Matt Garrett - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buda at the gas pump my name is rick archer buddha the gas pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people we've done over 660-something of them now if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones go to bathgap.com and look under the past interviews menu and you'll see something new under the past interviews menu we have us a person developed this whole thing just in the past week and send it to me and say look what i've done and what it is is a thing where you can type in any word or phrase and you'll immediately see a list of all the interviews in which that word or phrase was mentioned and then if you click on any item in that list you'll immediately see that video in the window up above and if you click play on that video it starts playing at the point where that word or phrase was mentioned so it's a really cool search thing and it's based upon the youtube captions and there's still about a third of the interviews or so that don't have captions yet so we're in the process of creating captions for all those as well in fact if you'd like to help with that project there's information on that page in any case this whole program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it there's a paypal button on every page of the website and there's a page explaining alternatives to paypal also i encourage you to subscribe to the youtube channel um looks like we're going to hit 100 000 subscribers this year which has no ultimate significance but it's kind of a cool milestone so thanks for joining us and uh thanks to today's guest who is matt garrett matt is a young fellow living in the uk i discovered him through his interview with angelo delulo whom i interviewed a few months ago and i've spent the last week listening to various um youtube videos that matt has made and have enjoyed his burgeoning wisdom so i have a brief bio here that matt sent me i'll just read that and then we'll get started growing up a burning desire to seek truth took hold after years of searching the need to see reality overtook the need to avoid suffering through the marriage of inquiry and surrender realization unfolded in ways that could never have been imagined by my former self after seeing through the illusion of separation there is now a keen interest in exploring the mystery of reality and the human form the stage of integrating this non-dual understanding into daily life is ongoing and beautiful and something i return to daily not just to help myself but to look for ways to alleviate suffering for anyone who is interested it has been seen to be a never-ending clarification deepening with each insight into reality a reality that favors authenticity honesty and devotion all else will be burned to a beautiful pile of ash so it sounds dramatic when you read it out yeah but if nothing else you're a good writer oh yeah that's funny it's funny because it's so ordinary but it's so when you when you want to write it down it's like um yeah it's both extraordinary at the same time for anyone yeah that's very true i often discuss that i have a friend who's going through a really beautiful unfolding and she often finds herself just weeping uncontrollably with the overwhelming love and beauty she's experiencing and everything and yet at the same time you know she she also uses the word ordinary um i mean go ahead go ahead what you're gonna say just just like she said it's like the most ordinary but for me i think familiar is a word because it feels so like you always knew i think that's what ordinariness why everyone says it um yeah yeah some people use the phrase the natural state you know yeah it's perfectly natural um and yet i think that if if the average person who is deeply mired in suffering were to pop into it instantly their jaw would drop to the floor you know there would be this amazement and yet at the same time once you acclimate and you've said things here about integrating and so on once you acclimate it's the most natural thing in the world you don't walk around you know weeping or sit in the corner drooling or you know it's just kind of natural yeah it's it's as if it's it's prior to everything isn't it it's what they're without the doing without the thoughts and it's there in the thoughts as well even to say like you said there is it's just prior to everything it's it's not as if it's waiting to be seen so it's it's once everything kind of just stops for a moment and it's just so it's just clear yeah yeah other phrases that are sometimes used are the simplest form of awareness um or the state of least excitation of consciousness you know everything else is a is an agitation but that natural state is just the most settled natural state so just closing the blinds then that's okay yeah um yeah isn't it sorry so you you're only like 23 years old but yet you wrote this thing as if you've been on this long journey how old were you when you first got interested in this stuff yeah so that that's one thing i think is um like there's been a lot of suffering and it's weird i i know it's weird to like i look young and stuff like that but i think maybe it just hit me earlier like very early i remember just an intense i look back and you can call it suffering but and with almost a kind of sense of humor to it and um maybe a sense of oh that was nothing i needed to do it but in in the moment it was excruciating it was um with the burning desire to know truth there was this need to get away from the suffering this feeling that this wasn't real this wasn't normal this everyone else seemed normal and there was something that needed to be seen and even to this day wants to be clarified this it just i just couldn't live with myself or the idea of myself that i thought i was and i knew there was a way out but then i realized this was going to be a way through some extent and all my ways out basically dead ended which was just infuriating this sense of suffering the sense of isolation um and it was really through and i hold my hands up it's through teachers and things i've you know they've just i've done this i mean ultimately you see there's no one there's no real teacher there's no guru that they're just sharing what's already within but coming across inquiry um you know just normalizing this unfolding that was happening gave me so much um courage to keep going with it that i just you know you you just start to be so grateful that you came across these things and you realize even gratefulness doesn't make sense but yeah does burning suffering was was the feel for this yeah everyone as well really he said in this thing that you said the need to see reality overtook the need to avoid suffering which implies that to see reality you had to confront suffering head-on yeah had to sort of face it and not try to stifle it or blot it out yeah in fact i'd like you said that i'd go even further to the only way the only keys to the freedom was in the heart of this suffering was was at the core of each of these resistances these emotions if you want to call it on a relative level the things we were running from most i realized it wasn't that i had to overcome these things i had to just examine them for what they were and really truth to be seen rather than achieved by getting over it and you know especially starting out with emotional work i realized and i've seen in your interviews it's amazing when people talk about emotion because i can relate so much to the only way i've ever gotten through emotion was to completely surrender to it go to the heart of it and die into it and it's just like surrender and inquiry just are the most magical things when when paired really and it kind of finds you in a way and um yeah dying into it was something that really came about i think yeah it's interesting because the average person would look at you or would have looked at you several years ago when you started going through this and said you know what's this kid got to suffer about he's healthy he's well fed you know he's living in a warm house or whatever but obviously you're talking about a completely internal thing where the really the alienation from your true nature was causing suffering would it be fair to say that yeah you've you've hit i think you really hit the net on the head where you kind of dead end everything that i mean on one hand you can say i think a lot of people especially in the uk america like we've got the survival down to a team we've got food we've got a shelter i couldn't be more grateful for a happy childhood even to an extent it's almost as if that that added to this this inner fury this inner like everything that ended it couldn't be money that was going to provide happiness it couldn't be relationships it couldn't be all these things i was out of luck i was out of um anything so and then even spirituality became the last thing because spirituality enlightenment was this thing i could now chase that was you know beyond the physical and i could kind of turn my nose up everyone else and say look they don't really get it i get it i want to enlightenment did you do that for a while then i got to the end of that as well and that is that is the most um horrible discovery to know that even the inner work was just another money or relationship or thing and to an extent i wouldn't say that's even bad i think you have to chase spirituality you have to chase enlightenment to really find that that really that is enlightenment but it's not what we think it's completely radically different it's just transcending who you even are so yeah it just dead ended everything um including spirituality yeah and you know i mean you know that i don't know in the uk but when we were kids in the u.s we sometimes would play this game where you're trying to guess something and the person would say you're getting warmer or you're getting colder you know as you moved closer and closer to what what it was they were that you were supposed to guess and uh you know i would say that spirituality even in the sense that you put it just now you're getting warmer you know it's not like drug drug use or going to parties all night or anything like that you're you're on the right track but obviously there are degrees of maturity and the approach to spirituality yeah yeah you can't say it's like it's like the upside down pyramid i would say with all these things you can choose from and you try and get closer and closer to truth and as long as spirituality is getting to the root slightly more but then even in then if you open up spirituality you've got all these things which nothing wrong with them like mindfulness really helps um breath work astral objective all these things but if you want to get even closer to the core of that like what is the route of suffering like what what am i not looking at what am i avoiding and what can be inquired into or surrender to you and it's always a root there's always the root the self the misident this identification with a separate self the belief in separation just this simple belief triggers all of these branches of suffering that we can trim all day long with all these symptoms and and plasters and or band-aids whatever you call in america but like many people get i is completely sick of just healing this self but then you turn around and try and find the one you're trying to heal and you're like you can't find it so so there can be healing but is there a person that's healed is there a self is even progressing is there a solid entity that's even making any kind of progress and this is what in a way it's a parallel because you said there's nothing to do and you know spirituality is a um waste of time or something some people say but really if you if you're honest there's an effortless effort that you can look in the right places to uproot the fuel behind this and this is what a lot of people don't understand like okay there's no self but can you see that there's no self and does that drop away and is that seen with clarity and luminosity i think is what most people get stuck with is you can see through yourself for a glimpse but then all the mindless identifications hits you like a train again and it's all there these conditionings and all this stuff yeah i'm glad you used the word paradox i've used that word so many times on the show that somebody once sent me a t-shirt that had the word paradox on it um there's so many things that are paradoxical in this field and there were like a dozen things in the statement you just made that that are paradoxical or something is it's this but it's not this it's also that you know and that we we can dig into some of them um just really quickly because you said something in the other day um you talk about a pendulum a lot between i think it was a video with arishanti or someone but it was so true with the pendulum on one hand sometimes when we break out of mind we're so in involved in this no self that this no self becomes or this non-separation becomes so amazing but then the other shoe drops and it comes back to humanity the human form the relative level where you want to integrate you know where the emotions are where all these things are and people either get stuck sometimes up here because it's such an amazing experience but that's what it is an experience and then it comes back well we are still in humans there's a form here there's a speaking between me and you and it comes back this way like you said and then eventually it kind of goes back it goes goes good and then you can you know kind of walk this delicate line of seeing through cells but not disregarding your humanity i think that's the dance it's it it's it's it's that that kind of skill of getting in the middle yeah maybe that's where the zen masters used to whack people with a stick you know someone would say i am not the body okay whack how's that [Laughter] that's the thing but when you're through you can't really do that there's a woman named jessica nathanson whom i'm going to interview next week and um she has a website called the glorious both and and i first became aware of her because of a series of conversations she had with tim freak if you know tim and i think he lives up in glastonbury he's been on back gap a few times but her whole thing was she had this awakening and then she dove into what we might call neo-advaitha and she she feels like it really dehumanized her and be and disassociated her and she just felt so it was in a bad place you know and so she's kind of on a campaign to promote integration and balance and living the paradox fully yeah it's it's there's there's so many traps um it's funny because i feel like the deeper you go the traps become almost more subtle but but deeper so like yeah when you come back to the humanity thing then you can almost take on this i am a human a heroic trauma healer and there's so much trauma to be healed but if you get stuck in just doing that and not and and almost taking on the self again because the self wants to be this hero that is uh doing this for like humanity or doing it for themselves to be loved all the time and i don't know i think i think even there the self can operate in a way that's trying to progress with this stuff so in the middle it's like on one hand there's no solidity to me there's no kind of person here but at the same time there is conditioning there is a momentum of behaving in a way that's not aligned with that seeing of no self so it's like you say she i