(The following is based on personal notes and taping. Please do not consider as verbatim or as a quotable source for Eckhart’s teaching)

Our practice for the rest of this week and this sentence already contains a paradox. Our practice for the rest of this week is to stay with just this moment. And that is the paradox that on the surface of things time seems to be very real. Within the depths of yourself time ceases to be real. So you always have when one speaks of the timeless dimension of consciousness, using language which is derived from the world of time, paradox comes in. The practice then is to just stay, just with this little moment. Just this one. And always with this one. When you are walking out there, stepping, one step at a time, being in the state of "yes" to this moment. That is really all. Now the yes to so-called beautiful, sunny, warm weather maybe a little easier than the “yes” to cold, wet, windy weather. And you can extend that to almost a metaphor to the rest of your life. The strange thing is however that the “yes” to the cold, wet and windy weather takes you even deeper than the “yes” to the good weather.

And the deepest is the “yes” to death. That takes you deepest. And death is any kind of death, physical, or psychological or some loss of something that was important to the “me.” It dies, part of your identity dies and then the “yes” takes you very deep. The “yes” to what is. So the space opens up immediately with the “yes” to what is. The space that is beyond mind-objects, thought. This thought, the mind, the mind-made self wants this to be more difficult. It would prefer to have an outline of what I am supposed to do for the next ten years that finally will get me to space-consciousness. It would be very happy if I gave you a folder describing the steps to take because its very happy with being given additional time. Future. It lives on that. And so it is not happy when it hears how simple the transformation of consciousness can be. It's not happy that it doesn't require time. You mean I’m already enough? Can't be. Not me. I'm not ready. I have a long way to go. Surely, there's so much that I don't know yet. That I still have to learn. I've only read a hundred spiritual books. There's so many experiences I haven't had yet. The fireworks that they talk about. Well, it may be a nice experience but it doesn't last that long. And then you are little me again saying you can be a little me with the added thought-form "once fireworks happened to me." (laughter) And then you can live on the dilemma of how to get the fireworks back.
So the need for more that is built into the structure of the human mind is also here, of course. But of course realization of who you are is not a “more” and that includes more knowing, knowledge, or more understanding which is not necessary. That's almost insulting to the mind. You mean there's nothing for me to do, says the mind? If I may quote the philosopher Woody Allen who said "I'm always astounded by people who want to understand the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." (chuckle, laughter) (a loud sneeze from the audience) A sneeze can sometimes be satori. So the “yes” to just this, just this moment. Space opens up within. Spaciousness. And miraculously you become truly intelligent. I believe it was Krishnamurti who used the expression, "the awakening of Intelligence." And that's what it is. There's more to Intelligence than the mind can conceive. The mind being only a tiny aspect of the One Intelligence, the human mind. Fine, beautiful too. Except when you seek the totality in it (the human mind), when you seek yourself in it, when it becomes all there is, you get trapped in a tiny aspect of the totality. That's a little delusion. When you are no longer trapped in it, the human mind is beautiful too.
So the practice here is not going beyond what “is” now. With the “yes” comes Space. With the Space comes, and I use that word reluctantly, with the Space comes Love. Not the clinging and wanting love of the egoic self. A deeper love, the state of love that's inseparable from you essential beingness. You love what is. And in loving what is, the universe actually becomes transformed. The universe is not separate from what appears in your consciousness. All the forms that appear in your consciousness make up the universe. And when there's love, that which appears in your consciousness becomes transformed. That is the universe.
And that only works if you do not differentiate between good and bad in your thought. Those teachings have been there for awhile. Somebody else said it in different words 2000 years ago. It only works if you don't differentiate between good and bad. How do you not differentiate between good and bad? The mind, the thinking mind operates on the principle of good and bad. It discriminates. We could call it, because that is its essential characteristic, the discriminating mind. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the discriminating mind. Becoming trapped in the discriminating mind and this is why it's so essential to bring the “yes” to what is, an unconditional “yes” because it “is.”
