Webcast Transcript 14 February 2006

> Darryl.

Wayne > Hello Darryl. It’s been a while since you’ve been seen here.

> It has been.

Wayne > What brings you back?

> In the neighborhood?

Wayne > Hm-hm.

> I have a lot of concepts I’ve built up since last I was here. (laughs) Same problem.

Wayne > Hm-hm. We’ll see about dismantling those; what have you got?

> Um, gosh, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Let me think… I’ve just been reading a lot of stuff; it’s like cotton candy to work with - different ideas and thoughts, and I find myself trying to get away from it, but I keep going back to it…For me it’s a very fascinating study - to look at religion; look at prophets, those kinds of things. But Advaita seems to be the clearest for me, in some ways; although I’m not sure what it’s saying… I really don’t know… but it’s nice to be back here.

Wayne > So have you been reading anything interesting, in particular?

> I was reading some of the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin, from the Christian tradition, and it’s really interesting looking at this background, and how his writings make a lot more sense when you understand that he was a paleontologist and he loved geology. I don’t know what it’s worth but it’s interesting to reflect on.

Wayne > I haven’t read him. I’m familiar with the name only. What was it about what you were reading that interested you?

> It was an anthology of mystics, and he was one of the mystics in the anthology.

Wayne > I see.

> So I was interested in looking at my background in Zen and meditation and Buddhist philosophy, and looking in the West to see if there was anything that can be learned from that tradition. That’s just the person I’m looking at right now, so… I’ve no idea why I do it. My wife reads Glamour and I read the Bible and mystics and Advaita, so…

Wayne > Well, as long as you don’t force one another to read one other’s material you’re in good shape.

> Unless you’ve got a budget for cosmetic surgery. (laughs)

Wayne > You want larger breasts?

> I think if I had some they’d be large! (laughter) I also look at Ramesh’s writings, that little book with daily thoughts… I forget what it’s called…

Wayne > A Net of Jewels.

> A Net of Jewels, that’s great, it really, really is refreshing. I still felt my head is going in the proverbial dog’s rear end - a lot of searching I can’t seem to get rid of. And I found this place to be very relaxing, as well as supportive for other…I won’t say neurotic…other people with the same disposition that I have. So it’s nice; I’ve found a lot of comfort here in being with other people that are like me, I guess you could say.

Wayne > Hm-hm. Humans are social creatures, we seek out those with similar temperaments and natures to ourselves because there is comfort in that commonality, so it’s very natural for people to coalesce around a shared interest, or a shared philosophy, or attitude, be it Glamour or Advaita; people certainly have very varied kinds of interests.

(pause)

> (laughs) I’m laughing because of what my mom said. She asked me where I was going, and I said, “I’ve got to go over to Wayne’s.” And she said, “Who is that?” And I said, “Hm, well, hm, it’s kind of like a spiritual teacher, that type of thing.” And she goes, “Hm.”

Wayne > There’s a lot of “hm-ing” going on in your household!

> And she said, “Where did you find him? You always find such… unusual things, you know.”

Wayne > Did she say “weird” or “unusual”?

> Probably “weird.” (laughing) And I don’t have any answers for it, but it’s an interesting thing, I am the one in the family that seems to end up at your place and other places I’ve done, and it is a question, “Why do you do that? Why do you go there? There’s a church right across the parking lot from where you live, why don’t you go there?” - that’s a lot of my mom’s statements, you know. Interesting. And I go, “Oh well, mom, that’s seems to be my life.”

Wayne > Hm-hm. Is your mom a Christian?

> Lutheran.

Wayne > It would be a fair question to ask her why she doesn’t go to the synagogue that’s right around the corner. (laughter)

> The church across the street from me is Lutheran. You said something the other day… that kind of thing that just occurred for you, you know - the grace, just all of a sudden - you didn’t cause it to happen; your actions didn’t cause what took place in your life to occur, or for you to get sober, you know…

Wayne > We’re talking about my sobriety specifically now?

> No, I’m talking about both of them. When you had a complete awakening…

Wayne > Yes.

> …your conversation wasn’t that you were all of a sudden doing this, and this caused that to happen. It was just that this was occurring, but this happened… and it was separate from, but it wasn’t really connected to…

Wayne > Hm-hm, so what is your question exactly?

> I don’t know… we were talking about coming here and emptying out. You know that a lot of times you get things taken away and nothing given back to you, like you’re not giving me a story… like “You should believe… blah, blah, blah.”

Wayne > OK.

