Andrew Cohen - N°16 - LAST RETREAT - January 2025

So because this is an enlightenment teaching, the goal is enlightenment, not anything else. That's the destination. That's the goal. That's the point of concentration and attention all the time is the potential for liberation from anything other than the true self, the authentic self. Everything else is irrelevant in this context. In the end, no matter how fascinating any of these other parts of ourel can be in this teaching, we all we care about is our capacity for total liberation, which is absolute freedom at the level of the self. So we don't want to get stuck anywhere else. Most people do. So these holonic engagements, they're not really discussion groups. For them to really be what they can be, which is a source of active liberation, the ego's got to die in everybody who's participating for a few minutes. So I think in spite of everybody in spite of the conscious and unconscious resistance on the day before yesterday. So that that was happening to a small degree in a lot of the groups because nobody was prepared for what was going to happen. So last night most of your groups were were they were good because mo most people were participating and you were speaking about these distinctions in an interesting curious way. So they're all very good but they were they were more when they were good they were more about the what we call the positive ego having a having a dialogue and the authentic self finding its way. This is the main point I wanted to make for this this morning that the positive ego is not the authentic self. The authentic self is not the positive ego but the positive ego can be a vehicle for the authentic self but it's not the authentic self itself. So awakening to authentic self in the context of the positive ego is a step along the way in this journey. But I want you guys to get familiar with going much deeper. Would you let any and all notions of a separate self completely disappear not just in your mind but in your in your own very being in your very being. And people who have profound access to enlightened awareness are usually able to demonstrate that from time to time. And they get so immersed in the consciousness of the true self or the authentic self that their personality their human personality and ego temporarily seems to disappear from the picture. You speak up and be God and all you can feel with their all you can feel in their presence is the presence of the self without a without a separate personality which can be quite thrilling if you're sincere and can be quite fright quite frightening if you're not ready to see the face of God directly. So these groups the goal of these groups is to have a collective awakening for a short period of time to give everybody a glimpse of what it's like to be enlightened at a very deep level. So for that to happen, you have to put into practice these these simple attitudes which I've shared with you. We're going to continue to share with you which is to transcend the personal sphere of your experience. You have to transcend your personal identity which is your which is the comp uh compulsive and conditioned relationship to reality through this structure of the personal self. That seems to be the the vehicle through which we relate to relative reality or absolute reality is a structure of the personal self. Right? This is why these simple instructions of not expressing opinions, not trying to make a point, learning how to be more interested in listening than you are in being the knower, being a lot more interested in listening than you are in being the one who knows. and sitting in a state of vast open receptivity without any idea of what's going to happen with a lot of commitment and uh austerity and strength remaining open to what you don't already know with a with a kind of ambiguous intent intention is necessary because what you want to happen is you want to you want to compel your authentic self to wake up and start speaking through you. So that's what we're interested in. And the idea here is we want more than one authentic self to wake up at a time. So the authentic what we're calling authentic self. We want the authentic self to start having a conversation with itself. Not the positive ego, not the intelligent, educated positive ego having having a conversation with another intelligent well educated positive ego which can be very interesting and intriguing and relatively meaningful. Somewhat we're interested. We want the want the self to talk to itself through us. And it happened briefly two days ago. So I want us to really focus in on this. We want to go deeper. So there's no trace of a personal self having experience anymore. So you have to learn in this practice how to transcend the personal sense of self in a very deep way and see who see what's left. See what's left of you. See what it's like to be you when the personal's gone. And you'll it's it's very intriguing. It's very absolute. It's very profound. It's very liberating if you're prepared for it. If you're not prepared for it, it can be scary and frightening. But if you're prepared for it, it can be the most exhilarating, thrilling opening to to reality that you've ever known. So the the way we get there is just through these very simple steps of not already knowing which I keep repeating and maybe now you know why I keep repeating it because it opens the door these doors to open up. If you really do it, if you make yourself empty, you have to render yourself empty. We all have to render ourselves empty so this portal can open up inside us. And we have to trust in the friend we can't see. We want the friend who we can't see to start speaking our positive ego. So when the positive ego exits the room, all kinds of miraculous possibilities show up about who you are and what's possible individually, collectively. Very thrilling. But this requires an enormous amount of renunciation. So we have to go back to this zero point again and again and again with a great self-discipline and interest which to repeat which is a place of not already knowing not knowing and and being very patient and waiting to see what's going to happen. Now this is what I do when I teach all the time in the first few minutes of the talks I go in and out of positive ego and authentic self. I go back and forth until I start resting. The authentic self usually takes a couple of minutes. And then when that happens, everybody starts getting very concentrated, very focused. Not as much because of what I'm saying, but from where I'm speaking from. It has a particular sound quality. It has a particular tone. Has a particular vibration which awakens us all to non-duality at the same time. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's the mind of the Buddha. It's the mind of the guru. It's the voice of the true self. the source of the authentic self in this work we're doing. That's the that's the goal. There's a lot of other interesting stations along the way which have all kinds of information for us to learn from about being human. But because we're in enlightenment school, we don't care about any of those. You just want we just want the true self, the authentic self in all its liberating glory. Is we're not interested in any other any other possibility because it's only in the true self, the authentic self that you can experience total or unconditional liberation on its own terms. which opens up a different possibility for your relationship to reality than another station. So I want you to think about this morning what it would be like to be you without being you whoever you are, whoever you think you are being embedded in this personal stream of consciousness and cognition. What would it be like to be you? I'd like you to find out where see what it feels like and see what it looks like. See what it thinks like because it's different. It's bigger. It's deeper. It's more profound than any relative notion of who you are. So how that relates to what we want to do in these dialogical processes instead of us speaking confidently as the positive ego, you want to be more patient and see what happens when you wait and don't do that. So it comes from a deeper place inside you. It's always there waiting. But if your attention is always on the past and who you think you have been, you'll gain access to this what we call the true self, the authentic self. The presence of the authentic self will make itself known when that which is infinite emerges. You feel the presence of the infinite and you know you you're beginning to get on solid ground. That becomes the uh unlimited context of a new possibility for being human for all of us. That's the ground of enlightened awareness. And what this feels like is it feels like having the rug pulled out from under your feet. There's a sense of profound expansion, infinite expansion, but there's simultaneous senses I don't know who I am anymore. profound expansion with night, but I don't know what it means to be me anymore. This is unfamiliar territory, but it feels very deep. And we could say that it's uh it's not personal. It's like super personal. It's it's it's 100,000 times more personal than the personal is, but it's not personal anymore. super transpersonal dimension of reality is infinitely more personal from a certain point of view than your ego is. But your ego is relative and the super personal self is infinite. And yet at the same time it's you contains all of your unique personal traits and habits and conditioning, but it's not in any way limited to them. So we're not interested in having an interesting conversation. having a liberating experience. It's not the same thing. That's what this process is all about. And specifically, it's it's this is this is liberating the subjective state of enlightened awareness from these internal domains of the unique individual to the shared shared space between us. That's the idea that we don't know the limitations of what's possible when the enlightened awareness emerges in the space that exists between us. We don't know the limits of what's possible. And I and in my own case, I want to be very cautious about what I think is possible. I want to find out. We have a lot to this is a new territory. So, we have a lot to explore, a lot to find out about what's possible. This experience that I'm describing is not a magic bullet. It's not going to solve all your problems or solve all the problems of the world we're living in or solve all the problems of humanity instantaneously or anything like that. But it's a it's a new emerging aspect or expression of mind awareness that has a lot of interesting potential in it. A lot of people who freshly discovered this this space between us think they found the answer to all of life's questions, all of life's mysteries and challenges. But it doesn't work that way. It's not that simple. But it's a new dimension of the practice of enlightenment. Now instead of enlightenment being mainly a personal matter that becomes personal and collective it's not either or it becomes both. And so in evolutionary enlightenment I want everybody to practice both these aspects of awakening. Both your personal awakening and your own personal access to these higher states of consciousness and deeper dimensions of yourself. It's in the collective experience of this higher state of consciousness and explore what it means for the evolution of consciousness and culture as a total practice and as a total engagement with life. So far with exploring the dimensions of this new higher collective in a subjective we space there's no evidence to say that it will help us solve solve our problems. It helps us to experience non nondual interubjectivity. It awakens us to the one that is the many and the many that is the one. It's a failed experience of consciousness and cognition. But it doesn't have any any inherent miraculous capacity to help us solve our problems that's yet to be discovered. Our problems are going to still have to be solved the hard way. There's no easy way forward. But any way we can find to come closer together in non-dual consciousness brings us closer to ourselves and our potential. else. So the more we do these kinds of practices, the more we have these kinds of experiences can they can make us as said accident prone to all kinds of new possibilities. So if you can learn how to put this dialogical process into practice and you get very good at it in theor theory you're going to know how to keep your ego in check because you're proving it through your ability to perform egolessly under pressure because again through this kind of process you're putting your yourself under certain degree of stress So learning how to keep your ego in check in a very clear and concise way is a very big gift to you and to all of your friends and family. Keeping your ego in check is not is not most people think keeping your ego in check is learning how not to be egoically reactive to adversity or to perceive real or unreal threats. your persona. So, I'm not talking about that's part of it, but that's not the main part. The main part is how to be egolessly open and free in spite of where you think you're at. In spite of how unenlightened you're convinced that you are, you want to learn how to be enlightened. Anyway, sometime around now. And the practice of this this dialogical process gives you an opportunity to have that kind of experience. what it's like to be you and all your imperfection to