The mind, the thinking mind cannot love what is. It might love what it judges as desirable and it will reject, try to get away from or hate that which it judges as undesirable. Not helpful. Judged as no good. That's what the thinking mind does. It's job is to judge. You cannot change the thinking mind in that sentence saying , "I don't want to judge anymore." The have tried it because humans heard 2000 years ago, "Judge not your neighbor." "Love they neighbor as thyself." And then they tried not to judge. Never saw that the prerequisite for not judging is to step out of the mind. Its only from the dimension of space consciousness that there can be the state of no judgement.
The moment a thought comes in, you've judged something. Thought can be equated with judgement and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what thought does and on its own level it has a certain helpful function if we don't get lost in it.
So love arises the moment there is space. We could almost equate those two. Love is space. And it's the only way in which the world can become transformed. It transforms the world from within because the world is an inner phenomenon. An enormous intelligence begins to operate with the “yes” when the Space arises. So that's the destiny of humanity. What appears to be the individual human being to be an opening for Space.
One could almost say that all the history of humanity up to now was the prehistory of humanity. We're not quite human yet. I don't know if there will be any history after this. There may be but it won't be very important as history. So you look upon, whatever you look upon with love and you love your neighbor as yourself. Your neighbor is whoever comes into your field of consciousness, of course. And this is essential practice now when facing another human being. I mentioned it briefly yesterday, is there Space. Just a little bit of Space. The little space of no-thought, as your attention is there on another human being, the Space of, the openness of no-thought. Length doesn't matter, the Space just...the mind comes in and again a stepping back from mind.
Ideally it's there whenever you listen to anybody. Then it may be that when you begin to speak you might lose it initially. It's a new way of living and so it's easy for the mind to draw you back into the stream of thinking. If you then remember to step back from though once you've uttered what you have to say, you step back again into Space and you listen. And after awhile you can even sense Spaciousness in the background as you speak. Another way of saying it, you can sense yourself, your essential beingness in the background as you speak, the I-AM.
This is probably what a very early spiritual teacher as far as the Western World is concerned, contemporary spiritual teacher, early 20th century, Gurdjieff who spoke of self-remembering. Remember yourself in any situation. Probably what he meant was that. He didn't mean remember the story of yourself. Remember the essence. And it's not even remembering it isn't quite the best way of putting it, knowing it, being it. Remembering could lead you to believe it's some kind of, something you think about. Okay, I must think about myself.
You will be challenged in two ways by the human mind in this because the human mind senses that it loses its control, predominance and the challenge comes from within and it comes from other human minds. Which come disguised as human beings. Most human beings, they carry a disguise of mind. Or the other way round, the mind disguises itself as a human being. The being is there but where? And that is the skill, the art of penetrating beyond mind in others. Of not getting caught up in that density when you are facing of another human being. Not getting caught up in the density, that frequency, that vibrational frequency that is the human mind because otherwise you get caught up in it and you become reactive which means it stimulates your own mind. And that's the normal human interaction.
You can only penetrate beyond that if you have gone beyond it within yourself. It's only then that you can go beyond that in others. That would the “yes” apply here also. The “yes” to what is when what is is a human being right in front of you. That is the form that this moment takes and that maybe the most difficult “yes” of all. Compared to which the “yes” to bad weather is easy. You could be in the Canadian Arctic, and that “yes” would be easy compared to the “yes” that is needed sometimes, quite often when you meet a human mind.
And here we have really, I don't remember who said it, perhaps it was Ram Dass, who said, relationships are the sadhana, the spiritual practice for the West. The main spiritual practice for the West is in and through relationships, encountering other humans. That's the challenge, the greatest challenge.
That challenge has different levels to it. The more you are linked with these humans for some reason, through family ties, one could say the more past you share with another human being, the harder it may be. Practice this at first when you encounter relatively uncomplicated encounters with humans, seemingly superficial interactions. And it's amazing how people reduce all those interactions and of those there are many throughout the day. How they reduce them to a means to an end. When you have superficial interactions, ordering a meal in a restaurant, paying for your food, buying a newspaper, meeting someone in an elevator, talking to the cleaner coming in. Whatever it may be.