really like that website title and look at it after yeah there's a on the upcoming interviews page there's a link to her website um one of my favorite quotes was from the old buddhist sage promise imbaba he was said to have said although my awareness is as vast as the sky my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour so in other words you know vast awareness and yet minute precise attentiveness to the human value to the to the relative value to the act to the behavior and so on yeah that's that's it it's i think jeff foster said um you can honor the wave without turning your back to the ocean like you know you don't have to forget you're made of water this is the there there is a skill there's an art to it it's like a dart it really is a dance it's it's so it's if you make it to science it's all intellectual it's all inquiry it's all this but there has to be a surrender at some point there has to be a complete letting go of the raft um and that's the scariest thing this void that appears well that was always there but we're always running from you know yeah did you ever see jeff's uh cartoon the invite to trap on youtube no i didn't but like it's cute look it up um it's basically these cartoon characters and it's based upon an experience jeff had with his mother where they were walking in some park and his mother said oh look at the beautiful tree and jeff goes into this thing jeff the cartoon character goes in and saying there is no beauty there are no trees you know okay i remember you said that was dad you said something about the same with his dad yeah it's true and there's no there's no warmth to it there's no warmth to the teaching it kind of suits a bit off it seems a bit like there's def it's definitely so good like a whack on the head for just getting out seeking but um it's like there's no warmth yeah it is strange it but but at the same time you see why but what has to be done is to just notice who wants you know liberation more because it's just another identity on that side yeah i suppose how we we might be able to summarize what we've been talking about for the last few minutes is that um and spiritual development if we want to call it that there's many things we could call it is a multi-multi-dimensional undertaking you can't sort of isolate yourself in one dimension of it to the exclusion of the others that there has to be this holistic well-rounded balanced development would you agree with that terminology yeah um i think it's down to like a spiritual maturity i think um i remember starting out and i was looking for a practice a truth a thing i could do enough of in order to achieve this plateau of enlightenment this final ground of bliss and happiness and everyone's going to like me and i have the best job in the world and i'm going to be so spiritual that the books that i sell are going to go best seller i'm going to be the next eckhart toll we've all had it okay and eventually you have to mature enough to see that you have to die really like like you have to see this as a death in some ways i think because i was on the impression that i could achieve achieve achieve or see through self become so enlightened i remember walking through the forest blissed out i was blissed i had no sense of well the body was almost seen to be completely empty of any solidity it was as if i wasn't even really there like i remember there's a tennis you know djokovic the tennis ball yeah sure he's described it best which is strange that he was playing tennis and at one moment he just felt he who he was this this person just it just wasn't there it was vacant but but life was but the aliveness was still there life was still going and i remember thinking this was it and but something deep down and the seed knew and there's always been it's always been the case whenever something's come about it doesn't hang around for long these realizations because if you've got true authenticity true honesty you know that there's something more to look at there's something that's well who's experiencing this bliss who's ex who's the who's the self that isn't enlightened who's yourself is these things and on the realization that you're everything or the realization that you're nothing there's there's always still a slight experience of that a kind of progressive through that and then the course took a very dark term where yeah broken out of mind identification everything that i thought i was i saw through but then all the momentum of the um previous conditionings the karmic um all the conditions just came through flying back because they wanted to be looked at you know it was a case of no stone being left unturned that was come back it came back with more force it came back with more rage anger all these things they had to be looked at now there was nothing that could hide it was like reality was forcing me to look at every single way that i was not being honest with my self-image my who i thought i was you know these constant we're always battering with life trying to trade off of life trying to if i do this enough i'll be more happy this thing and i had to really die into this process of of almost it took a turn into into no self rather than all self and then the will when the will starts dissolving it's game over because no matter how much you try to get back this will have i can do enough inquiry to meditate it's like surrender just floods your body like i i was never to credit for any of this and then it's like in whatever you do now is not your will it's god's will there's no you and and this is going somewhere that you can't guide and then you have to you have no option but to like let go of the reigns because if you hold on to those reigns again you will get the strongest burn in your hand you've ever had because you know you're not in control it's like you're fighting your own illusion and then eventually the lights are turned on so much you see so much that you can't kid yourself anymore you can't keep yourself asleep you have to face every single trauma that that was there every single relationship issue all this feelings of not being lovable or not being good enough or anger all these things it's it's brutal but it's the most worthwhile thing that unfolds i think yeah maybe somebody who's listening right now could do us a favor and find that saga data quote where he says something like you know when i see myself as everything then such and such but then when i see myself as nothing then such and such and between these two my life flows you know that quote yeah i think it's like with the love and then the wisdom and then yeah yeah so let's see somebody could find that and send it in through the question form that that'd be handy um anyway um okay so a couple of questions came in let me just ask those and um okay this is a question from um someone named ajay maharaj in canada in the bio that i read it states that you were seeking seeking to find the truth and see through the illusion of separation can you speak on what that looked like for your close personal relationships including family yeah so that could be split up into the seeking on one hand and then the seeing through separation on the other um i'm not sure how it really the seeking relates to family is i think what what i get from that is the seeking i think what there is whereas family as well as just a relative world the seeking i think it takes you out of kind of i remember being almost disinterested in these personal relationships that used to be of course family's always there on a relative level but there was this need to see through relationship at the same time almost a retreat from relationship a retreat from jobs money i was doing a degree sports all these things there was a retreat from that so the seeking could go inward because all of these people that i had relationships with or the career path or the sport all these things there was still a self that was doing that and i'm not someone that thinks you have to be in a cave the whole time in in this but i i do really think that a period of time of retreat in oneself is so beneficial because you can just let the noise just simmer for a bit let the silence sort of grow and and in that silence is what really you're needing to look at in isolation sometimes just just looking for this and i keep using this because it's like a you're no longer invested in i remember just being completely disinterested because i knew those dead ends all these things i'm not saying the dead enter family but people sometimes even i see it they hope to get a family and then they get the family and there's love there's all these things but there's still this agitation this need to find truth you know not in a material good and these things and there's still this looking for that self and the seeking really went inwards with i'd say radical radical inquiry um this had to be known that there was that i was a delivery driver for about a year was it three or four years ago now three i can't remember but i would take the inquiry home it wasn't because i was forcing it because generally so interested that i couldn't find myself anywhere i couldn't find this person that was seeking i couldn't find matt i couldn't find when delivery driving out and about in the senses in the experience of self when talking to people when delivering food when using the physical body i could feel sensations but like where did i end where did the sensation start where when i was talking to someone when they were looking at when i was looking at their eyes was i looking at them or where are they located in the body so so the inquiry became so interwoven everything became like that message or whatever came through everything there there was no distraction so this could be done not just on the cushion like i said in the retreat but then you started taking it into the world this inquiry this you know seeing the emptiness of objects like if i remember the end when emptiness came into my life in this in the form of the insight of emptiness you could see that there really was no objects not just the emptiness of self not just the emptiness of subject but the emptiness of what i perceived i remember doing it on my mum at one point i was like well this sounds really horrible but if i was to like really say where is my mom if i was to like take off the arms is she in the arms or did you tell her that or you no i was i was just beheading her no i had i was trying to find where she was or anyone like and then i thought okay she's behind the eyes but i was thinking like with myself well if i'm behind the eyes let's go to the exact particle where i am like let's really find this part with this subject this self that i keep referring to all day that i'm trying to protect trying to make enlightened and all i could find was empty sensations there's just more sensations kind of like break where the brains seem to be and then even that i i could be aware of prior to that so i kind of remember talking about but but yeah it was it was inquiry into into into self foremost and in not finding itself i think it opens up this opportunity for a lack of a better word to deepen the no self aspect um of that that the dying into nothingness you know and anyway we'll talk about the entitlements but yeah just it was rob burbee if anyone's interested i just want to get anyone into rob burba sadly he passed away but what what's that name rob barbier how do you spell that so rob rob and then b b-u-r-b-e-a he was a buddhist um brilliant teacher down in devon i believe he has videos on youtube he he didn't he was like ramona maharshi in a way that he didn't want anyone to i don't actually didn't want video there's loads of audio tapes so if you just type in google uh he is brilliant for emptiness he's got a book called um seeing that freeze if anyone's interested i would um he opened me up to the world of emptiness um and he had this thing where he said and this is what clicked enters me is one day i sat in my chair and i was deep into contemplating what he meant because if i don't understand something you have to kind of sit with it in a silence without that without an agenda to know you just have i remember just sitting with it he said we have objects right so let's say you have a mug like this we see this mug as a solid object but he took it he took a chair and he said he started burning the chair in this metaphor and he said when does the chair become not a chair into the pile of ashes you see how at one point it's a solid and then if you look at it later it's just rubble on the floor ashes so we have this kind of opens up this fragility of what we say is an object you know um so i realized i could start doing this to everything every object like a car for example we say that's a mercedes that's a object so i'm suddenly doing that that's a bmw but if you were to take the logo off the bmw slowly start taking parts off at what point does it not become a bmw car anymore when it's completely unrecognizable or or something so i can see the fragility of this world of perception of subject object and this was more just seeing the emptiness in objects before it was turned into a inquiry of the subject of these objects um so yeah that was a big shifting point i think yeah that's great um i mean people have been doing this for thousands of years you can read the manduki upanishad or the ostrovak rigida and books like that and this is the way they talk you know that i mean they go so far as to say the universe never manifested in the first place it's just a mistake of the intellect to perceive that it has and things like that and modern physics i mean physics will tell you that if you boil everything down to a microscopic enough level there's no physicality to be found it's just probabilities and energies all that all that stuff um so you know i've always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of spirituality and modern science particularly physics and a lot of people are interested in that um because you know through these modern tools we're finding that these ancient wisdom teachings are true and they just had a different way of going about it um one thing you said i wanted to ask you about i also heard about this and you you alluded to it in the last few minutes but i also listened to it in some of your audio your your youtube videos um you know how we were talking earlier about integration and balance and holistic development and all that there are some of the things you've said which to my mind leaned a little heavily on sort of the not having ambition or initiative or motivation and stuff like that and i think that those things can be balanced with detachment and with surrender like at the time you were interviewed by angelo you were working in a clothing store and you were like either on the door or on the cash register and i thought well this guy has so many so many good he's a smart guy so much potential he can do more than that with his life so if if if you were to be satisfied with that as your life i don't know i i i kind of see spiritual development as a full blossoming of blossoming of our potentialities and i think that a lot of the great scientists and composers and writers and people like that were actually highly evolved people and they had unlocked certain potentials that they expressed through their art or their science and i don't think there's any um reason why an enlightened person couldn't also be a great musician or scientist or or something