?" And we'll make up all our own lists of who and what we are. And we can go visit our friends and have them help create a construct. But that feeling is about something that isn't real. And that objective construct that we create so that we can look at ourselves and examine ourselves is also not real.

Student: That's like we can't see ourselves. If we look in a mirror we're still not seeing ourselves, we're seeing a reflection of ourself.

Culadasa: You're saying your reflection. Yeah. You can't see your own face. [???] yeah. The only way that you can see your face is in that very special metaphorical sense of understanding beyond the sense of self [???] Yeah. But that's right. Otherwise you're only looking at reflections and all your ideas of self are just mirror reflections, but they're mirror reflections of something that... the feeling of self is what drives that. We feel like we're a self.

So does that help make the distinction between direct experience and objective experience a little clearer? You can take emotions and you can experience them directly, or you can experience them objectively. And in that case, experiencing them objectively is a good thing. Because it gives us the kind of space we need to evaluate whether the compulsions that the emotions are related to are desirable, virtuous, and wholesome, or whether they are undesirable on virtuous or unwholesome.

So that's one case. The same thing with the sense of self. The sense of self automatically causes an objective construction: the ego self. And it's a really good thing to recognize that this arises out of an inherent sense of self, but it's a construct that doesn't have any inherent reality. But the only way that you are going to know reality, or to know truth, is this kind of direct experience.

And so you've got to examine the contents of direct experience. You've got to go beyond the contents of subject-object knowing into to the realm of direct experiencing.

Student: If I'm thinking subjectively, I may say, I feel... if I'm thinking objectively, I may say I feel depressed. If I'm thinking subjectively. I'll say I'm depressed.

Culadasa: I am depressed.

Student: Okay. Got it.

Culadasa: Exactly. That's the linguistic counterpart to.

Have I wandered too far afield from the original topic? What do you think Dorina?

Yes.

Student: When Dorina asked that question. One of the things that occurred to me is that if in terms of one's life, and this is two questions, it seems to me that perhaps if you are able to objectively look at what your natural inclinations are, what your gifts are, that is somehow a real clue about what your life might serve and the directions in which one might place one's energy, just on a practical level.

Culadasa: Definitely on a practical level, yes. Whatever your strengths are and whatever your abilities are on a practical level that's really what you have to work with. That's where your greatest opportunities are gonna lie. But, if somebody who's really good at mathematics and so they put all their time and energy into becoming a great mathematician that does not going to serve them to become enlightened.

So if your goal is to become enlightened, then you have to bring a whole element of wisdom into examining how and why you're doing what you're doing. Likewise, the question, I didn't want to answer the question [as] " if you want to become awakened, what you should do is at the first opportunity go hookup with a teacher and take on robes and enter a monastery" because no formula works, no formula is going to work foreverybody. You have to find your own path. And if you go into a monastic environment it could actually hold you back. Whereas if you stayed in the world, you might've made much greater progress. I'm just trying to say that it's going to be totally unpredictable. It's not only totally unpredictable for any given person, it's unpredictable for ourselves as we make this journey.

The key to it is to remember where we're going and also to remember where we're going to find the answers and to stay in that place of the present moment, doing whatever is in front of us. And being guided by the perfections, being guided by virtue. We have the tools to help guide us to make these decisions.

Student: And I was thinking about effort. One of the six perfections is joyful effort and as, and joyful effort being a totally different thing in my eyes, from efforting for myself to get somewhere.

Culadasa: Mmmhmm.

Student: But joyful effort seems more in being of service to other parts of myself.

Culadasa: Yeah. What makes your effort joyful is not being attached to the outcome. Not being selfishly oriented. Yeah.

Student: Yeah.

Culadasa: And it's trust. It's a certain degree of trust and confidence. If you are following a set of precepts that you have competence in, then that makes the process easy. There's not inner conflict and you can do it joyfully.

Oh, great. The joy is in the idea that you're on the right path and no matter how much effort it requires you to make in the present moment, it's the right thing effort. Isn't that how you feel.

Student: Mmm hmm.

Culadasa: So maybe a good point is... another very good guideline is if you have that sense of joy and rightness about the path that you're taking moment by moment.

Student: And it feels like there's something in there about love in the joyful effort is that you're going in the right direction, coming from your heart of your basic goodness. That a lot of all the other stuff of, "I should do this. I should do that." All this kind of thing is if you have the right motivation that's coming from your basic goodness, it seems like you wouldn't have to have any of these rules or whatever. If you really had that kind of a heart, where you just were full of your own basic goodness, then whatever decision you made on your path would be good.

Culadasa: At least it would be coming from a place of goodness even if you made a mistake.

Student: Yeah, even if you make mistakes and if it doesn't turn out the way you want or anything else, at least you have this feeling that your intention, your motivation, was always coming from a place of goodness and not trying to get something for yourself.

Culadasa: Unselfishness.

Student: Unselfishness.

Culadasa: Because it's the selfish part of it: "should I do this or should I not?"

Student: That's the self-grasping.

Culadasa: The self grasping and the attachment to outcomes.

Student: Trying to get somewhere.

Culadasa: And that's what I was trying to communicate earlier about. If you're trying, do you want to be in control? If you want to push the river, if you want to make it happen. There is a huge component of "I" and a huge component of expectation. And I had attachment and...

Student: demand...

Culadasa: Mmmhmm. Because awakening just doesn't happen that way. It happens when "I" gets out of the way, attachment stops, and you just get into that place of being and accepting what is in the moment that allows you to get beyond all of your projections. And then you can have your projections. They're all right. You can be with them and you can continue the journey.

It's also not about endings. It's not about getting somewhere. And then it's all done.

Student: [laughter]

Culadasa: It's not about that.

It is the journey, not the destination, that counts. Yeah.

We will all achieve our final liberation after we've drawn our last breath in this body, your self. You will be freed of your self forever. That's not what we're concerned about. [laughter]

But even in the seconds, prior to that self liberation, there's still something much more profound to be experienced.

And actually, if you get good enough at being in the present, then you are already awakened. Then you don't need to worry about where the path takes you and you just keep following the path.


Added at Sept. 26, 2020
Recording date Jan. 31, 2010
Audio length 0 minutes
Original file name CS-01-31-10.mp3

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