> So, one of the things that you said to me was, “Anne, you can get hooked onto that feeling of having the rug ripped out from under you.”

Wayne > Hm-hm.

> But that’s not something that I have control over, having that experience of having the rug taken away, and then not having that experience…I don’t see that I have to stop doing certain things in order to have some things change… that it just happens. No?

Wayne > I’m not quite sure where you’re going yet. Are you?

> Yeah.

Wayne > OK, then let’s keep going. Tell me where you’re at.

> OK, so one of the things that happened several months back is that all of a sudden I got that I always recognize ME. There is never a time that I get confused about “here I am”…, I’m sitting here; I’m not in your chair; I’m not in her chair; I’m here.

Wayne > Right.

> And I’ve had many past lives where I’ve seen, and never do I look like I look now. I always recognize me in a crowd of people, and I go, “There I am.” And finally it hit me that there was something about that I had no idea, that it’s not this body kind of thing, it’s something else, it’s a recognition of something. I didn’t know what it was but I totally recognized, “that’s me,” “that’s me,” “that’s me”…

Wayne > Hm-hm.

> …in all these past lives and stuff.

Wayne > Hm-hm.

> And I could see that nothing changed that, it never shifted, that nothing changed it, nothing added to it, nothing taken away, nothing. It was always the same, always…I don’t know…there was a consistent, “that’s me.” And so I mentioned it to someone who was told by Gangaji that he could go and teach, and he said to me that I need to focus on that, and that I need to keep focusing on that recognition. And it doesn’t seem like that is where I have to go; I don’t see you as having to focus on recognition, you know. You’ve never said that. I mean, you did Tai Chi; you did some meditation, but it was just through being around Ramesh all of a sudden, then…

Wayne > The point is that all of these are stories we tell, you see? The universe is composed of events, and there are billions of them - billions of things happen. Now, of all these billions of things that happen, the human mind needs to organize that into some kind of reality, into some kind of functional arena in which it can operate, because there is too much information, there is too much happening. If you had to process every single bit of it, all the time, you brain would fry, you would be totally immobilized as you churned through this incredible mass of sensory input. So, what the organism learns to do very early is to screen data, and to put it into hierarchies of values, and it’s all part of a selection by the physical senses, you see? So the physical senses limit the amount of information that the organism processes, and because you can only hear in a narrow band, you can only see in a certain range of light, you can only operate within a certain range of temperatures, all of these things limit the organism’s perceptive abilities. Then it’s further limited by the brain’s functioning and what it selects out of the sensory input, what the senses bring into the organism – the brain organizes all that information, and certain bits are “brought into awareness.” It’s an incredibly complicated process, but you can see in your own experience that certain things rise to the surface of your awareness at a given time, and you can never predict what it’s going to be. You may be focusing intently on something, then all of a sudden a thought, totally unrelated to what you’re focusing on, rises up into your awareness. We all have that experience. Part of that whole process of awareness is ordering the data in the universe according to a principle called cause-and-effect, so we relate events, one to the other, on a causal basis. We say, “this appears to precede that most of the time,” in our experience; therefore we shorthand this relationship and say, “this causes that.” Now, that’s a very useful way of perceiving the universe, it allows us to function, and such relationships are crucial to the organism’s ability to exist and work as a human being. But what we’re concerned with is looking at something much more fundamental in terms of the nature of what is, in the universe, and then cause and effect relationship does not serve very well as a tool, you see? And you start to see that the cause and effect relationship is, in fact, notional. When we say, when we have an event… we’ll take my being struck sober, OK…?

> Right.

Wayne > …because I wasn’t doing anything with the premeditation, with the intention, of having that result we say that I wasn’t doing anything to bring that about. However, there were numerous events that did precede it, obviously, billions of them, from the moment I was born. Now, selecting which ones were causal is an interesting exercise. You say, “OK, which one was more influential than another one?” “Is there a causal relation between breast feeding versus bottle feeding and subsequent sobriety?” and maybe if you poll a million people who have had that experience and isolate those two factors you can come up with a link. And then we say, “Aha! We now know that this causes that because there seems to be a predominance of people who have this or that preceding them, and so we say this caused that, or that it had a strong effect on the subsequent event. But it all gets pretty fuzzy, you see, because it is not a predictor of what will happen with any individual. There is absolutely no use whatsoever in any of these statistics or tendencies to predict or explain what will happen in one particular case. So when we take a particular case, all we can say is that this event happened and these were all of the events that preceded it.