like that he doesn't just have to work in a in a dumb job you know yeah before i go into the strivings i think striving is probably one of the best traits you can have for spiritual awakening i think it if you're striving inward if you're striving to be open vulnerable curious in reality you've got everything you need to go away what you were doing i mean you weren't just sort of ho-hum i guess i'll just drive this delivery truck i mean you were you know huh yeah inquiry the whole time i think that's why i keep my private life quite separate because the what i'm doing in my actual job which isn't clothing still it's funny i i love the clothing store job because there's so much interaction there's so much ways that someone can pull you out into your shadow and express this i mean working the clothing show in oxford street you're gonna be at your wit's end on rage at times on black friday i remember just thinking this is the best if anyone's becoming enlightened get a job at urban outfitters on oxford street and work black friday weekends and it's like it's like ramp that's what you said go spend a week with your family it's the same right right so so the clothing shop was a practicality for me to move to london in the midst of a um a pandemic yeah it was it was rent through the roof and so my actual job is in documentary filmmaking and um making adverts for like commercial work so you have that job now yeah yeah and and and as you said there every single when when you can go into creative i i like to keep it separate this whole thing with this but i could talk about anyway next i think it might help people that are also into the creative world everything i've ever made now the freedom you get in art without having to take credit for it without having to feel like you're doing it you're the doer of it also not being bound by limitation in what can be created i think the only reason i've managed to carve a career in my filmmaking is because i because of this unfolding and you and now i realized i've never made anything it's just happened through me just like this podcast for you happened through you it's beautiful podcast and you've just opened the channel for this whatever your being is and sometimes it feels like oh this is difficult i don't want to give up my credit for this in giving up the credit for the artwork and giving up the dealership it just flows it flows and it flows and people hone in on it the best music i've ever seen um like djokovic when he's playing tennis he doesn't even feel like he's there this is why he's so good yeah you look at david bowie or michael jackson um michael jackson said i know there's a lot of controversy with him but michael jackson said i mean let's say let's be honest he's one of the most influential people in music most popular with his with his music and he said at one point something along the lines of it was just him dancing in the moon and he disappeared or again like djokovic this this no self is creeping into the people at the top of art world or or music or these things that it's like they're tapping into nonduality and expressing it through them or it's using them to express and people around the world can something deep in them knows that and that's why they're so successful i feel yeah and somebody like djokovic i mean if you have a serve coming at you at 130 miles an hour and the whole game you can't actually it you have to be on autopilot you know [Laughter] of course you have to have a lot of training and you have to have the right physiology and everything but the greatest athletes often speak of this kind of experience where they're just in this deep you know kind of witnessing state and and things are just happening automatically yeah no i think tennis is such a good one because you this even if you weren't into an underage and you didn't have experiences you're not really there anyway all the training's already been done and there's there's no room for any kind of thinking oh it's 180 miles this way i need to no you're you're as if it's something like darts where you're kind of in your head and you're thinking and you're thinking and you think oh paul or snooker or whatever it's um it's so different um but you started to touch on striving which i think is really good and i think the same thing where if someone is taking this message as oh there's nothing really to do this is all play i can just go and drink a beer like that that's a version to me that that's avoidance to me because one thing that angelo taught me uh and i think angelo is one of my most powerful teachers in his ability to point without giving you handy for the mind and he said um he said one of the best he commented on some something the other day he said the best practice really for awakening is a life well lived like if you live your life well and thoroughly first of all your life kind of gives way there's no the you gives way and but what he means by this i think is that if you if you lean into life you get get everything out the shadows face everything with honesty and brutal brutal authenticity you will wake up because the aversion it kind of seeps away and like you said the need to wake up kind of overtakes the need to be comfortable you need to because let's be honest people look at people who are young or something but we've had lifetimes of suffering i think we're just sick of it the people into this path and they just want to go the full way now they want to wake up now and the sad thing is i see so many people into this stuff but they get sidetracked into like i'm not saying anything's the bad but like certain practices that want the self and and keep hold of yourself and they don't just want to sit in an empty quiet room and face a brick blank wall and just let all the suffering come up and all the pain come up and just to surrender to that because that is the best practices as well it's just it's just silence basically i think yeah so the couple points here that i want to unpack more with you one one is uh the striving point and another is uh the the doership point and a question came in on the doership point um from charlie melk m-e-l-k in waupaca wisconsin um this is the age-old question he said does free will exist and if so what is its role in awakening i've never heard a good explanation of the relationship between free will and determinism or at least one i could learn from and apply to my own spiritual development yeah so let's keep this as non-intellectual as we can but still attack it in a way that hopefully sheds light because the first thing i'd say is once we we think about things what what we try and do with with thought it really is avoidance of what's here right now so anything that's here right now especially free will we can investigate anything let's get out of philosophical debates not this person but philosophical debates about free world determinism the only way we are going to ever look into this is right here right now in this moment um in experience in the sensations in the you know we have to go prior to thought because if we try and figure out thought with thought we're just a dog chasing his tail so these things like free will i would say investigate first of all on a relative level that has you know to be able to hold people accountable for bumping into your car or killing a dog you know there's going to be free will though i'm not saying that that but in my experience when i investigated free will i could never find this will this personal will that i supposedly had and i would say can you even find where you first made a decision can you find not only can you find the one that's making the decision but can you find these decisions because if you even look into the science aspect this is still an investigation of now you know the whole experiment where the thoughts were firing the neurons like 10 seconds before it even fired and so this kind of inquiry can lead you to a place of total exertion where it really does feel like if you trace everything back to the big bang it's almost as if everything is just kind of the conditions are here for something to happen even me to come onto this call with you your neurons fired to watch angelo's thing something in you wanted angelo angelo made a video once this is all god's will this is that i can't find this separate self that's doing this i can't find it with this so and that's there's so much freedom in that if you don't take it in the way of attachment or inversion because people take this and they're not going to sit on the sofa and say there's no free work and doing what i want but that's them resisting that insight and not facing what that truly means which is no now you have no free will over your suffering and when you give up free will and suffering it has full brains show itself flower itself and be processed or or seen through i think it's another one of those multi-dimensional paradox things um i like take the bhagavad-gita for instance there are verses such as you have control over action alone never over its fruits you know live not for the fruits of action nor attach yourself to inaction so there are these verses where lord christian is saying to arjuna do something here's what i want you to do take initiative and then there are other verses where it says like you know you are not the doer and the the enlightened person realizes i do not act at all and everything is you know the will of god or whatever that's carrying it on so why would why would he state two completely contradictory things in one in one book and i think the reason is that um you know knowledge is different in different states of consciousness at different levels of consciousness different levels of spiritual maturity and you have to be you can't appropriate the truth of one level to a level that you're not you you yourself are not living um so you have to if you experience yourself as having volition then you have to exercise it wisely if you experience if it's your experience that everything is really the will of god then you know no problem it'll you'll it'll all carry on automatically and you know when people do this kind of misappropriation they get themselves into trouble um there was recently a teacher who was embroiled in a scandal where he was you know sleeping with a lot of young women who were coming to him as students and uh in spite of the fact that he was married and so on and when hit when that was discovered he started coming out with all these excuses like oh i am not the doer or it's just god doing it it's the will of god all this stuff so you know it's just kind of a bs misapplication of a beautiful teaching and um so i think you know the whole free will determinism thing maybe ultimately there's absolutely no free will but if we experience ourselves as having it then don't use an intellectual concept of there being no free will as a kind of a tool in in your daily life just be who you are where you are and be genuine otherwise it can cause confusion and get into trouble yeah no you've hit it out on the head because if if someone's going to be brutally honest if someone ever says to me look my myself my sense of self is falling away completely it's never returned that to me there needs to be a fragrance of self because if someone's to call your name and you don't turn around then that is that's dropped away you know exactly this is the expectation people have they're like enlightenment you know you're blissed out no you just see through the reality of that ego you don't lose the the ability to speak the ability to turn that even when i'm driving my car and i hit someone or not that i have ever hit let's say you lost your delivery driver job you have to get into a clothing industry but like you say let's say i was to delivery someone and i would i dropped all their shopping or or i on purpose or whatever backstage hit them in this moment you have to admit on the relative level to the character yeah you could say let's go up yeah i i screwed up it wasn't you it was but this is the dimensional thing how how am i how dimensional how deep do we want to go into this how prior do we want to go to this beyond all of this because if you were to take it out you can look at even the two of you arguing and you're beyond the two arguments the will of this person all of that person so it's like but in the moment i don't think it's the best thing to be in that state of absolutist no self because if your child had just fallen over or you know an old lady needed help if i went into no self absolutist i need to go into my character as the human to be able to help help her across the road in my form like we just swing the pendulum all day yeah yeah until we walk that line um and there's something you said i really want to touch on because it was good yeah this whole will i think if you're if you're premature to somebody's teaching especially emptiness especially will you take it but mine takes it as oh i can use this to make myself more comfortable happy i can i can now say it's fine to play video games all day or be horrible to my mom or or dad because there's no free world like jeff foster said with the beauty of the tree there's no beauty there's no truth but this is this is just not true or not close to close to truth um i see what's closer the truth is when you've really exhausted the will even desire the remember someone said the other day they said you're quite fine i hope this is all fine talking to somebody said i have the desire to go meet a prostitute and i said i didn't i didn't i'd never say what to do i just said in another case though when desire is there the posture is not a good example but there's a desire there you need to not suppress it feel it inquire into it the one that's doing it the one that is when we suppress the desires you just have another form of resistance another form of shame guilt all these things and this doesn't help at all um but but with the will back to the will if you go to the edge of the world and you and you see that you hit the ceiling i love when adishanti said you really do hit the ceiling of what you can do because at a certain point inquiry even loses its um ability to see through things even emotional work it's like you're out on a raft to see i was saying eventually all these things have gotten you out to the middle of the ocean but the truth is at the bottom you have to let go of the raft and like sink without practice without your own will without any kind of knowledge or way through i feel and that could be taken on different levels but it only really flowers sometimes when it's needed but all these practices and things are so powerful i feel they just sometimes need to be let go and that includes the will yeah two thoughts on what you just said one about the desires um we don't just act on any desire that happens to pop into our heads i don't care what state you're in there's a value to discernment you know discrimination um and there's a value you might be tempted to let's say you're working in the clothing store and um some customer was being impatient and gnarly with you um you know you might have a an impulse to say something to tell them off but you know you can check that desire you're not going to cause irreparable frustration harm to yourself or anything it's just there's a wisdom to being able to hold one's tongue or to check one's impulses if they're inappropriate um the second thing is about the pendulum thing um it's not it's never all or nothing