| Messages/Living Gems |
| December 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, The end of the year is a natural time to stop and reflect. Dredge the memory. Wonder about the future. For me the year embodied the reality of polaric opposites. My beloved guru, Ramesh and his dear wife, Sharda both died. Their passing was intensely painful. Their absence left a hole of galactic dimension. As I watched the DVD of Ramesh's last Talk I was overwhelmed with gratitude for having known this great man. He was frail and weak and in a sense, barely there, yet he was still talking and teaching and leading his visitor into a deeper insight into the Reality that was palpable in the room. His presence spoke volumes more than his words. That which is born must die. That which was never born is eternal. With great sadness comes great joy. My first grandchild, Hailey was born and I was able to hold her within a few minutes of her birth and experience that exquisite connection that is the essence of our humanity. Watching her grow and develop, smile, laugh, recognize and grasp is one of life's spectacular gifts. As has been the case for so many years now, I traveled the world and sat intimately with many people. Overcoming the barriers of language and custom through meeting with open hearts and open minds. I feel blessed to be able to participate in the sharing of this legacy left by my beloved Ramesh...though sometimes when I hear myself say something particularly outlandish I have an immediate vision of Ramesh shaking his head and tolerantly smiling at me (a look I had numerous occasions to see). This is a Living Teaching we are engaged in. It pulses and throbs with life in all its vital aspects. It caresses us and stabs us and all the while it IS us. What a crazy miracle! I hope you will join me in celebrating it NOW! With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) Daily Living Made Simple 1. In any given situation, do whatever you feel you should do. Whatever you actually do would be based entirely on two factors which God made -- your genes and your conditioning. Therefore, whatever you do would be precisely what God expected you to do. There cannot be any sin for which you need to fear God. 2. Whatever happens after you have done what you felt like doing, would be according to God's Will/Cosmic Law. Whatever happens and the consequences -- for better or worse -- will have to be accepted by you; you have no choices. 3. At any time, do not judge anyone as good or bad, neither yourself nor the other; because no one, neither the sage nor the psychopath, does anything: everything happens according to God's Will/Cosmic Law. November 2005
November 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, Niels Bohr, the famous physicist said. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature IS. Physics concerns what we SAY about nature." I think this statement applies equally well to spirituality and religion. All discussions about God, Source or Enlightenment are discussions about what has been SAID on the subject, even if it was said by your own mind. The mind confuses its ability to label and compare things with actually knowing what something IS. This fundamental misunderstanding is at the root of human discontent. It is not the limitation itself that causes the discontent, it is the ignorance about the limitation. You believe that what you think to be true is True in the Absolute sense, rather than realizing that it is true in only the limited relative sense. This is why the Living Teaching focuses on your essential nature, encouraging you too follow your curiosity as it pertains to What You Are rather than what you imagine yourself to be. There are many paths to the edge of the cliff. The one you are on can be glimpsed by looking back over your shoulder. With much love, Wayne
October 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, It has been a month now since the death of Ramesh. For me the sharp pain of loss has been replaced by a dull ache. I have received many very beautiful letters and emails from people expressing their love for Ramesh and talking about the profound impact he had on their lives. He was for so many of us one of lifes most amazing gifts. Ramesh used to tell the story of a publisher friend of his who had mistakenly considered himself to be enlightened. When this man's wife died he was consumed with grief and that confused him. He had imagined that he was "above" such mundane, human emotions...that since he knew himself and all things to be the Absolute, who would be left to grieve for who? This points to one of the most persistent myths surrounding enlightenment....that it results in a kind of passive indifference in which all is known to be illusory, including the one who would know it. Most organized religions exhalt the renunciant, the wandering sufi or sadhu or penitent or monk who gives up business and family life to focus on the Supreme. The assumption here is that daily life and the Supreme are somehow seperate and exclusive of one another. I prefer the Taoist pointer of the man of understanding as being a perfectly ordinary human. He eats when he is hungry, he works to provide for himself and his family, he takes pleasure in his sexuality and cries when he hurts. He lives in accord with his nature. One of my