Now, we do tell stories, as human beings, about our past and part of the story is causal in nature. We select certain events out of our past and link them together into a story, the story of our lives, and they have to do with our self-image of what our life was like. Now, somebody else who was along with you for most of that time, your sister, or your parent, will have a totally different story about the same time frame, and your movement through that time frame will have an entirely different story. So, cause and effect are functionally useful, but you have to understand that essentially what we call causal is arbitrary, it’s a story we tell after the effect, after the fact: “this caused that.”

> You used an interesting word, it was “notional” or “notion.” There is a lot of guesswork in having notions about things as compared to the world we live in, which is depicted in such concrete ways.

Wayne > It is depicted in concrete ways, but when you go beneath the surface of it and begin to look at what is presumed to be concrete; even concrete, when you look at it atomically is mostly space. It seems very solid, it’s firm, but structurally, relative to that which composes the concrete, the atoms that compose the physical concrete, what is actually physical matter is insignificant relative to the space around it, and yet it appears solid.

> And if I think of that when I’m driving I’ll crash into something.

Wayne > That’s right. It’s not useful functionally. For functioning in your environment you rely upon the information provided by your senses, and they are often accurate enough for you to function. Not always, but often.

> “The great causal chain of reactions” – that’s what they teach in school. So what we’re looking at is a different kind of unlearning, maybe?

Wayne > Well, it’s a questioning of these basic notions, saying, OK, causal chains are useful, functional relations. Are they accurate representations of what is? That’s another issue.

> But certainly not entirely. I mean it’s an aspect.

Wayne > What’s an aspect?

> Saying that, yes, there’s a physical reality to live, and we know a lot about that reality, but it’s just one part of it and is not supposed to be taken as the whole, it’s just a part of the reality we live in… (pause) …so the notion that I had as I was driving by here was that I wanted to come here.

Wayne > Yes.

> The notion might be otherwise. How the hell am I supposed to know what the notion is, anyway?

Wayne > You start with your experience, and you say, OK, my experience is that I had the idea that I’d like to come here. That thought arose. So, if we can start with that occurrence, and then begin to look at what that occurrence lives in, what is the environment for that occurrence? It arose in this organism, but it didn’t arise in millions, billions of others. How is it that it arose in this one and not in billions of others? What factors contributed to that? How is it that it arose in this organism today and it hasn’t for years…I don’t know, when was the last time you were here? About two years ago?

> About that, yes.

Wayne > So for 365 other days in this same organism the thought didn’t arise. So how is this happening occurring? And that is the beginning of an investigation which can lead to all kinds of interesting things.

> I know exactly what you’re saying because I’ve read so many stories of people who have awoken, you know, and they’re all different, they really are, and one a woman who was pregnant, I think she was about seven or eight months pregnant, and just left her doctor’s office, and was chewing gum and waiting for a bus on a street corner in Paris, and she woke up totally, you know. And that was her story, that she hadn’t been seeking, she hadn’t been doing anything, and she just woke up! And I thought, well, can you imagine all the people who have been following her, they have to get pregnant, and …

Wayne > But she had been seeking. That happens not to be one of the better examples in terms of what I would consider to be a genuine awakening as opposed to a spiritual experience. (shrugs)

> OK, I didn’t follow into it further than that, I just read the little stories of awakened beings, or whatever.

Wayne > It made a good story.

> Yeah, I thought so. I think what it was when I left on Saturday, there was a cautionary feeling, there was a caution, “Well, if you’re coming here and you’re seeking out these experiences…” – to stop that. What I got when I saw that “Oh, that’s me,” because I was doing all these different things in all these different lifetimes, and nothing I did made any difference, and it really didn’t shift, change any of what I thought. I don’t know what I got, but anyway, I was just definitely unchanged in attitude, not subtracted from nothing, that was it, that’s all I got, and that all this was going on but it didn’t affect me, and so I was thinking I could read any book I want, I could go up, I could go down, I could be in there dirty, filthy, clean and it didn’t affect it, and so I (pause)…anyway, I guess when I left here on Saturday there was a feeling that you had said to me I should have paid more attention to the caution, and maybe I got it wrong, like “Oh, maybe it wasn’t really true,” like maybe I shouldn’t be getting this feeling of the rug being ripped out from underneath me, and stuff like that. I should have asked you the question at the time, is what I got, because it’s too confusing to go back.

Wayne > No doubt about it. It’s very confusing to go back. But anything that you attribute to me that has “should” or “shouldn’t” attached to it isn’t me. OK. I have absolutely no sense of what you should or shouldn’t do.