you know um a pendulum gives the impression like it's gonna it's way over here but it's not going to be over here what i'm i'm kind of suggesting that it's more like a zoom lens on a camera and you're you're a camera guy where you know you might focus in on a particular thing but you also still see the background like right my image right now it's focused on me but you can still see the background and maybe you zoom to the background and i become blurry um but in any case our our focus there's always going to if if we're really developed in this way there might there's always going to be this sort of no self silence not non-doing dimension and there's going to be the kind of divine everything is perfect just as it is dimension and there's going to be the oh we have problems here this child just fell down or is about to run in front of a car or something like that dimension and you don't you don't ever focus exclusively on one to the exclusion of the others that it's just more of a matter of the zoom lens going to where what's appropriate at that time yeah you i think i've never used the pendulum again now because this is such a good this this thing that you talked about because like you say when when you when you all this is really is a stepping back a widening of the lens and when you when you're what i like about that is when you're in the humanity thing it does feel like you're getting closer it does feel like a leaning in sometimes when it's emotional i could just say just lean into it just until there's no you in it you're we're almost going in and in it almost like a tantric approach to that and then and we're going back and back and back and back i'd also say as well that you say it's less like that way or this way or even zooms in and zoomed out there's almost a case of you can stay in the silence even even in the noise of becoming or taking the form of a human you start to never forget the silence yeah you have no choice after a while exactly you exactly someone sat there and they were really mind identified it's almost as if it takes more effort to be in the silence and eventually being the silence you see is your natural is your state anyway and it takes more effort to suffer more efforts have to think and to create these illusions and kid yourself again that that there's anything wrong that the the the separation has any reality to it yeah in fact i think it was angelo when i was listening to your interview with angelo he was saying that for him the more heck the more crazy the situation and i think he's he's an emergency room doctor isn't he the the more crazy the situation the more he notices the silence because the contrast is greater or something yeah um i remember he said that um and it gave the same thing of oh this can be done anywhere this can be seen anywhere and there's times where i was um in the silence and my mind was mine was the most noisy at that point so it's that same thing again um and it just shows people if angelo can do it with the stress of his job i have nothing to say about anything in my life that could never and unless i was suddenly amputated with everything and i was this and i had no prospects he has the most stuff on his plate up until that point um in terms of professional jobs i think you know having something like that and to be able to still do that has given i know other people are doctors and they've read the steam android stuff and had so much courage to do their stuff because before it was just an excuse they didn't have time we didn't have a thing even delivery driving i would probably say before this is you know when i was doing it 10 hours a day like there's no time to sit and meditate okay i'll take my meditation to the delivery van driving i take it to the conversations i take it to go into the toilet where do i end where does the toilet start this kind of this kind of stuff you know that i want to take this back to striving because i remember one of the things i wanted to really talk about today was that this can be done by anyone and yes relative world there are going to be problems where you know you've got you've got to do a job or maybe your degree is taking over but eventually if you're really wanting this and more than you want something in the land of careers or money and you don't have to cut them down but you can incorporate this and orient towards this until this is your priority and you don't forget anything else you just orient towards this whilst doing these things or and you can go the full way anyone can yeah there's a principle we might call the highest first in other words you don't eliminate all other things but you prioritize and so you know this is your first priority and then and as jesus said you know seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else should be added unto thee so you don't lose everything else you actually gain more if if this inner development or whatever we want to call it is your highest priority yeah yeah are you so resonate with that um i think what came to mind you're saying there as well is the realization of the amount of suffering it took to try and put happiness in these other things like careers and these things doesn't mean trust me post awakening i've been even more involved in filmmaking because there's no agenda to use it for happiness because there's no agenda it opens up this complete freedom to create and do stuff and still make a living out of it and when there's no agenda because you look i i talked to another guy that is a musician and before the awakening he was making music in order to um i'll say his name as well yihan jihan i think his name was i just want to put his name out there because he's such a lovely guy um he was making music before and it was almost like an agenda he had to make something in order post awakening you see that there's nothing in that substance-wise that's going to bring happiness there's no fulfillment there and suddenly you're free in the realm of music to create with no need to if there's money involved of course it becomes tricky but it just opens up this freedom um to create without sustaining a i don't know some hope that this is going to fill me up yeah and i don't know how we wanted to find happiness but i wouldn't say that it brings no happiness but it's more like icing on the cake you know um i'm sure that this fellow derives fulfillment and uh by creating his music and it's it's a joy to him he'd rather be doing that than just sitting staring at a wall or something um but he probably would also be content just staring at a wall but you know but so it's like a value it's an add-on you know you you get to have the fulfillment and do something that is is a joy and perhaps is a benefit to other people it goes from exactly that from this will finally hap this will find me wholeness this thing to this thing is just a celebration of the wholeness yes like relationship i remember thinking at one point because relationship to me especially intimate relationships was such a hotbed of resistances and suffering and there's so much validation and security and with and into this there's so much there to be deepened with self because that's why i think itself operates so much as well um what are we talking about then um added on fulfillment in addition to a baseline fulfillment exactly and you can sense when someone just energy wise wants something from you in the room or something or some kind of validation even relationship because they're thinking this person will fulfill me will fill me up will will add to this wholeness to me but then if you've ever sat with someone i don't know if you have well they just feel really content in themselves they don't really want anything from me but oh yeah say what's the difference between these two people i see this person feels the fullness feels complete and the laughter the things you share a celebration of that wholeness whereas anyone else usually is looking as with an agenda to either manipulate you to get them to like you or to attach to them or it's just slight perspective change that happens not through force but through seeing that there is no there's no separation there cannot be anything to attain to lose um you know that phrase from the 23rd psalm my cup runneth over um i'm not a big bible expert or anything but my grandmother used to read that to me when i was a kid and uh i think of that often because it's like when my cup runneth over when you're when you are full within yourself then you naturally overflow and um if you're not then you can't really overflow in the sense of the kind of person you just referred to who is content with themselves and you feel the overflow coming when you're in their presence so um i think that the more deeply awake one is the more one's personality blossoms it's not like you become more a bland emotionless person but you become more vibrant more alive more you know and um and the more it benefits others i just one more thought before i lose it which is that uh you know that saying man is made in the image of god when you were talking about um the value of the sort of the fullness rising in waves and the the joy of creating this and doing that um you know maybe that's if we're made in the image of god maybe our that thing you described is a reflection of what god himself is doing because you know you can imagine prior to the manifestation of the universe there's just sort of the god and resting pose as it were you know just flat oneness and then i am one may become many it rises up in waves and there's a value added there's some joy in the whole show you know the whole creation that is more than just the unmanifest value by itself yeah you moved from you you moved from wholeness you when you were talking now i remember something that someone said to me it's like what like how how is it different what what is it different and when you're when you're not moving from this as if god's moving through as if you're if you're putting in this effort constantly to take credit for your actions and this dealership and this this thing this energy all the energy sucks out of all the blame and guilt and effort striving with these things is you're missing out on the truth reality of it really is just god's will moving through yeah through and and the beauty and the joy that you're talking about there it's almost as if beauty and joy is synonymous with with this being um because it's what's what's the difference as well let's investigate this as well how can people see into it i think it's the word is resistance as well because when you're resisting you're basically saying you're going against the universe you're saying god isn't you don't trust god you don't trust the universe in this moment because you'd be saying no i know best here i shouldn't have this feeling i shouldn't have this thought i shouldn't have you're going to get this billions of years of evolution to get to this state the amount of naivety i had or most humans have to say this moment is wrong is is basically saying you know best over god but then once you really let god show and i don't keep using the word god that's called universe because it puts people off well let's just define it quickly we let's call god if we're going to use that word just the sort of all-pervading intelligence which is running the show from the subatomic to the galactic levels yeah yeah exactly and i am going to keep using the word universe now just because i've seen it but that's a perfect description um but when you're going against the universe it's it's so there's so much suffering in that because when you go with the universe there's no use anymore to do it there's just this aliveness there's like the weather patterns they just come together and you know this this body is temporary but what sees through my eyes and see through your eyes is exactly the same and it's beyond all that you know we're just playing a game at this moment i'm just so when someone says you know i look i look at you now and i see myself beyond your form and and my form that that there that is the absolutist view and you can fall into that this beauty of it and what the peace i think comes is this lacking this scene through dealership because when you see through dealership you realize there's not a single thing there's no space for anything to be outplaced if there's no there's no gaps where things could oh that could have slightly gone wrong there i shouldn't every single thing that's ever happened prior in my life showed me an aspect of reality i wasn't looking at all these wrong things the suffering things all these things and when you really see that now anything that comes to you in the in the future is now more an opportunity to deepen there's something i'm not quite looking at here and there's nothing wrong the universe has just about timed it right you said something earlier there where you said you know some people shouldn't be opened up to this straight away they their body minds couldn't handle it but the universe would just give you little pieces until you know ramana maharshi he had it bam his apple was ripe to drop whenever he was but then he was in this state of he was having rats eat away or something yeah yeah his legs were being gnawed on and by insects and and then he got out of that pit and he went up on the mountain and sat in a cave for many years before he was whatever he needed to be to come and start interacting with people exactly so who are we to say that this is not right even in your life my life the universe is literally giving us pieces that are just right for us to open and widen our our view of who we are who what reality is what's what's true and if i was to give you know if someone's come across a teaching that would blow their world open they might just implode i don't know if someone's so mind identification the universe is the most intelligent is intelligence it knows what it's doing yeah it's great the way i one analogy i use these days which seems to fit for my life is that it's as if we're in this play and there is a script to the play there's a there's a script writer who wrote the play but we also have the um permission to improvise and so we're kind of going along and things happen okay that's part of the script but i think i'll improvise this way you know and uh maybe that's just a halfway kind of developmental state because maybe if i were cosmic enough it would be just you know i totally go with the flow and everything is fine but that's that's my orientation that there's um it's kind of like that i've said this many times before but it's like the nursery rhyme row row row your boat where mainly the stream is carrying the boat along but you are you still have a paddle and you can row and but you're rowing gently down the stream so there's just little minor adjustments you make as you go along to maybe avoid this rock or whatever exactly like it's like the preferences it can still be there but there's just seeing the emptiness of these preferences the seeing that there's no one there deciding there's there's no credit for this or that because to be honest if you were to drop the whole notion of preference and you wouldn't be able to choose what to eat you would the character the character is still there it's it just it just even even those preferences are completely not your doing no not but there may still be the perception that they are you go to a restaurant let's say and you look at the menu and you you ponder