favorite rememberances of Ramesh is of him yelling passionately at the television during an episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in which the contestant chose to risk a small fortune to get to the next level..."You bloody fool!!" Ramesh, always the conservative banker, shouted out. Ramesh was one of the most ordinary of extraordinary men. His life was a testament to this. It was not surprising therefore that he would raise the ire of the modern religious fundamentalists for whom Understanding is synonymous with renunciation and who have very strong ideas about how other people "should" be. Ramesh weathered these often viscious and virulent attacks with typical poise and good humor. "Brickbats and bouquets," he was fond of saying. I admit I didn't know what a brickbat was (it's a club) but I got his point that in this life some people throw you love (bouquets) and others throw you hate (brickbats) and ultimately what they are throwing is more about them than it is about you. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) Asking what happens to a 'me' after death is like asking what happens to the character a person was in his dream after he wakes up. Seeking stability and permanence of being in the state of relativity, the very basis of which is incessant change from moment to moment, is what the problem amounts to. Death is only one of the series of movements and changes which began with birth. It is simply the final change which marks the disintegration of one phenomenal object among the billions that are continuously being created and destroyed, integrated and disintegrated. 1989
September 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, One of the most common responses I get during my talks about the Living Teaching is, "If everything is 'just' a happening and is predetermined why should I make any effort to do anything?" The key word in the statement is "should." In fact, there is truly no question of should. Whether you realize it or not, you do what you do because the Universe dictates your actions. It does so via a combination of genetic predisposition combined with subsequent environmental conditioning (experience and learning). If you look deeply into your own actions you may see that you do things regardless of your feelings that you should or shouldn't do them. The "should" is simply a story that is told about what will happen or has happened. Sometimes what happens is aligned with your feeling of "should" and you are content. Other times there is a disconnect between what has happened and what you feel "should" have happened and there is guilt (if it is YOU that should have done it differently) or a feeling that the world is messed up (if it is the UNIVERSE that should have done it differently). At the end of this newsletter is a 20 year old quote from Ramesh in which he talks about effortless effort. What he is describing is effort without the subsequent "should" which is always a product of involvement by the False Sense of Authorship (the "me"). Consider this note as encouragement to continue to follow your curious heart into a place of silent witnessing. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) It is only the effortless effort (the passive witnessing without judging) along with the pathless path (the pure understanding without any 'me' as the comprehender) which can lead to the goalless goal ('That' which has always been here and now). 1989 August 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, The recent death of Ramesh's dear wife, Sharda, Ramesh's current, serious medical situation (he is in the hospital with pneumonia) and the birth of my first grandchild, Hailey, two weeks ago has gotten me reflecting on this bittersweet miracle of life. In the Living Teaching, we talk about Life as we experience it as being the sum of birth plus death. As an equation: Birth + Death = Life. This is a very different approach than the common idea that death cancels out life. Life - Death = 0 Death in this model is seen as a negation. It's result is an emptiness, a zero. When we take the former, holistic approach, death is understood to be an essential component in the formula of Life. Life itself is eternal. Life is the source of everything. It is our enduring, essential nature. As human beings, birth is usually associated with joy and happiness, death is usually associated with pain and sorrow. I reacted with an almost ecstatic pleasure when I first held my minutes-old granddaughter in my arms. I was later asked how this differed from first holding my daughter in my arms...upon some reflection I realized that my granddaughters birth was more powerful for me because of my present relationship with death. Thirty years ago, when my daughter was born, I had little connection with death. It was an abstraction, something that I was independent of. I intellectually knew I would die some day but there was no reality to it. This is no longer the case. Death is real for me now. I held my Father as he died. I can feel my own mortality in my body as it ages. I have sadly watched my beloved guru grow old and weaken. In a strange but wonderful way this acquaintance with death makes birth all the more spectacular. Birth and death feed each other. In the seeing of this....in the Acceptance that such seeing embodies, there is Peace. May you find it now. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) The individual is always seeking something and is satisfied when he gets what he is seeking. But then another search starts for some other object. The ultimate successful search is that which shows that the seeker already had what he was seeking, that he had never lost it, that the seeker himself is what he was seeking for. 1989 July 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, About a week before I reached Mumbai for Guru Purnima, I received the sad news that Ramesh's wonderful wife, Sharda had died quietly and peacefully in their home. What I will always remember about Sharda Balsekar is her hands. They exist, frozen in my memory, fingertips and thumbtip gathered into a point, suspended over a plate of puri batata, as if sprinkling magic, fairy dust. And it WAS a sort of magic, fairy dust...if you can call love, magic, fairy dust. Because that is exactly the ingredient that transformed those mundane componenents into something truly sublime. Sharda's love infused everything and everyone she touched, transforming us and enriching us. Sharda lived in my home and I lived in hers. For twenty-one years our paths crossed yearly, sometimes briefly, sometimes for months. She was always the epitome of graciousness and subtlety. She was both interesting and interested. She had the ability to make me feel as if I had her complete attention. Another image that will remain fixed in my mind is of her standing high on the slopes of Mt. Haleakala on the Hawaiian Island of Maui, sipping giddily from a glass of champagne, the helicopter that had brought us there standing ready in the background. Her eyes sparkled like the wine and I could see that in that moment she was truly, truly happy, almost like a little girl who had been granted a forbidden pleasure. More than anything...Sharda cared. She cared for her family and for mine. She cared for me and for all of us who were graced with a little of her time here on Earth. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) The basis of all pairs of opposites is the existence of a 'me' as the experiencer. Thus even manifestation and non-manifestation, temporality and intemporality, presence and absence, are all different from each other not in fact but only appearance. Each is a conceptual interpretation by the 'me' as an experience (positive and negative respectively) of the phenomenon of the sequential extension of objects. All pairs of opposites lose all meaning in their mutual negation in the absence of the 'me' as an experience. 1989 June 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves,
I am very pleased to have my new book, Enlightenment Is Not What You Think, coming out this month. If it is at all successful in dispelling some of the myths about Enlightenment, I will be gratified. In the Living Teaching it is recognized that seeking Truth is infinitely more valuable than finding it. The search is alive and vibrant. Once you think you have found it, the resulting knowledge is dead. Knowledge is acquired. Truth is revealed. The nature of this revelation is an absence rather than a thing that is to be gained. Of course, it is impossible to describe an absence...we can only describe something that has properties. The impossibility of the task of describing Enlightenment, combined with the insatiable thirst on the part of the seeker to know what it is, has produced an incredible array of pointers. The inevitable fate of such pointers is that people hear them as descriptions and then take them to be Truths in and of themselves. It would be an endless and thankless task trying to point out the falacy in each belief about Enlightenment. I have contented myself with presenting a broader perspective on the subject, in which a new and deeper insight may be found. I hope you find it valuable. As always, we shall see what happens. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) Just BE. Close your eyes, relax the body, let the mind be vacant, and you are in noumenal beingness, the fullness of nothingness. Such beingness is disturbed by an event that may occur like the breeze may cause a ripple on the surface of water. Then the world comes into existence and the event is witnessed together with the reaction, if any. The breeze stops, the ripple subsides in the water; the phenomenal event is over and you are back in the noumenal beingness. The world arises and subsides in your beingness. JUST BE. The 'me' in you is irrelevant, illusory. 1989
