Andrew Cohen - N° 30 - LAST TEACHINGS - Dec. 24 _ Feb. 25

The personality, the ego is not a problem. You should let go of it. It has a natural and subconscious expression. And if we're very if we're very neurotically wound up in our personality and have all these problems and fears and thoughts, personality becomes very self-conscious and very distorted, very unfree. And if you let go of the personality, your identification with it, identify more with the true self, then the personality begins to express itself in a very natural, spontaneous, beautiful way. And you notice that you have a unique personality that's unique to you. I have a unique personality that's unique to me. She has a unique personality. It's unique to her. They're all beautiful expressions of our uniqueness. If we let go of our neurosis and attachment to the ego and if we don't let go of the small ego, we're going to distort the expression of a personality. We're going to be weird people. Ego distorts the persona. So the enlightenment solution to your question is just focus on the true self and forget about the other part. Then you trust that everything will unfold. Yeah. If you let if you leave it alone and start to express yourself in a beautiful way, you'll start to become more beautiful as a person. Is there any reason that it should be easy? Huh? If you're going to be an Olympic champion, you don't expect it to be easy, right? When the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, he said, "I'm not going to get up till I'm enlightened." Have you heard this? Do you think he expected it to be easy? So, expect it to be hard and maybe it'll be easy. I found that I expected it to be hard and for me it's been very easy because this has been a gift to my guru gave me this as a gift. So, I didn't work for this to my knowledge. gave me a gift and then the rest has been easy to be honest. I didn't struggle for this in this life. Anyway, just started happening. I met him. I spent time with him. It just started happening by itself. I didn't do anything and I didn't believe a thing anything he said. He said, 'Andrew, when you leave me, something very big is going to happen to you. And I thought, [ __ ] How the [ __ ] does he know? Really? And when I was leaving, he was he was waving his arms and he was laughing. [laughter] The true story. And I I thought this is this is really weird. And then everything he said came true. How do you explain that? You can't. So personally, I haven't had to work. I haven't had to work very hard for this. It's been easy for me to be honest. But most people struggle with these issues. In my teaching, I think that the reason that people struggle so much is because they're not sure that they want to let go yet. From my understanding, if you're sure you want to let go, if you're convinced, if you want to let go completely, let go completely. let go completely of this life of the ego's relationship to it once and for all and forever and it's easy. A lot of people aren't sure they want to go that far. It's a fear of letting go completely. That's what the problem is. Makes it very difficult. It creates a lot of painful situations and ultimately most people don't end up letting go. They end up dying first. So it can be easy but it just requires an enormous leap of faith. Understand? It's not it's not very complicated because if you let go completely you're not going to know who you are anymore but you still have to be yourself. So how can I be myself if I don't know who I am? If you let go of the mind, it's easy. It happens by itself. That's that's that's how it works. Father, even if there's no ego, there's still a doer. the one who makes the choices. I have in my in my way of thinking which is just me. I have difficulty with this concept of there being no doer because from the minute we open our eyes in the morning to the minute we go to sleep at night, should I brush my teeth? [laughter] Yes or no? Should I have coffee or should I have tea? Should I have fruit salad or should I have an omelet? Should I fast? These are easy questions. Constantly making choices. Some some questions have enormous consequences. These bigger questions involve more of our self than just these conditioned responses. So to me, this position of there being no doer creates a lot of existential confusion. And a lot of a lot of gurus get in trouble for saying there is no doer. Take advantage of a lot of people and say I did but I didn't do anything. So what we hope is that our choices can be an expression of a conscious choice a conscious and informed choice. I know who I am. I know what I'm doing. I know what I want. A lot of people make decisions from unconscious motivations below the conscious mind. So they don't really know what they're doing. They don't know what they're saying. They don't know who they are. So we want to know who we are. We want to learn how to make very conscious choices. Become the conscious chooser, not the unconscious chooser. Saying there is no chooser, it's not real. But I want to become a conscious chooser versus an unconscious chooser. That makes more sense. We're conditioned on multiple levels all at the same time. Level upon level upon level upon level upon level. So much conditioning. biological, personal, cultural, psychological, philosophical, ethical, so much conditioning. It's very difficult for there to be a free agent in the midst of all of this complexity that makes up the self. So to be able to find some autonomy in the midst of all this complexity, we have to liberate more and more of our conscious awareness so we can have the ability to make a conscious choice which spiritual work. [ __ ] just doesn't happen. I'm saying I don't think that's what you're saying is true. That's that's not how life happens. Life just doesn't happen to us. We're a ball of conditioning, ball of conscious and unconscious motivations and impulses that determine the choices we make and the actions we take. Doesn't just happen. It's not just a random accident. What I'm saying is there's a part of oursel that's not conditioned. It's a small part. It's free from the conditioning because we can be aware of the conditioning. If we can be aware of the conditioning, it means we're not completely trapped in it. That's the part of ourel we want to grow and make bigger and bigger and bigger. The bigger the more the larger this part of us gets, the more free our choices can become, the more conscious my choices can become. We're no longer a victim of life. Those who attain selfmastery, that's the ultimate goal. That's the whole that's my whole point. But if you don't resist it coming back to you, it starts to feel good. It's it's personally very empowering. I have the possibility to liberate myself. I can become free. I can liberate my mind and self. And there's no end to what's possible. There's infinite potential I can liberate. This is very good news. Otherwise, what you're advocating is a kind of which is very popular here. It's a kind of self-acceptance. I am who I am as I am. It's perfect. [laughter] Is that really true? Not necessarily. That's my point. With an evolutionary perspective, we realize there's always room for improvement. Even in these areas where there's no food at all, there's no the light, the light of conscious awareness doesn't seem to enter. The light of some conscious awareness could still penetrate these deeper and darker layers of self at some points. So we're not we're not so we're not none of us are finished. We're all works in progress. There's always greater potential for improvement. And the more these parts of ourel have become illuminated, we we realize there's more and more room for expanding our capacity for making conscious choice. So what I'm proposing is is a both end situation because what the adi what this extreme advice of vanta offers us is self-acceptance in the present moment without conditions. And I'm saying what I'm speaking about is there's a foundation of self-acceptance but also an embracing of our evolutionary potential at the same time. The self-acceptance is always egoic. The true self doesn't need to be accepted. But but the egoic self-acceptance lets everybody off the hook. I'm perfect as I am. And I say really so can we embrace self-acceptance at an egoic level while embracing our own unlimited potential to develop at the same time? That's what I'm advocating both in. So it means you can still love yourself, accept yourself, forgive yourself while at the same time embracing your infinite potential for higher development. both thin. Cuz if we accidentally walk into a wall or make some kind of mistake that causes karma, we have to re-evaluate and roll roll up our sleeves and get back to work or not. Because hardcore reality has this very mysterious way of keeping us on our toes. It's not just not being victimized, which is a big part of it. It's also doing well, succeeding. Are we doing well according to our own criteria? What that means? Are we succeeding according to our own criteria? What that means? Are we flourishing? That's the most important thing to me. And whenever I'm teaching, I'm trying to get very specific about what I mean. And they translate the dharma into kind of practical realities. And whether someone is walking their talk or not, you have to get to know them. You can't tell if you get to know somebody for an hour or two hours or a couple of days or a couple of weeks. You can't tell. But you get to know somebody over a longer period of time and see how they endure the challenges of life and the challenges of samsara and you can tell what they're really made of and how free they are and not how steady they are. How steady we are? How steady are we? Unwavering. Committed. Strong. Strong. So being strong versus being weak, being clear versus being confused, >> being kind versus being mean. >> For example,