it for a while and you think okay well you know this one looks like it might be good i think i'll try that and you know so maybe that's just automatic and you didn't have any choice in the matter but if you if you perceive that you do don't beat yourself up over it it's just it's natural but yeah i think i think the one thing i do want people to really know and i think i remember just thinking i want anyone out there to know this can this can be done if if you orient towards it if you if you want to go for a way or if you want to see through through self if i can just give a bit of context because i feel like i remember listening to andre realizing how dedicated he was how and even that's a paradox because because the dedication that he removes but if you sit with this inquiry and you and you really hold space i think is the right word because if you're holding space for this surrender to unfold if you try to do this you try to surrender it it's almost there's still an agenda woven into this there's still a need to get somewhere else to progress into this but if you you know every night if you have every morning in the day if you have a keen interest to go the full way and you orient towards this everything that you think you're running from which is things if you just sit with it and instead of trying to practice out of it you go to the root of why it's even there the fuel behind it the the self in the middle of it it drops out the the bottom of self drops out and the suffering there it struggles to grow back without the fuel the fuel of separation the fuel of belief the fuel of resistance this is the thing i really wanted to hammer home because i remember sat there not thinking this was do i thought this was for the epcot tools of the world the ramona mahashi's the even the adishanti but that came because artishanti and he was one of the first guys he seemed like a normal really normal guy and he took the sport to the edge he took cycling so far to the edge and this pursuit this striving you said touched on the striving you need you need to exhaust seeking into the ground to finally say i don't know what i'm doing god or universe show me reveal it to me and it reveals as soon as you stop looking for it that's kind of what happened to aja too i mean he he also he he just has this competitive spirit so when he got into zen he was like all right i'm gonna do this to the max and you know he would go on these long retreats and just you know meditate like crazy and everything and he finally reached a point where he he he thought he was gonna snap and he he left in the middle of her retreat and went home and had this little meditation hut in his parents backyard and he just went in there and he said i give up you know that's it and boom and then he had his big awakening yeah it's uh how true is that how true is like any insight that's ever really come about in my experience anyway sometimes i'm just staring up to see or if i'm just just sat because because in that moment i think the groundwork could be put in the inquiry the exhaustion but then it kind of just flowers when you're least expecting it because that's when the will kind of takes a break for a second that's when the agenda the pursuit kind of bottoms out for a bit um yeah but audrey might tell you and probably would that he don't think he wouldn't have had that awakening if he hadn't done all that striving yeah so i think that i think a lot of people exhaust themselves and in the exhaustion they finally stop and not stop like physicality stop but they stop beyond the physicality they just they just give up looking for something and they just allow the universe to show them they hold space for something to unfold because they the resistance to whenever you're seeking you're resisting now you're saying there's something here that needs to change when you give up seeking you're almost giving fertile ground for like the flower to bloom whatever you want to call it poetically but it there's a there's a stopping that takes place and in the stopping you see the silence that was always there you see you just it unfolds and you wonder why you were ever so caught up in all of these thoughts yeah you never you never looked at the silence between the thoughts and and yeah it's always there it's this whole thing of giving up seeking it's kind of a popular phrase these days papaji once said to a group of people sitting with him give up the search and there are conferences about the end of seeking and websites about it and everything and i don't know my orientation to it and feel free to disagree or comment on it is that it's a there's a phase obviously where you you're just not feeling much fulfillment and so there's a kind of a desperation uh man i got to get this i got to realize this but then there's a time when the fulfillment really has matured quite a bit and there's there's a sanskrit word santosh which means contentment so there's a contentment quality that grows but you don't necessarily you know rest on your laurels at that point there's still this enthusiasm and motivation and curiosity and realization that there's so much more to deepen and to know and to integrate and so on but it's done more on the basis of a fulfillment quality rather than a desperate emptiness quality well this is the taboo i think that you've talked on where seeking can end and i've found the seeking end and now i call it clarifying what i call it because in a way there was so in post-awakening i'd say the intensity of suffering if you want to call it suffering maybe less than worse suffering there's less there was no personal suffering but suffering it made me face everything and even though the seeking has stopped i think it's because the seeking had stopped i now couldn't numb myself with thinking my way out i had to face it all full-on and like you say the enthusiasm yeah all the positive stuff but there's a clarifying which of death which is like a post awakening where there's a big taboo where you know i don't even mean for these videos that i post to kind of gain attraction i think adventure will just stop at some point and just and just rest in and do the video stuff but so that's just taking away from the fact that i didn't want this to really come about but it's all god's dwell whatever you want to call it but what's about the post awakening this the seeking can stop they say but that doesn't mean really that this has deepened to its fullest deaths because i think i think not many people have gone we say people not many beings have have a have a loud the personal will the the death the there's a there's ladies it's you did an interview with um either chances it's suzanne suzanna marie yeah yeah it was she and i had this conversation yeah i love that because they touched on something i couldn't really see much online which was this this the know yourself the real the real sense of even the center the the one that's experiencing this like people can stop seeking because they see everything but now let even the experience of bliss let the experience of enlightenment really die into nothingness because some people still take credit for even the inquiry up until that and that shows that there's still a residual will there so it's almost like this it's like this big grand thing and you go on youtube and you sell your insights then everything comes crashing back because you now need to in you need to embody this realization you need to breathe it live it you know how you converse with people how you like these hooks let's put our hands up people that unless you all your conditioning falls away i think i was quite lucky and still am that things hit me with an event with such an adventures afterwards because i thought i was in the clear i i'd broken out of my identification it's almost if i work on the level of mind and this hadn't caught up this was still operating on the old system and it needed to be and this is the funniest thing you can't go around you have to go through each time it's like the animals come running at you and you just get trampled and the only way you can do it is really face whatever's running at you and see what they're trying to tell you because every every single trauma that comes up every single bit of suffering that comes up to me i've mostly experienced was something that i wasn't looking at in reality either my self-image maybe or something i was denying maybe i didn't feel good enough but i tried to be a better filmmaker in order to put up with that validation in how i looked maybe all of these things you have to let die and like you said the seeking stops but i feel like the clarifying is where it's brutal i think you because you if you want to go forward reality is looking at you like this and you have to face each of your resistances each of your things until there's no stone left and turn and then that to me is the start of embodiment because it's not that you're now blissed out happy you just you lose the ability to resist which doesn't mean doesn't truth doesn't care about happiness this is aliveness this is how this is the realization you know this is the end of chasing happiness is the start of seeing truth through this integration and even integration loses its term because it implies it never was integrated it's just like you say these depths of awakening and i think i the only people that really resonate even at this stage for me were because i don't do much looking online but definitely shanti definitely angelo uh suzanne marie um they're the people i really recommend to others if they feel this urges resonation to go beyond awakening like i think i just got a video called beyond awakening or something but the one that i really like is one that he's called his own website for anyone it's called beyond the person and only watch it if you're resonating with it because it can really take you to places maybe you don't want to go but i think everyone's going that way anyway yeah check out harry alto sometimes you ever watch any of my interviews with harry what's how do you spell his son h well firstly his first name is spelled differently it's h-a-r-r-i because he's finnish and alto a-a-l-t-o um and you'll find that there's a index on the past interviews menu bad gap where you can just pop that name and it'll come up anyway different take than most people on on all this stuff i won't elaborate i'll let you just check it out so a few more questions have come in here let's see here's one from somebody in your neighborhood darren emerson in jersey uk as part of your awakening have you lost contact with friends and family because they no longer get you or you get them um if so how have you reconciled it with yourself personally i found this a source of sadness so i'm interested in your view so yeah that's it's a beautiful question because it's so honest because what i hope people resonate well i don't i hope people gain something from this basically if i can get context for it because there's so much alienation we feel so alone sometimes in this path which is funny because we're all looking for this oneness i say deep down i never got i was never getting someone they were never getting me because as long as we're in identification and it seems like people are getting each other i think i look at people and sometimes they used to be an envy that people seem to be able to play this characters these things but i think what i realized there was no fulfillment in that there's no there is to extend but when it's that's celebration of wholeness like we talk but i see more and more that i was never really celebrating this wholeness i was always i was never being got and i felt so alienated in this in this in this place and so to answer your question first of all dead on awakening i find is a lot more ordinary than people think i think people people have seen a huge shift in the way they speak to me the way i am with them because i think there's there's a difference in just the energy shift and these things all these things are just words but the ordinariness of awakening i think takes over and you see there isn't there wasn't much the only difference is that i can't i it's almost too painful to play a certain character to fit a thing so this authenticity can come through and the relationships you do form i find are just through people that resonate people that you don't really need to be friends with people in order to get somewhere new and validate them and your friendships of a celebration of wholeness that they're it's really hard to describe even the family stuff you you you almost give up hope that these two separate entities will become the perfect relationship or these things you just see through all of that and there's a freedom in that and then the expression of joy through celeb through this stuff but to take it back a step and give context all of this there is this big alienation that people really don't get you because when you're not living your truth when when you're very mind identified in fact i think it's easier to live in the world it's easier to overlook reality overlook the truth that you're everything and play the role really well they seem to play people do play it well and it can be almost not too much suffering that people go their whole lives playing these characters and that can feel alienated because something in you has this calling to go deeper and everyone else seemed to not be going deeper um and i remember that's what for me if this happened was so isolating was that i was seeking something i knew there was a burn desire but they seem content with there's nothing wrong with this there's no higher or lower beings it's just what resonates and what comes together for the body minds but they just weren't into the same stuff and it was really difficult for me to accept that people could just be somewhat content with their body mind and not suffer too much the extensive thing and eventually it overtook me that it didn't matter i didn't need these people to understand me or do these things and what seemed to happen as soon as i stopped looking for that in people i've met so many people that are into nonduality and you're just authentic people aren't spirituality but they're so true to themselves or truer than people from before that we speak and there's no need to fill the silence if i'm with them we just we enjoy each other's presence if we do talk it's about art or film or something that cuts through the human condition and can help people of this thing and i think that's the difference it makes is you you start to lose your interest in in in relationships which aren't resonating deeply what you've seen in this inward journey yeah when i first started meditating when i was 18 i had to leave my friends because they were all doing drugs and i just didn't want to be around that scene anymore and i i left a band that i was playing in and i i just spent a few months walking the dog every morning you know and i got into a community college and started doing other things with my life but of course i you know gain new friends and um that's the way life always is most you know we're probably not in touch with most of the people that we're friends with in high school now because our lives have gone in different directions but there's an old bengali saying which is if if no one comes on your call go ahead alone um and so you know sometimes it's necessary to just um go ahead alone and especially if the people who are you're