> Cool. Thank you.

Wayne > You’re welcome. (pause) And that’s really what’s pointed at when we talk about the unconditional love and the total acceptance of the sage…that there is the absence of any “should,” either specific or implied, you see? Now, unfortunately, the ego, when it hears something, applies a “should” to it. Because I might well describe something I like or don’t like, something that you’ve done, perhaps, that I like or don’t like, but there’s no suggestion that you should have done it or shouldn’t have done it, you see? It isn’t about you, it’s about me - I liked it, I didn’t like it – it’s totally about me. But when you hear it, it becomes about you, “I did a great job” or “Damn, I shouldn’t…” (laughter)

> True. Personalizing it.

Wayne > Well, not just personalizing it. Personalizing is very natural, you’re a person, so you’re going to personalize it, but it’s the involvement by the ego in that personalization which supplies the “should” and the “shouldn’t” - which is a whole other layer of involvement from the primary reaction of personal involvement, which is when you’re complimented it feels good, and if you’re criticized or chastised it doesn’t feel good. That’s everybody. But in the absence of involvement there is simply that reaction, the reaction of the organism in that moment, you see?

> If an example of the concrete is something that feels hard and real when you knock on it, I realize that, as you [Wayne] break it down, it’s obviously a much different story. What does it look like when we look at our own supposed or notional identity, who we think we are? Does it have the same kind of depth to it that the concrete example does?

Wayne > Yes, I think that example is quite consistent, but why don’t you take a look and find out for yourself, rather than taking my word for it? Because that is something that you can do, much more readily than you can investigate the concrete, because you don’t have an electron microscope readily at your disposal to do that, whereas you do have the means at your disposal, theoretically, to look into your true nature, to look into this question of personality.

> It’s certainly hard not to use metaphors or stories to talk about this kind of stuff.

Wayne > Of course.

> Because if we didn’t have them we wouldn’t say anything! (laughs) My mind continues to turn to look for the next way to encapsulate it.

Wayne > There’s no problem with that. I mean it’s the function of the mind to organize according to stories, to draw parallels and to make metaphors; that’s how it functions, it relates one thing to another.

> But without it what will we do with our time?

Wayne > We live, presumably. Living simply wouldn’t be occupied with that particular activity, but by some other activity.

> I was thinking of impermanence. It’s interesting, I was thinking of the concrete, and I was thinking the human being, who I think I am, is more like a vapor, when you look at it in a broader sense, of time. What I take to be a real concrete person is something that’s evanescent, it’s fleeting, it’s impermanent.

Wayne > Yes.

> So it seems that that’s a great teacher… if you’re awake… is the fact that everything is impermanent, you see it all around us. But yet again, we don’t ever really realize that we’re hypnotized or whatever you want.

Wayne > Right, so if all of that is impermanent, is there anything which is permanent? Because the fact that everything is impermanent is not a great revelation, everything that is born dies, everything that exists came into existence from nothing. So, what is that from that which exists has come?

> (laughs, pause) But the stimulus, the response, the conditioning, that notional connectivity, is removed when you recognize it’s all impermanent, isn’t it? It was a conditioned response to something that we had no control over, and those have built up over… I mean they’ve always been there, have always been building and creating.

Wayne > If they’ve always been there, then they’re permanent.

> There have always been these… cause and effect have always been there.

Wayne > If that’s true, if it’s always been there, then it’s permanent. So what is that which is permanent, you see? That’s what we’re looking into.

> If I figured that out I could translate that into making lots of money on the stock market.

Wayne > Maybe, maybe. Why do you want to make lots of money on the stock market? Let’s look at it, why would you like to make money on the stock market? Say you make five hundred million dollars on the stock market, is that going to be enough?

> Not particularly, no.

Wayne > No? OK, say you make five billion dollars on the stock market. Is that not something which intrigues you?

> That’s my business, sure. Of course, yeah.

Wayne > So, what will it give you if you get it? You must have some sense of why you would want…?

> It’s not going to translate into pleasure, that’s for sure, I can tell you that! That money doesn’t mean that you’re happy. I deal with miserable wealthy people all day long.

Wayne > Right. So you told me what it won’t bring you. What is it that it you feel it would bring you if you got it, what makes it interesting for you to get that?

> That’s just not interesting.

Wayne > You need a new profession, my friend.

> It could be I do! (laughs) I don’t deal with money, I deal with people, I deal with how people deal with money.

Wayne > Right.

> That’s what it is. I don’t see myself as… well, I don’t want to be doing that for… (pause) it’s interesting to think about.