Many kinds of brief seemingly interactions that only seem to be a means to an end. Because in the mind-identified state the present moment is always a means to an end. So in the mind-identified state whoever appears in this moment is also a means to an end. That's a dreadful reduction and impoverishment of human existence, to live in such a way that most of your encounters with other humans, both superficial encounters and even other encounters, longer, other kinds of relationships are really, in the mind-identified state a means to some end. Because you are never fully present in the Now in that state. You always want something else out of this Now. The Now is a stepping stone to where I want to get so now all those meetings, whenever you meet anybody, it's a wonderful opportunity for the arising of Space in that meeting which is love also. And all that it requires is to look at this human being and to listen if they are saying something in the Spacious Awareness which has no thought in it. Just that alertness.
This is why we're here, the whole reason why we are here is to know that state of consciousness. To look the same way you look at a flower or tree and, perhaps, at the same time if there is an interaction that's taking place, the waiter comes, you look up from the menu, 2 seconds, 1 second and then you say what you have to say. And then he or she asks the question and then you look and then you say what you have to say. There's a little bit of Space. There's part of the interaction where you are not playing a roll in that interaction when there is Space. When there's no Space it's almost inevitable that you will slip into some kind of roll. In a restaurant, and this is unconscious, in a restaurant you play the roll of the customer and there's a subtle difference then in the way in which you speak to that human being. And the waiter or waitress may be trapped in their own roll, playing the roll as waiter, waitress. And you can sometimes see it when they come. Sometimes some of them play their roll well, they get a good tip. Others don't play it very well either. They play their roll reluctantly. (laughter)
And then there are other rolls that humans play. And you observe yourself, whenever the mind is there, there'll be some kind of roll that you play. Even to yourself, alone in your room, you play the roll, perhaps you're the victim and you're thinking about your victimhood. (laughter) And I'm not saying stop playing rolls, that would be a big demand. But what is possible is to be there when you do play rolls. To know that there's a roll, to notice it. You notice it for example if you behave and speak differently that famous person you meet and the waiter or the person who comes to do the cleaning. Are there slight or considerable differences in the ways in which you speak to them or interact with them. Perhaps there are, which means your playing rolls.
Which means the basis for you interaction is a conceptualized sense of self and you're imposing another conceptualized self on the other person. And two conceptualized selves then play their respective rolls. The famous person may be playing their own roll unless they are so famous they have seen the emptiness of it and gone beyond it. And you might still persist in imposing a conceptual identity.
People do it with spiritual teachers, believing when they meet a spiritual teacher they're meeting somebody important. They're not. They're not meeting anybody except themselves. They might get nervous when they see a spiritual teacher. Are you nervous when you are meeting yourself? Strange but because they have a conceptual identity of somebody important and then you have another conceptual identity of somebody who is not very important.
And you may have a conceptual identity of yourself as important or not important. Or you might not even quite know whether you are important or not important. Sometimes the world tells you this and sometimes the world tells you that. This includes all opinions you have of yourself. And that's an interesting thing, more concepts. Opinions that you have of yourself are ultimately all parts of rolls, concepts, not real whatsoever. Is it possible to live without having opinion about yourself. Do you lose something important when you no longer have an opinion about who you are in this life. You just are.
At any moment when you live in the Now that goes automatically. It falls away with the awareness that is there, the opinions that you have become unimportant. The whole conceptual structure falls away. In the immediacy of present moment awareness the entire conceptual structures fall away so you are no longer imposing those structures on yourself or on others. Oh, no opinions. Can I live without having opinions about myself. Am I losing something important. Your opinions may be predominantly good or predominantly bad and there's a reluctance in both cases of letting go because there's an attachment, "I won't know who I am anymore! At least I know that I am a wretched miserable being." And so the liberating thing is that that becomes unimportant. The more there is that Spaciousness in you life, the more those things fall away, the conceptual structures about yourself are not important. They are not who you are. And then you don't inflict them on others. That's the beauty of it. When they fall away within yourself, that conceptualized self, you don't inflict the conceptualized self on others which is, it sounds shocking, we could say it is the first act of violence.
The very root of violence because it's deadening the humanity, the essential beingness, the essential aliveness, of the other human being which ultimately is no other. And you will only do that if you have deadened it in yourself, first. That is the dilemma of humanity in it's present evolutionary state, amazing.
So to see in some ways we're, this is why its so wonderful to watch an animal, because an animal, too, has no opinion about itself. It is. That's why the dog is so joyful and why the cat purrs. If the dog had an opinion about him or herself, that unconditional love wouldn't be there anymore because the dog would then also inflict an opinion on you. And it might not be good. So the dog would be thinking, "Oh, here he comes again."