associating with just don't get what you're doing but like family you know you can always accommodate and be interested in the things that they're interested in when you go to visit them like you know i have a sister who's not interested in this kind of stuff at all and when when she comes to visit we we play card games or you know do fun stuff together um which yeah uh and i don't bring up politics because her politics and her husband's politics are at the extreme on the other end of the spectrum from mine um but we we love each other and we enjoy you know so that you don't have to we don't always have to wear our spirituality on our chest so to speak and like you say people that do and and take this lingerie and put it please face it as some of us all do at the start i think it's further than truth when you go into your sisters or and playing cards that that's closer to truth because to to push monday on someone is basically also not trusting the universe yeah but that will come into their life at some point and i remember with my mom i had the similar thing my religious but not to the extent of going free within and seeing yourself i remember at one point i think i did try you know when we all come across like mom look for your sense of self you don't exist all these things and they don't know and the spiritual maturity is to see you know this isn't this isn't really aligned with what i think i don't need to push it on people anymore because i've seen what i've seen and if it resonates for them and it goes and then that's great but right now all my mom needs is a hug all my mum needs now is like a song to talk to they in their on their perspective of life which is not less no more wrong which is this is the end of right and wrong they don't need someone telling them there's no self just like the lady that crossing the street i like she gets hit by a bus i'm not gonna say well there's no one there she's dead you know there's definitely no one there now there's just a maturity and a flexibility to the way that reality moves reality doesn't move that rigidly doesn't stay in non-duality it moves with with something that can accommodate for everything and that i think that's what i've seen as well like we said there with your sister yeah we speak on the level of the listener there's a an old indian saying that when the mangoes are ripe the branches bend down you know so that people can just easily pick them so um you know the branches don't stay up on high and say nana you can't pick me yeah yeah exactly okay another question came in this is from ka rudolph in germany as a tantric practitioner i have reached a very good level of being and peace after awakening an extreme purification occurred but it seems that there is no creativity and no feeling of purpose does this arise in the process of awakening at one time i can't get myself going for any activity like before awakening it's definitely a case as well first of all i found different body minds are hooked up definitely differently um in the creative aspect but i think this seems less of a like all creativity what kind of i i sent up a flat lining here a kind of a the purpose i think is the more the thing that can cause a bit more of a confusion because it's as if everything that we were striving for as i say with the dead ends you get to the dead end you realize nothing there so then it's like there's no man's land then what if this isn't it it's even spiritually even enlightenment yeah then what and this purpose drop drips and drops away and this no man's land really is what i would call the best teacher to be silenced because silent because there's so many gurus and teachers out there that can give you the techniques the tantric approaches i i just sense this guys into all these things are so powerful for you know creating the conditions for awakening even even mindfulness to extend the sign of the mind can help but there's a certain level where you do have to start to trust your intuition because again we're going to go into the realm of well i need another practice or to get purpose or this or this i'd really orient towards firstly the subtle sense of self is still there because if you don't have a purpose who doesn't have purpose where where is this purposeless person this is slight this this entity we refer to it's not all in in the sub because sometimes the purpose is the lack of purpose is almost a reaction to losing what we had before kind of grief of this in whatever was we were doing this creation work this all these things i think the maturity world comes in you learn to listen to the silence first of all you you bask in that silence you let it show to you because when you're lacking purpose what you're really saying is i need something more i need to be working towards something to improve this state that i'm in and so there's something here in the now that needs to be looked at not there so even if it's a residual resistance the subtle self that's that's going on this can really be seen in a bit more of a delicate way um slight inquiry sometimes where is this self you know um the realization that because purpose belongs to a character if you're identifying with a separate self you're identified identifying someone on a timeline moving somewhere so so i think i just want to point to the subtlety of the later stages of this no man's land sometimes you know emotional work it can still be there but even the that can be let go of and i think i really love just this sitting in silence because then what will happen is the mind goes i need something in order to gain my purpose or get something better and then we got to do is get used to not knowing get used to that sweet spot of not needing an answer not needing to get somewhere an agenda and something unfolds in that unknown i would i would recommend in that no man's land yeah i don't really know the nature of his practice but i mean i wonder what he's doing with his time if he's just sitting watching television all day or something maybe you know if you didn't allow yourself to indulge in something meaningless like that some purpose would arise you know okay now what can i do that's constructive here maybe i should go to school or maybe i should you know do this creative endeavor that i've always thought i wanted to do if i'd had time or there could be something because i think that um i mean there are people who are naturally inclined to be monks and recluses and like you say sit in a cave but most of us are not wired that way and um i think that there's a see what you have to say about this but there's there's a phrase that goes brahman is the charioteer meaning cosmic intelligence is driving your chariot and there's there's a transitionary phase that a lot of us go through where um we're used to being in the driver's seat and somehow rather there's got to be this shift where brahman is the is the driver and it's it can be a little awkward in the transition it's like one can lose a sense of purpose one can go with the flow so much that one isn't taking any initiative and is becoming wishy-washy and allowing oneself to be just driven around by by the winds um you know what i mean have you ever gone through anything like that yes it's like that transition phase whereas before it's almost less suffering in the case of i've got a purpose you're moving towards it and you see so many people that are striving you see like the sportsman usually and then they they reach their end of their career and they have to give that up and there's the grief of losing losing this purpose this drive and i think you sensed in into that and i would add the most peace i've ever found is giving up purpose giving up meaning not even having to somehow practice to then find this more aligned higher purpose but a whole different paradigm dimension of prior to purpose because i'll go back to again the meaning belongs to the character the character that doesn't exist the character that's moving along this enlightenment history line of going up and up close to enlightenment and now my purposes are going to be there so what i think the character doing in this moment raising these he or she is in the transition phase of not having purpose because the ones that did before dropped away i feel because he sees through the separate self or the meaningless of that meaning if that makes sense and now it's like grasping at something else to have purpose but i find the peace is when i let go of even purpose because like we say it's it's a subtle resistance that that happens we have a subtle momentum of um so it's going to pop up there but we have a subtle momentum of needing something to in order to get towards but you can really orient towards it until you can now sit on a park bench and you know of course career-wise it's all play it's all creativity it's all these things but i could happily stare at i don't have this whole weekend stare out at the sea in awe of not needing anything not purpose can be so heavy to carry around this purpose even i'm going to liberate all beings that's why i don't really like my bio there because at the end of it it said to alleviate suffering for others it sounds harsh i don't i will put my videos out there but if people need them but i don't i could delete my channel in a second i could delete everything it's not an income i'll go work in a coffee shop the reason i think i get quite a lot of comments which can sometimes be i think even sent me that email earlier today of someone really going through a video and i think it's like a seven minute video and he gave quite a few paragraphs of what he disagreed with and that's absolutely fine but i think sometimes i feel i've hit the net on the head in in a way if someone's really triggered by it because it means if someone feels really strongly by it sometimes it means there's something and i could i would always hold my hand up if i'm wrong and i'll look at it i think you know what what's being said here but sometimes i'm more and more not if someone's really triggered it means that the message is quite direct and it's pointing something they don't look at so if i was to be really direct i'd say go beyond purpose go beyond the meaning but if i was to you know if you're in a state of absolute depression like look no there is something to look and you on each level is not wrong it's just this will help the person more if i tell them um you know go back into the emotion the feeling of purposes can you feel that out fully and you can kind of compassionately work way or if you go all the way you could just say there's no truth and there's no self or this thing but there's a there's a skill to that but i really think the freedom in this is found just prior to meaning just prior to purpose beyond the character i think yeah you mentioned park bench earlier in this in this response and of course that brings up eckhart tolle who after his awakening pretty much sat on a park bench for a couple years um you know just and then i think somebody started talking to him and he started you know explaining things to this person and then he found that this knowledge was kind of flowing through and one thing led to the next and now he's right written all these books and traveled the world and and of course his purpose is spiritual teacher and that's not going to be everybody's purpose but i think maybe sometimes we do need a period of hiatus where we you know we just put it in neutral for a while and um if we've been pushing ourselves in a certain way okay let's relax and let everything settle down and and then but eventually some kind of momentum is likely to start up again and maybe we'll go off in a completely different direction than we were going in before and it's good that you give yourself this little period of rest uh but it's not going to last your whole life or it shouldn't yeah yeah it's always if and i i can maybe i'm interested to hear your view on this but momentum can come back but without purpose i think i think momentum can go in a way that it unfolds and at any moment you don't know where it's going to take even the purpose if it wanted if the teachings wanted to just stop and no one would listen to the channel anymore that's fine as well it's more that it doesn't care about purpose the truth now just moves its own way and for me to put a purpose on something would be giving it an agenda or limiting it to my personal purpose but i've seen so much freedom in allowing this to just take whatever it wants even if even if it kills me this is think i think this is the this body might that that's the extent you need to go let it completely take away with no agenda i think in in what you just said you're associating the word word purpose with attachment a little bit you know like i i have this mission in life and i'm attached to it uh and i'll be unhappy if i can't do it um i think there can also be purpose without attachment that you know one can be highly motivated and and dynamic in in doing a certain thing but if for some reason that has to stop then okay in fact i wish i could find it it would take me too long to find but i read this great uh quote from the daltech this morning about um just um not being attached basically just uh if if something is taken away or you know you're no longer doing something okay that's over on to the next thing without any remorse or or longing or regret or anything like that just basically living in the now you could say um and what what's wrong when you're talking that was like you say the difference between attachment in purpose i think i always think litmus tests are really good click quit checking in when anything's when you're ever making an apparent decision or these things and it's always you know am i making this decision on on the behalf of a separate self is is this moving from a place of fear am i moving with the hole here is this something moving through me and i even remember you know in the post-waking phase even to this day it was constant clarifying it's like for example coming here this week i obviously live in london and i've got the opportunity to visit back home my family lived in seattle usually sometimes i go to some location to get away from life you know these things and you think am i doing this through fear or aversion but this week for example it's so nice to get out of the city and it feels like it this is just what was right you know some decisions they just there's no fear there's no attachment there things just flow without an agenda to suit a separate self the litmus test is just a constant questioning and inquiring into am i moving with truth am i moving with authenticity and like you say let's go meet in the middle where i could be agree purpose could be there just maybe the purpose of the universe it's just just non-personal purpose is is what truth yeah um and there have been all kinds of saints and sages throughout history who have um from the outside appeared to have had tremendous purpose they've driven their their you know accomplishing great things and then overcoming great obstacles and doing like mahatma gandhi for instance i mean you know he basically overthrew the british and and yet he had this sort of simplicity about an innocence and surrender to the wisdom of god if you want to call it that so i guess we just what we're doing here perhaps is dispelling the stereotype of an enlightened person as being just the you know the guy on the mountaintop you know sitting in lotus a person can