April 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, Our language can tell us a lot about the assumptions of the society in which we live. I often hear people say, "I made some bad choices that put me in the bad position I am in now." On the surface this may seem obvious and indisputable, but it introduces a bigger question. What was the source of the choice? In children it is clearer. If you ask a young child, "Why did you chose to hit Billy and take away his toy?" the child will look at you blankly. He cannot relate to the notion that he "chose" to do what he did. In his mind, he just DID what he did. If pressed, he will explain it by saying, "I don't know, I just felt like doing it." Simply put, it was a happening. It HAPPENED. As we grow older, we learn to play the adult game. We learn how to tell elaborate stories about what happens.We learn to give REASONS for what happens. We learn to take credit and blame, which quickly morphs into pride and guilt. At the root of the adult game is the claim of personal authorship, a claim that is deeply rooted in human culture and society. These deep roots are the greatest barrier to an open and unbiased investigation into the truth or falsity of the claim of personal authorship. The Living Teaching encourages you to be tireless in your pursuit of the truth of What Is. If you find yourself curious and able to look more deeply into the Source, you have been touched in a way that is rare indeed. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) The individual person will usually identify with only those actions which are voluntary and controlled. It is the ego which is concerned with the motivation, the volition, the choice of action, and is not concerned with the 'other', the spontaneous and the involuntary, which the ego considers untrustable, unreliable. The ego is concerned with common sense, logic and linear thinking and thus naturally distrusts anything that happens intuitively, spontaneously and involuntarily. 1989
March 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, Freedom is a word that is often used interchangeably with the word Enlightenment. To be enlightened is to be free. But have you ever stopped to consider what it means to be free? It is curious. Ask people what they think of when they think of freedom and most people speak in terms of freedom to do what they please. Freedom to go where they want to go. Freedom to say what they want to say and do what they want to do. Freedom is often associated with choice. Freedom to chose a leader (vote). Freedom to chose a spouse. Freedom to chose a career. Boil it down and this kind of freedom is about getting what you want. Presumably, the freer you are, the better able you will be to get what you want and the more satisfied you will be. Such a notion of freedom is inevitably linked to power. If you have physical power you are then free to climb mountains you could not if you are weak. If you have financial power you are free to go places and acquire things you cannot not if you are poor. In this way freedom becomes associated with acquisition or control and so it is that most people imagine that the road to freedom lies in acquisition or control. But the desire for such freedom is limitless and insatiable. The more you get, the more remains ungotten. We need only read the newspapers to see where such an approach has lead in the fiscal world. In the spiritual world this same desire for acquisition and control takes the form of a spiritual materialism in which more and deeper UNDERSTANDING is sought. Spiritual freedom is often thought to be freedom from mentation or freedom from anger or freedom from desire. In this way, equanimity and peacefulness are seen as states to be attained either through diligence or surrender. In fact, freedom is never attained. It can only be revealed. Freedom
is not a thing to be acquired but a condition that currently exists. It
is here, now and it underlies everything. True freedom is total Acceptance. With much love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) Intuitive understanding may or may not give one supernormal powers which function to the extent that they are not forcefully willed or claimed, for the truly awakened ones know that their real siddhi is everything going on in the universe. On the other hand, siddhi, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, may be cultivated by special disciplines just as exercises are used for physical hygiene. But however far such disciplines may be pursued they do not lead to prajna, but tend rather to obstruct it by encouraging the sort of egocentricity which is often noticed in great athletes and actors. Courage in living, the grace in living, spontaneous living comes naturally from prajna - the intuitive realization of being one with all that exists. 1989
January 2009 MESSAGE FROM WAYNE Hello my loves, The Living Teaching is built on the principle of investigation. True Faith is understood to be sighted rather than believed. It arises naturally out of the Understanding of the nature of What Is. Within the Living Teaching, faith and Acceptance are bound together. Whatever you look deeply into may lead you to confront The Mystery that lies at the root of everything. Faith is the profound Understanding of what truly Is. Deep looking happens through a variety of channels. People we call Thinkers, look primarily with their intellects. People we call Feelers look primarily with their hearts. People we call Doers, look primarily thorough their deeds. People we call Yogis look primarily through their breath and bodies. The Living Teaching embraces and enfolds all these channels. The Living Teaching can be understood as the river from which all the separate channels break off and to which all the separate channels inevitably return. With love, Wayne
A LIVING GEM FROM RAMESH (previously unpublished) The real secret of life is to understand that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he really lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it, by letting go he finds it. 1989
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