Wayne > What’s interesting to think about?

> About money, and how people are driven by money, it’s actually quite fascinating. But for me personally I’ve never really reflected on if I had money would I do differently. I would probably continue to work, I would probably continue to do the daily things I do, I would continue to come here. I don’t see that not having money is an obstruction to my life. For the next person it might be a little bit different, I don’t know.

Wayne > Hm-hm. Well, I have a very clear sense of what I would do with lots of money! (laughter) And modeling is not one of them! (laughter)

> It’s like the people who win the lottery and they say, oh no, we’re going to stay in the same house and keep working at the same job, you know, the wife says that, and maybe two weeks later it’s gone, it’s different… I imagine things might change a bit.

Wayne > Of course. But it’s when one anticipates what something will do for them in the future, whether it’s enlightenment or a million dollars, or whatever the lottery is this week, and when you buy a ticket, often the pleasure of buying a ticket is the fantasy of what you would do, you know…what this represents, if you got it…and I am quite certain that people entertain the same fantasy about enlightenment, “If I were enlightened, what would it be like for me, what would my life then be like, how would I live?”

> Spend it.

Wayne > Spend it – yeah. And so it’s often, I think, very instructive to look at that sense of what you think you’re going to get.

> When we were talking, and you said…and it got down to “it’s ego,” like that part of me that was concerned, that’s the ego part of me that didn’t come from you, and I was thinking, “Oh, look, the ego’s still here,” you know, and I know that that’s not how you experience it any longer, that you no longer have that ego part going on, that constant barrage, and I thought, “Oh yes, wouldn’t that be nice.” And then it hit me that that isn’t what you experience either, because if there’s no ego there there’s no ego there, that’s it.

Wayne > (reading) Issy asks, “Do you agree that even though there is no ego in reality there is still an appearance of an ego, even in an appearance of you, i.e. wanting shelter, food, sex and an attractive shirt?” That is not how I use the term ego. The ego is not what wants food, shelter, sex and attractive shirts; those desires are a function of the organism. Human organisms seek food, shelter, sex. Some are programmed to seek attractive shirts. These are all functions of the organism. In my definition, it is then the ego which becomes involved, it’s a secondary involvement by the ego. The ego says – let’s take sex because it’s such a popular subject – “If I get sex then I will feel satisfied, then I will, as the ego, feel complete,” you see? If I get the object of my desire, I will feel fulfilled. This has nothing to do with the sexual urge itself, which when it’s satisfied it’s over, it’s done, it’s fulfilled. The involvement by the ego is an involvement which is never satisfied. The ego is never satisfied, and so that momentary sense of completion that the ego experiences simply doubles the desire for more, you see? And so it is an endless process, and one that is endlessly disappointing. But it has nothing fundamentally to do with the basic desire. The basic desire itself - whether it be for food, shelter, sex, recognition in society, money, any of those things - is simply a function of the organism. But if the ego becomes involved and says, “If I get them, then I will be satisfied,” that is the basis for suffering because it can’t happen, the acquisition of those things will never satisfy the ego, and so there is a constant state of dissatisfaction and suffering. And that’s really what I ultimately find quite amusing about the whole idea of renunciation, the idea being that if I renounce those areas of desire – so I rid myself of all worldly goods, I get rid of all my nice shirts, I stop having sex, I don’t hold any kind of money, I have only the minimum of food necessary to keep the organism alive – that somehow this will bring me closer to God. The ego then will not have any food for itself because it can’t attach to those things. But the ego is infinitely resourceful, and it simply says, however subtly, “I am a renunciant, I am not concerned with the pleasure of earthly things, I am a seeker after God, that’s what I am!” You see? It’s an incredible dance, it’s really, really amazing to watch the whole thing play out, isn’t it? One of the classics is in India where they had this thing called the kumba mehla, which is where all the sadhus, the renunciants, from all over, come together for a big bash, a big spiritual gathering, and they have a parade of the gurus. And these guys…every year there are murders, they fight for the position of their guru in the procession. So the process is endless.

> A true holy war! (laughter)

Wayne > A true holy war! They don’t have anything except a steel trident. They’re naked, they have nothing, except a weapon. It’s an incredible dance, it’s really an incredible dance, I love it.

> And that dance continues to come and go until all of a sudden, as in your case, it doesn’t come and go like that any more?

Wayne > That particular dance does not come and go, but other ones do, the dance of life continues. As long as the organism continues, the dance of life continues.

> Right, absolutely. Got it.