be very involved in the world and have all kinds of purposes and responsibilities and so on and not only is that not incompatible with enlightenment or if i can use that word but it's actually en enhanced by enlightenment or an awakened state it gives gives one greater resources for doing whatever purpose one is called to do yeah and and the key word there is surrender like you said yeah complete surrendering and bringing back to to to what might help people is if you ever get confused about what about what to do where to just orient towards just either inquiry or surrender those two are are the sharpest tools you'll have in your non-personal box of spiritual toolbox it in quite like if you either question the belief or you release resistance either of those things will help um especially especially i mean the belief really they go that goes to the roots these beliefs that we hold we carry around um i truly think if someone's honest enough and they they allow us to they hold space with us enough you're in a constant state of surrender anyway people say you know i can't surrender i i can't every time you put your foot on the pavement you're giving faith that your foot your leg's not gonna buckle every time you step on a bus you don't know if this guy is suicidal he could crash i don't even know cause any fear here but i'm sharing how much you trust life already just trust it inwardly trust trust that the nothing needs to change nothing needs to be done in a way that's by you the only thing needs to be done is something to be looked at or let go of that that's all so i'm just bringing it back to this this like you say you use the word surrender this this marriage between inquiry where you can do something and surrender where you can't do something in the middle of there it's just like magic place where the bottom bottoms out yeah it reminds me of that alcoholics thing you know that thing that grant grant me the wisdom to change the thing i can't can change um accept the things i can't change and the wisdom to know the difference or something i'm sort of slaughtering it there's something along those lines yeah that's that that's probably exactly the same thing in like just non-spiritual terms in a way even that's very spiritual it is it's a spiritual thing a a is a very spiritual organization yeah um but um what are we saying here anyway i guess we made that point okay um one thing you were just saying that i found interesting is i mean it sounds like in your experience um self-inquiry or discernment or what whatever you're calling it is an ongoing process it's it's almost like second nature now there's this how would you put it it's it's not something you got over with and you know awakening happen i don't need to do that anymore but it's it's kind of the way you roll all the time yeah it transforms from i think this is the case a lot of people it's like it starts off quite clunky especially in the western world we're we're open to ramadan maharishi in all of these kind of distorted translator ways we try and work out what is the self-inquiry there's a lot of great pointers even in the west for self-inquiry we ask you know who am i the first time to ever look to this person that's even trying to deal with these things get happier become enlightened all these things and it's very it's quite clunky it's quite intellectual it's like i'm not my name i'm not my face and what did my face look like before i was born what where am i located in the body you know all of these things which kind of we're a very tight ball and and we're kind of picking away the threads which kind of unravel the ball slightly and i'll actually use the let's use the metal of a wall i like poking the bricks out of the wall like you know my physicality i can't even locate myself in the body so that's kind of making the wall of the ego a bit brittle these are the kind of top ones and you can do it for every or every label you've ever been given i could change my name to rick archer and suddenly and you could change your name to matt garrett and that shows the fragility of all these labels honestly i could shave my head i could um people are changing their gender there's so much fragility of our labels so we go deeper and deep to the core and then it's like kind of non-physical the thoughts the subtle self you know whenever you have a thought of the future of the past i remember there's a self in the middle i physically can't have a thought without there being a character in the middle like a matt garrett that or a rick like that yours would be a british argument in the middle doing a podcast tomorrow the self inquiry became so intense and i would say more radical is constant inquiry that it went even deeper to the to the just subject object just trying to find the subject even when i see the visual field i see colors okay does that imply a subject i i know colors but does that imply there's a color visual field hitting me a solid entity bear couldn't find one hearing it was more transparent there was no subject in this so so this i'm just getting to the point where inquiry then this was still with an agenda though i was doing it with the hope of finding enlightenment and i only find insights in this when i let go the gender but what inquiry transforms into is you're you're inquiring out of interest you're inquiring of course when suffering's there is sometimes the best time to inquire because this is where you know the self really goes and try and find yourself that's really really suffering and you just can't find it and it loosens illusions to the point where like you say the seeking is gone but what what the momentum of the previous conditions was was this momentum of behaving like a self even though my intellect knew who i was or what i knew i was was beyond all of that and this is where i think suffering can become really intense because you know you're not behaving in the right way you can't blame anyone you know this is all your own doing to an extent and the the inquiry basically became fatter and subtle it was you know the i am sense it was the experiencer of these no self um things and it just like you say now it's endless anyone that says doesn't end i am quite suspicious about because it's as if they've achieved something but to me you can never clarify this enough you know with the balance of not becoming too personal will and getting that revved up you can always clarify that life becomes so mysterious because i know so much less now i've unlearned things i know very little and it's scary to me some at the start because i was like this was everything i needed to know and i'd let go of the knowledge and now even now i'm speaking i don't really know what i'm talking about but it resonates something resonates beyond the language and that's where i think i get the best conversation with people when i don't know what i'm talking about is something moves through this this knowing this this knowledge that's been let go of i don't know who i am i don't know um all of these things and it's very difficult sometimes i talk about that was someone that's into like a particular thing they know a lot about can speak about but this is the end of knowledge and because i think you can move into this place of living and not knowing surrender it's like you you then know the truth because you don't the mind doesn't need to take up all that silence with noise so so the inquiry that you say becomes deep just more subtle and subtle and without the gender and that's how it transforms yeah this thing about um you know you said about somebody who thinks that they've reached the end of it all or something there was a saint teresa of avila said it appears that the lord himself is on the journey you're coming out with some great quote i need to look at all these up after yeah um did you um you know you have this deep self-inquiry thing going on um did that just sort of happen spontaneously when you were younger it just started happening and then that led you to reading ramana books and other things which gave more of a definition to it or did you start reading these books and get the idea to do the self inquiry which is the carton which is the horse yes this is kind of go more into the personal story which is i think can provide a lot of help with people for context especially remember listening to others thinking i resonate with that and i i nothing i'm doing is wrong so maybe i should have talked about this at the start but it was just actually intense emotional work for a good period of time where like like i didn't think i i i can't not take things to the edge like with it with emotional work it got to a point where it's actually damaging the journey because i became so attached to the emotional work emotional work meaning like you were actually working with a therapist or just doing it on your own i had one practice and that was to sit in a silent room or whatever anywhere you were just quietly even in starting off in in my house because i needed that retreat and just to allow whatever was in the body to be there without trying to change it manipulate it even practice out of it basically die into it and this is when i got i hate creating all these candy for the mind but i got kundalini energy which just bolted up through my spine and just seemed like this this energy and had this like all these crazy red relations which now looking back was good that i never got sidetracked into them because this is where people can set up camp so with all of this emotional work what i realized now was it was almost a form of inquiry because these layers of emotion were seen to be layers of identity layers of contraction they weren't just emotional work and then inquiry i was doing a tantric approach first for day and night i remember one time i racked up like 10 hours of just sitting with it and at that point i knew so they're sitting and letting whatever happens that that you call that tantric work i i'd call it yeah i think it's time to i this is the thing i don't read about i just if you do it was just one practice just i think david hawkins um had had a single technique of just get as close as you can to wherever it feels this resistance is and just to die into it let it stay and what i found was all these little residual they were like traumas that i pushed down even lifetimes ago maybe but especially in childhood like they were coming up and these you know it was it was an intense period of time and then deep deep lows and then massive highs and all of this coming up and one day i was running my bike in the news deep down i think what the grief that was coming was that this technique wasn't going to be the truth i had to let go of the technique and the grief in that because it is something like dying away i knew i just started saying i in my head i was cycling about i had a flat tire so i was really going against them so there was that i was i was fed up i think that really added to the surrender but i was going i i i there's something about eye cause i remember ramana maharshi video and i clicked off it because it probably made me try and look at something i needed to look at i was going deep and deep into the sense of i i sat down under a cathedral and i opened up this video of ramen mahashi and i knew everywhere he was saying i know it wasn't him saying it was like a translation of an english guy just reading out what he said was look for the self or investigate itself and that is all and i and i rode home that day and i think as the mind does it once you watch videos and i was i remember coming across rupert's fire that day i remember coming across all these great teachers that were looking for the eye and i i thought i've never looked around before and looked at the one that's even doing the motion work and that's that sparked a good amount of time to just inquiry into the self and i became so interested in yourself i was suffering a lot but i think i had this slight a-ha i can go through this i don't have to go around it with emotional work or all this stuff and i took that to the edge like you said and that's when we go back to how we talk about without even weaning off into um integration that's very interesting um you were just i mean you referred to past lives a number of times today and uh you know i i ascribe to that notion as well i think we reincarnate and you definitely seem to me like one of those people who've been on a spiritual path for many lives and when you came into this one it just sort of kicked in again um you know speaking of the gita again arjuna asks krishna well you know what happens if a person is on the path and he doesn't make it and he dies and um does he not perish like a broken cloud and then krishna basically just said well no he hangs out in heaven for a while then he comes back and picks it up where he left off you know that's i've spoken to a lot of people and there's nothing really special obviously we're all the same stores it's it's it's literally if if you sense something but it doesn't correlate with your memory of this body mind i've usually associated that with something previous to the body something like a resonation that someone resonates but even an energetic movement i think i've sometimes people everyone said it's not just me people have talked about sometimes you feel something and the feeling is as if it's like impersonal it doesn't even belong to you it's like you're feeling that part of humanity yeah so like for example in the masculine the masculine we have definitely in in males even the western world we have certain we've all got our own little stories of why we suffer of course personal defense but with males for example i think there's a lot of um suffering in generalization but in like needing to be an alpha male at times we talk with you all these things that kind of uh aspect where women not to generalize also have some which are they can all relate to and we're all feeling out something that's quite impersonal at times whether it's the lifetime whether it's just this part of the shadow work i'm not sure but i think there's something to really say about you start to realize this suffering doesn't even belong to me it's almost as if like um you're having to go through it for something that's bigger it's not even yours and never mind past lies where the body minds don't match up so the memories don't make sense but you just energetically feel like of course the apple dropped from the tree for me young and and now it's just a radical honesty with oneself to to really feel this through until it permeates all aspects of experience and you live life just oriented towards truth interesting i was a student of marshy mahesh yogi for many years and one time and he used to speak of all the accumulated stuff in our make in our nervous system and all as stress that was the word english word he used i think the sanskrit equivalent would be samskaras but anyway someone asked him well what would happen if we managed to release or resolve all of our stress and it didn't have any anymore and then he and he said then you start working on cosmic stress and uh meaning i think that you know the the stresses of the world the stresses of society become a washing machine for that and the number of people i've interviewed have said that they feel like they can feel like they're processing things that are that people are going through all over the world they're they're acting as a purificatory mechanism or something