(laughter)

So you are meeting another human being in that space of no-thought. Brief, perhaps. That's fine. And then there is a true coming together, a true meeting beyond concepts, beyond roles or opinions. And if you should slip into roles, it may now be easier to notice it when it happens. To notice the subtle changes in your behavior and speech when you relate to different kinds of people according to the concepts you hold in your mind about those people and how you compare your own self-concept with that self-concept. Is he or she more important than me? And that will determine that role you play. Does he know more than me, see? Whatever it is. And a little wanting comes in. You want something from he who is more that you.
Comparison is a continuous thing that the egoic mind-structure uses, continuous comparison of me with others. I can only evaluate me by comparing me to others. How do I rate here? And that determines the conceptual structure of me. And then you try to improve it with all kinds of strange things. Name dropping. Hoping...you're talking to someone and drop a name, hoping in that association with that name which is a concept, belief, this is a famous person and you know him, that your own self-concept, something is added to it that will give greater worth to yourself. This is why the names are dropped, in the hope that in the eyes of that other person, so you are hoping that this person you are talking to will give you more recognition, through dropping the name of somebody else who is famous or has some other high status. So it's a hope to gain a stonger self.
And name dropping is just a small example of the strategies used by the ego to enhance itself. It's always looking out for something. So you may observe that in some spiritually advanced people, occasionally can catch themselves name-dropping. When I talk to my friend so-and-so...Ram Dass called me the other day. (laughter) Whenever you notice something like that, it's not really a personal thing either, this is how the egoic human mind operates. And the noticing it, that's the amazing thing, when you notice it, there are still many humans in this world who are trapped in this patterns and don't know it, they are totally those patterns. Noticing it is actually the realizing of Space consciousness, where you can see what the mind is doing. And so whenever you notice a pattern, a role that you are playing, some conceptual thing, it's a wonderful thing.
The brief insight that you have there, the realization of what is going on inside you, that could immediately be used by the mind again and then formulate a judgement about yourself which could be "Oh, you see, you are still deficient in spirituality. You see, you're doing it again. All that silly, you're still playing silly games that everybody else is playing. You're no good." For example. Other things are still possible, too. But if you stay with the noticing, it's only from the unconditioned dimension of consciousness that you can see the conditioned. From within the conditioned after you've seen it, you might judge it, that's the conditioned again. So whatever you see in yourself, even the worst so-called traits of humanity, because all of humanity is within each human being.
It may not be manifested but all of humanity is within each human and you might discover evil thoughts..."I think those thoughts? I?" There is no “I” beyond those thoughts. The deepest I-AM is not thinking those thoughts. The thoughts are clouds. They are human thoughts floating around. And often people believe all their thoughts come from them. There is really only one human mind. There's the collective human mind. And it's almost like clouds can float into your mind from other minds and you think certain thoughts and you think it's me. All it is is the collective human mind operating.
And you can discover strange things in yourself and the temptation is there to judge yourself as not yet worthy or might never be worthy. You should definitely not be having these thoughts. And so you are making them into a problem, personal problem. The thoughts are personalized and they become problematic. And you give them more power. Because making them problematic is further thought activity, is further self activity, the mind-made self. It loves, whatever dilemma you can find, it loves it. And the more complex the dilemma of yourself the better. "Surely I need twenty years of psychoanalysis to get through all this. To get to the bottom of it all. (chuckle)
Well if you examined the mind bit by bit yes it would take a long time. (laughter) Where did this thought come from? (laughter) So whatever you notice in yourself is beautiful because the noticing, the seeing, is already liberation from being completely identified with whatever thoughts or emotions are happening inside you. And so you can just stay with the seeing, seeing it is the human mind, that’s all it is. If you just watch..oh...oh. That means you are more interested in seeing, being the witness, than getting into the thought or reacting to the thought which creates further thought. It draws you in. And the amazing thing is when you see patterns especially repeatedly, they tend to drop away after awhile by themselves.
Don't have to do anything. Patterns that are no longer invested with sense of self but are recognized as patterns, they drop away. It's only through complete self-identification with patterns that they go on and on and on. And so the recognition comes with stepping back..oh.
So now let's go back to the interactions, there is a human being, question is even in the briefest of interactions, your life is made up of these things. Your life is made up of relatively insignificant moments. The moments that the mind tells you are significant are relatively few. And it might be waiting for one. It might have been waiting for a long time. I'm waiting for a significant moment in my life. "Then I came to a retreat. I thought that might do it." There is a watch they have the advertising slogan, I don't remember what watch so maybe it's not a good slogan. (laughter) There's the watch and somebody is looking at it and is saying "Significant moment! Significant moments!” So I suppose whenever you look at that watch, that moment becomes significant. Presumably it's an expensive watch and so your conceptual self becomes significant when you remember that you are wearing it. (laughter)
Allot of the consumer industry works like that, to enhance your sense of self through an image. A fiction, yes of course. But they don't know it's a fiction. It's their self. So life consists unless you have an expensive watch of insignificant...(laughter) and one of the things that people are waiting for because in the normal state of consciousness you are always waiting for something and really you're waiting for something significant to happen. And not that often does it happen. And it doesn't last very long. The wedding comes and goes. And then daily existence is there. Breakfast every morning.
So and then you are meeting all these people, these insignificant people in your daily interactions hoping to meet somebody significant. And not realizing that you are missing the whole thing. You are missing your whole life in the waiting game. In the conceptual waiting game you're missing your whole life. And every encounter with another human being is potentially a beautiful meeting with yourself. Is potentially the most significant event there could be. Even the briefest encounter when there is a recognition of the other as yourself which is there in the space, perhaps brief space of no-thought, which of course implies no concepts, no roles, no mental positions. There is the end of the illusion of separateness, the illusion of separation which has been there for so long.
And so you meet the ticket collector, casual person you meet on the plane, however brief encounters in the day. And each time there is the possibility of being there as space, not as a little me. And that is a beautiful practice which then becomes extended to those people with whom you share more past. And this past that you share is of course an accumulation of concepts in your mind about them. Otherwise there would be no past that you share. There may also be certain emotions that are linked to the concepts concerning those people.
So you carry a little mental emotional form, formation, one could almost say entity because thought-forms are entities, emotional fields are entities. They have a life span, they are born, they die. For each person with whom you share past you have inside yourself a little mental emotional formation and that is the conceptual image that you hold in your mind for that person. When you only know, you are completely identified with mind then to you, that conceptual emotional image that you hold that is based on past is that person. You are completely trapped in that conceptual emotional formation. So you have constructed unconsciously, not that you have done it, it's done automatically, a little entity, a little mental formation that, when you are totally identified with that, to you is that other person. It is your wife, your ex-wife, your ex-lover, your lover, your father, your mother, your aunt, or whoever else it may be with whom, the person you've worked with for a long time, your boss, whoever it may be, you have that, you carry that, and that wants to remain in place.
What tends to happen is then all your interactions with that human being are happening through the filter of that conceptual mental entity. You are not seeing who is there. There will be things in that human being that you cannot see because they are not part of the image that you hold. And certainly you cannot see the deeper reality of that human being which is beyond any concepts, any story. Part of the concepts is the concepts follow a little story too, part of that formation. So when you are totally identified with that then that is the agent though which you interact with that person. You're really interacting with your mental image.
Another thing that tends to happen is all you see from that person then after awhile is what corresponds and will strengthen that image that you already hold of that person. Other things you may not even see because perception is selective. So they will be, that is how your interactions with other humans become very limited and become totally mind dominated.
How do you step out of that, that prison which first you have constructed for yourself , you put yourself into a prison because you have formed the same kind of image for who you are, “me”, the little “me” as I call it, the little “me” with its story, it's memories, it's patterns, it's reactive patterns and then the little “me” forms little other "me"s around it. That's the prison cell that people inhabit. You may not become immediately free of all that. Freedom is here as you step out of conceptual thinking. That's the beginning of that, losing it's overriding hold on you, all those conceptual structures.