for stuff that's in the collective consciousness yeah i mean try sitting with anyone post awakening and trying not to feel what they're feeling it's yeah you you just feel it and there's there's no i'm feeling or you're feeling it they're just karmic uh energy that needs to be released that there's something in that that's beautiful because then you realize i remember an insight quite late on was this isn't even my story this isn't even my suffering my meaning me this is like the universe waking up to itself just in my little corner of the universe if we go back to space and time but it's not even mine it's it's like the universe like you say there's something really resonating here about you lose the pers because it's so juicy isn't it all our little stories of this is why i'm suffering and we all have our own many maybe unless you've seen a therapist or someone else not you but if anyone's not seen a therapist then maybe they've never even talked about them before but we all have them our little juicy stories that we like to cling to and say why we suffer um but to resonate no to orient towards truth is to really give these up as well like and that that's sometimes so hard because it's so nice something comfortable and warm to feel why i'm suffering why i can't you know because of this i can't wake up or because of that and that's what surrendered to an extent so i'd like to say you you bottom out to your to your personal suffering and now sometimes you just feel like just general heartbreak for humanity you feel this grief like we're all losing ourselves and in losing ourselves we're gaining we're going back to source but to get back to or to reveal sources who we truly are requires a tremendous amount of surrender and now this doesn't even feel like this is my suffering this is just i'm just feeling this on behalf of humanity here and it and it and it's crushing like it it's difficult yeah no that's beautiful um we expand our territory of influence we could say i think it's a natural human tendency to do that and uh and there certainly is a lot of suffering in the world that needs healing um and you know i mean my i've always had this orientation about spirituality that in a way it's the hope of the world because without it we're never going to sort everything out just with surface level solutions there there needs to be a change in consciousness really for the world to be changed and so i i find great hope in the the fact that people like yourself and many other people around the world are just having these awakenings and you know you don't see it on the evening news and if you didn't realize that this whole dimension exists it would be easy to become pessimistic but i i think that the fact that this whole network of people around the world is waking up could very well be the thing that that saves humanity yeah as you're talking about it made me think of the word responsibility and you can look at the word responsibility in your own personal journey of thing and also responsibility for why why why are we doing this and of course if we are to be really brutalized it usually is fueled by suffering no matter how of course there's good people out there that will do it in order to make you better for someone else but i think the best way you can help others is to really work work on your own realization because when you're for example for me to go into my realization or angelo to go in his realization he didn't try and help me he went into his own realizations floured his realization and through his realization sparked something in mid or you know we don't call cause and effect but it was his own it's once it's when people wake up themselves that has this ripple effect yes less about this i'm going to go and help these people because once you do that personal agenda personal will all comes back and it just takes up the room of what reality was trying to do there yeah i mean look at some of these people that think okay we're going to send missionaries to africa and save these poor heathens you know and turn them onto jesus or whatever and yet those people themselves haven't had any real genuine spiritual awakenings so you know obviously it's pretty true yeah it's premature that's that's the word i was looking for and uh which is the and there's a flip side to everything and that there are people who think you know to help to hell with you i'm working on my own realization so you can just go to hell and you know i i'm not interested in you i you know get out of my way it can become a selfish thing and i've i've seen that but um again there's always a balance yeah it's it's it let me start again am i acting from fear i'm acting through love and and there's something you said though i really want to go into um just now yeah just then when you talk about the missionaries uh yeah it's the thing with suffering because i think we project this kind of savior complex sometimes we want to help these people but sometimes it's their suffering which is going to wake them up for us to try and get away from our own thing to go and help these people not to the extent of the african let's say it's someone that's just spiritually suffering that you know they're your friend or something and sometimes we can take the savior complex that i need to help them but in trying to just do it by forcing something on them like nonduality or this or that i think one it's an aversion from your own sitting in your own and working with your own self and if you really were to realize this deeply it would flower that what they're going through is exactly needed for them i've only ever had insights through deep suffering and there's an extent to yes you can help in a practical level but sometimes i've found to tell someone to just sit with it i'm not going to help but sit with the silence and see what unfolds if you don't get help like you say the balance of that on one hand yeah on one hand we need people to take responsibility for their own awakening and and i think that's what i've seen on the brutal side of things and this isn't to do with the african or the relative level of helping this is to do with being careful of how much suffering you try and take away from someone yeah there's that i mean i i think that groups like doctors without borders or people that go and you know help people build with solar powered wells in villages where the women have to walk 20 miles a day with a bucket on their head and now they can get local water all that kind of stuff is great and there should be more of it um but i think a lot of times the motivation for going into sort of quote unquote save the heathens is very egocentric i mean there's been so much violence and brutality in the name of that throughout history with all the colonization that happened around the world and even now i think a lot of times the tendency to want to get everyone to believe what you believe is a symptom of your own doubt and insecurity you know and it somehow helps to you know reinforce one's self-confidence if you can get everybody else to buy into your particular trip but you know there's a case of actually really needing to look within and not going and out and trying to impose your beliefs on others yeah there's two words you said there um reinforce you said reinforce self-confidence but i would go clay said reinforce self if you're going out with your projections your need to do something you're just solidifying the self that's being as heroes saving someone right you're running from the truth that you're nothing like because to be able to help someone you're then creating this self-image of a savior or or someone that can do something as substance to you that you're going out and doing this thing and i would completely agree on the relative level of you know africa people are in poverty there's that but i'm talking purely on the spiritual level or purely on the in the level of of mind and suffering of psychological suffering um if i was to think about it it would be if i could actually make myself believe illusion even more and feel i need to go and help the south of england wake up or london and start a meditation center these are great things to do when done with the right purpose motivation but i can do that as an aversion to having to sit in silence and sit with what i'm running from because as soon as i have all these big plans to help london or something i'm now back into into mine back into getting away from from that and i've seen just sitting in realization i've reached people through my youtube channel where i upload a video you know and it goes whatever and very little effort on my part but the most effort i put in is just tackling that which needs to be seen in the deepest darkest places on my mind and it's the worst thing i ever wanted to do to start with then you start to realize looking and illuminating these dark places of your mind and seeing the self that appears in all of these stories it starts off being the most painful thing but then you realize it's the most relief because this is where all the suffering was tightly in a ball and that yeah i mean recently the pope went to canada to apologize to the indigenous people because you know in the last 150 years or so or when whatever the time span was the children were taken away from the parent from the families and put in these catholic boarding schools um you know and had to have the their native culture stripped away from them you know shave their heads force them to speak english uh you know all kinds of stuff like that and then they ended up getting sexually abused and physically abused and a lot of them died i mean so it's a complete disaster where people who thought they were righteous were um just doing tremendous harm and i guess this is a little bit apart from our general conversation but i don't know for some reason it's coming up and um you know um yeah i think that one always has to make it one's first priority to know the self to purify oneself before trying to help other people if you're going if you want to be a lifeguard learn how to swim before you start trying to save people from drowning yeah that's the that's the best metaphor for it um and also with the thing with the poke it's like this increasing consciousness has allowed it's almost like there's more awareness now to see what's been happening and it takes a tremendous amount of you know self honesty to go and apologize and this is all it comes down to is honesty not just with others like there's no more blame anymore for anyone else when you really this is what's horrible really because it's so nice to be able to blame certain people and and even guilt you know there's slight residual resistances and these things and you do you have to be so honest to take full responsibility for your own awakening but yes on a regular level people can harm the body these things with words and there's a lot of trauma out there which you know is unfortunate for certain people but to an extent for the real psychological roots of suffering it is what our own doing but it's all our own play we've just lost track of who we really are in this big play and and this is what i'm just although i'm interested all i'm interested in is that root of suffering because people can take it out and then you know we talked about with all these different spiritual stuff whereas all these branches of spirituality with a criminal day but it will just grow back if the root's still there and if you don't take the root out and even when the root seems to be taken out there's still this momentum of the root growing back and you just need to die into that and make it your your life's orientation very good that's a good concluding point and i know we better wrap it up because you have to leave in about five minutes or someplace um so i looked at your website and and there is a it's a simple website not a lot on it but um you do have quite a bit on your youtube channel and i'll link to both of those from your bat gap page but on your website you also have a little thing where a person can have a you know personal conversation with you or something so i don't know how much time you have for that kind of thing but um do you do many of those and you you want people if people want to get in touch they can do that yeah so obviously my full-time job in film so um that's what i do but whenever when anyone ever when anyone is ever interested um i do get quite a lot of those submissions so i just set aside fridays usually for them or be on thursday if people want to talk with me um always open the chat email as well just just in case you just want to speak so if you want a session yeah for fridays but um my emails through my website's always there if you need to chat okay do you take a donation or a fee for that or what yeah so first session is completely free because i just gave up a day of working yeah you only have so much time right yeah so there's a fee but um obviously for thunderball but i've always found these conversations to be so on my end as well i've learned so much so it's great and um you meet people i've met so many people through it that i resonate with and we kept keep in touch and absolutely love it um so so yeah fridays i set aside for that great all right well thanks so much matt it's really been great um talking with you and getting to know you and i hope we stay in touch and uh you know see each other in the future maybe even in person someplace if i ever get over to the uk i'll definitely get in touch yeah that's one thing that's one thing i was going to say because i think at some point it will come to america again just because don't mention during the moment on consciousness um it would be so cool to there's america's a hotbed for everyone who wants to interview and stuff yeah well i can help you get in touch with people that would be really helpful thank you yeah good okay well thanks a lot and uh thanks to those who've been listening or watching and as i mentioned next week i'll be interviewing jessica nathanson she lives in israel although she's from my home state of connecticut we used to actually ski at the same ski area although we never ran into each other either literally or figurally figuratively but i think it's going to be a really interesting interview and i hope you stay tuned for that if you'd like to be notified of future interviews there on the upcoming interviews page there's a little thing in the right-hand column where you can click and put it into your calendar and to be notified of the live ones and then the the permanent ones we send a newsletter out email out when i post each one so if you'd like to get that and be notified sign up for the email list there's a place on that gap to do that and subscribe to the youtube channel if you like and anyway if you go to bad gap and explore the menus you'll find a bunch of different things that you might find interesting that i don't have time to tell you about here but just check out the website look at the different menus all right thanks and i'll see you for the next one thanks matt cheers thank you all right have a good whatever you're going to do i will enjoy the rest of your day really nice to speak to you yeah good to speak to you take care bye bye [Music] you

Channel: BuddhaAtTheGasPump

Views: 16,631

Keywords: Truth, liberation, Angelo DiLullo, free will, awakening, seeking

Id: TtOa20hGTYY

Length: 125min 52sec (7552 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022