And of course there's a reluctance, the conceptual structures, those little formations, almost entities, little, it's amazing that you have a little, a little being in there that is called "my ex-wife." (laughter) And she lives in here. (laughter) My ex-husband, whatever or my wife or my husband. After many years of marriage it is not uncommon for partners, married couple, they hardly see each other anymore. They just have the image of the other. There's nobody there, just in the distant background there's a body sitting and there's the image. Body, image.
You may have noticed, it happens sometimes as people become more conscious, many of the old conceptual patterns, behavior patterns fall away. This I'm sure has happened to many of you already. Through the arising of the unconditioned consciousness many of the old patterns become less empowered. They just lose their force. And then you might meet somebody you've known for along time, family, whoever, they don't see, to them if they are totally identified with their image they won't even see that you have changed. They want to project the old image. They are refusing to let go of that. And you might want to say, "Hello, I'm here." They may also resent that somehow they can feel that there is now a clash between who you are and their image. They might become angry because the image doesn't fit anymore. What have you done? I don't like the way you are now. You're too conscious.
It is a beautiful challenge. Those humans with whom you share allot of past, to bring in that openness in your interactions. The Course in Miracles speaks of relating to another human being without past. Easier said than done, you might say. In this moment that human appears in front of you and you're giving that human being your full attention. The same attention that you give to the tree or the flower. That human being may be going through their conditioned behavior and yet you are simply giving the most powerful thing there is, simply giving, be attentive, listening and looking.
To be able to do that there needs to be a “yes.” You have to allow that human being to be here at this moment. You might as well because they are here at this moment. They're right in front of you. I noticed a little, to illustrate this, a little anecdote, I once knew a woman, not in an intimate relationship, an acquaintance, who was regarded by most people as one of the most obnoxious people around. "Here comes trouble." When she comes she would be accusing you of something, wanting something, wanting you to get involved in her problems, complaining constantly. So those were her patterns. I noticed once, I was living in a small town, where she also lived, two or three times I noticed, there was basically only one high street, they call it where the shops are, Main Street in the town, I was walking on High Street, more than once I noticed myself as I saw her coming the other way, was crossing over to the other side. But then once or twice or more than that it happened that as I was approaching a corner, she was coming around the corner. Too late. (laughter) And then I noticed a very strange thing, the moment she stood in front of me, there was space and love. The person that I wanted to avoid if I could, but when I couldn't avoid her anymore, there she was, and there was spaciousness and love. And next time I would avoid her again but when she couldn't be avoided, it was beautiful. (laughter)
And a few times in our interactions she felt something, something fell away from her and she walked away as if some weight had been lifted. There was actually love there. It was penetrating beyond those mind structures. Simply Spaciousness was there . It was just a strange thing.
Somebody noticed once that I crossed to the other side and then asked, "Why are you doing that?" It just happened. There was no decision-making involved. It's very much like avoiding a thunderstorm or down-pour of rain. If you can, let's say if you walk this way around, this perhaps is similar, it's a kind of...but if you get caught in the rain and you say yes it's beautiful. So there may be human beings in your life that would not perhaps choose to interact with. You don't have to unless life puts you in a position where you do have to.
At that moment the totality has determined that this is the ideal situation for you and for that person otherwise that person wouldn't be there. So you do not need to seek out those people whom you can't stand but it may be that for some reason this person keeps coming up in your life. And the universe is not insane. The human mind in its present form perhaps is insane but the universe, there is an underlying intelligence at work and that underlying intelligence knows what it is doing. Things are connected at a deeper level, all humans are connected. Sometimes it comes to the surface as a synchronistic event, there's a coincidence and you say "how is that possible?" And what you see is only a tiny flash that is coming to the surface of things to show you the interconnectedness of all things on a deeper level. So whatever is at this moment, is part of the totality and could not be otherwise. It is because it could not be otherwise and so to see the inevitability of 'is' which might mean this human being that I would rather not be with. It is challenging or difficult for some reason, he or she is in my life. And that is your teacher then. If there is a human who is there, that human must be my teacher. What is he or she teaching me? What is this unconscious person going to teach me?
(laughter, chuckles)
It's teaching you this, giving attention, listening, looking, allowing to be this moment as it is and thus going beyond conceptual structures in your interaction. And you may well be ready for this even to practice, some of you may have a long standing issue perhaps with a parent or somebody very close to you. A long history of judgement, or resentment, carrying that inside and the other person carrying that inside. And it may well be that before you do it in the actual presence of that person, be there fully in that Spaciousness, the image may arise in your mind of that human being and you give attention and allow that image to be there in the Spaciousness that you are.
And perhaps you begin then to penetrate, to go deeper than the conceptual entity you hate. Forgiveness is really that. Ultimately forgiveness is letting go of conceptual identity for yourself and others. Give them space, give them space which is yourself. Recognize the feelings that you have and the thoughts that you have as formations, as a formation that lives inside you. The recognition of it means there is no, through the seeing of it as a formation, there's space around it. That means that is forgiveness that is freeing and because all things are interconnected, it is not uncommon for people who do that on an inner level, for suddenly to happen that that person suddenly experiences something similar to what you experience. Some letting go. Not always the case. You don't need it, you don't need the other person to go through that also. That's a bonus. Might happen. But it has happened and people have reported it as miracles. In some cases, its happened that the moment that shift happened, when they saw the limitations of the conceptual identity of they were holding and Space arose which is love around it. You don't love that conceptual, you don't love the conditioning, that entity. You might want to cross the road to go to the other side of the road for. You love the being, because the being is Space and you are Space, that essential being.
And it's not uncommon for humans who've done on an inner level, that shift happened and 5 minutes later the phone rang and it was that person. I've heard similar stories more than once, the phone rang after years of no contact that person rang. How is that possible? Because of the interconnectedness of all things.
So Jesus already pointed to the fact, how important in your spiritual life what he called your enemies are. How important to love your enemies. Now they understood that in a very limited sense and tried to do it through the structure of thought. "Okay I've got to try and love him. Okay. I just can't! I hate him!" (laughter) Or you hear that but you exclude 2 or 3 people from that. "I love!" of course, him or her don't even mention. So that's a beautiful challenge, bringing that into those relationships. Long standing. That have past. That spiritual practice.
So those people who keep cropping up in your life, you can't get rid of, use them as teachers of presence. You're supposed to be with them, otherwise they wouldn't be there. In some cases it's family members, grown-up children, parents, doing mad things. You wouldn't associate with them. You want to be with them in the same room in some cases. This is how people feel. If you weren’t my father, my mother, we would have nothing in common except for the fact that he or she is my mother or father. People feel that. Or a daughter or son or some other close relation. They are there for a reason. You may have more in common that you realize. You certainly have more in common than you realize.
This is beautiful. The rain, the truth being spoken and realized here, the possibility of going within. Could there be a better moment? If you start thinking, yes. If you don't think, no. Then you realize the goodness of this moment, the depth of it, the incredible goodness. But if you start thinking, you will think about a beach in Hawaii, perhaps. Or some other place. Always some other place. Could there be a better moment can lead you into thinking. "Let me think. Yes there could be." Or the question, 'Could there be a better moment?' can take you deeply into this moment and the beauty and sacredness of this moment. (silence)
Something that thought cannot capture. And so Awareness. It is known through Awareness. It's inseparable from Awareness. (silence)
So there's always that dimension of the sacred. The Now is always sacred. That is amazing. No matter what form it takes. (silent pause)
And of course naturally as you become free of the conceptual heaviness, you look and listen more. Attention arises to sense perceptions. The sacredness isn't perhaps in the sound of this rain, it's underneath it. The mind says there's no mystery here. Water molecules are dripping and when they hit the ground, they produce a sound. That's the illusion of knowledge. You still don't really know what it is. (silence)
The sacredness, of course, its the Space that is inseparable from you in which this happens. It's arising in that state, the background, the noise - foreground.
But it's almost, these natural phenomena like rain, it's almost as if Space were still coming through even the phenomenon. Somebody once put it beautifully and said "God made everything out of Nothing but the Nothingness still shines though." And so the Nothingness, the no-thing-ness, the One Life beyond form shining through this rain, too. (Silence)

Make the rest of today a time of stillness. Going within and also being present without, just this moment. It is unlikely that anything significant according to the mind will happen today but go more deeply into the seemingly insignificant and realize how significant that truly is. There's not even a TV here so definitely nothing significant will happen. We will address any questions that have survived in your mind tomorrow in the Now.

Continue: Part 6 - Thursday Morning