be enlightened now in the presence of other people. You get to compare that state of consciousness with your ordinary state of consciousness. See what you prefer. But we want to see this as a means to an end. The means to the higher end. And the end is the actualization of the highest human possibilities. You see what I'm speaking right now? I'm not speaking personally about anything, am I? I'm demonstrating what I'm talking about. I'm not self- referencing, not speaking personally. It's not about me. Speak about all of us. That's the authentic self. It's the eye to the Wii consciousness. And suddenly me and my personal story become irrelevant. Right? And because I'm talking about all of this from the deepest part of myself, what I'm saying becomes compelling, metaphysically compelling, whether you're familiar with the dharma I'm speaking about or not. It's the place I'm coming from and it's the place I'm speaking from becomes meaningful because I'm speaking from deepest part of myself, which is the deepest part of yourself and it's in all of us. It does it exists as a potential in all of us. And there's this higher and deeper spiritual work to be successful. We all have to learn how to be able to do that to some degree to liberate your authentic self so you can participate more deeply in life with other people to give rise to these utopian possibilities. If you can do that enough times, you can start to destroy your cynical doubting ego. Cuz for a lot of you, your ego doubts you're capable of doing this. If you don't really believe in yourself, you believe you can do this. So, you need to work on your positive ego. But we're not doing that right now. We're doing something much more direct. And if you can have this experience of a total awakening, even for a few minutes regularly, you can destroy your these deep deeply destructive and corrosive convictions of your negative ego that are slowing you down. without needing to analyze them or understand them. Just because the light of the true self will obliterate them at least temporarily again and again and again and again. And as I've been saying over and over again, if you have that experience repeatedly, you start to believe it. And when you start to believe it, you will heal from be healing from some sorrow and from trauma and from suffering and from everything else if you let it go deep enough into you. I just want this distinction I'm making to go to be heard. I know you've heard me repeat these things over and over again, but I feel it's necessary. When I when I speak about people, I'm not speaking personally. People don't know how to how to do it. What is he talking about? But I'm doing it now. So everybody can do this. When you transcend the personal in yourself, life doesn't get more boring. It gets a lot more interesting. The ego is so narcissistic. You can't imagine the world would be so boring without me. Wrong. Gets much more interesting, much more compelling, much more vast and deep. Let's be spiritually ambitious. Because if you can do that, it give you, whoever you think you are, are a lot of spiritual self-confidence. And then you'll know that you can do it as an I and we can do it as a we. It's important to understand that if the enlightenment project which has been going on for about four or 5 thousand years is going to succeed is going to continue to evolve and continue to succeed in its own context. You whoever you think you are in this work and we have to have to be able to succeed. Every time we try to do this, we have to succeed to prove that everything that we deep believe in our deepest heart of hearts is actually true. So if you if we fail, the enlightened project the enlightenment project fails and if we succeed, the enlightenment project succeeds. So we have to succeed in order to continue to have access to our own super self-confidence, spiritual super self-confidence. So you have to succeed. We have to succeed. And in the end, you have to you have to succeed. Even if other people fail, you've got to succeed because this is about the universe. And you I'm fond of saying that. And if you want to be free more than anything else, no one in the universe can stop you. And I I've believed that my whole adult life and I continue to believe that if you if you're convinced you're going to do this, no matter what it takes, nobody can stop you. Nobody can block you. Even if they try, they won't be able to do it. Nothing succeeds unlike success. The success is important to convince you at the deepest level of your being that this is possible. You have to be metaphysically, existentially, experientially convinced this is real. This is possible. And you have to be convinced again and again and again and again. You have to become a ma a master who succeeds most of the time because as I explained to you as my guru explained to me doubt destroys enlightenment there for some of you that might be in the form of self-doubt small self-doubt you go along self-doubt and it might be down the enlightenment project itself but whether it's down the enlightenment project itself or doubt about your own capacity to do this doubt destroys liberation As I'm fond of repeating, my guru said to me many times and I always repeat it because it's very thrilling for me every time I say it that he said the difference between enlightenment and unenlightenment is doubt. The absence of doubt about the thing itself. So the only way to be able to sustain doublesis is by succeeding most of the time. If you talk about this stuff, but you can't do it, what you're saying has no meaning, just new age fluff. But if you can walk and talk and you can do it for real, then life gets very interesting and the enlightenment project comes alive big time. So be be tough though as I said yesterday. Be resilient and tough and strong in your intention and be committed to succeed for the sake of the evolution of the interior of the cosmos. Make sure it happens and spirit comes alive. You become a secret agent. So this is like putting yourself on the spot voluntarily. add to each other's creative force by surrendering to the process and engaging with it more deliberately, more fearlessly. We start making this personal, we're never going to reach the goal because I'm a little bit different than you, aren't I? I'm a man, you're a woman, you're Indian, I'm American. You like music I don't understand. I like music you don't understand. All kinds of relative differences. It's an ocean of difference between us. You don't want to get trapped in all that unsubconscious creative freedom. the level of mind at the beginning emotion unself-conscious freedom. So if you're unself-consciously free, you're not thinking you're reacting. I wanted to be a drummer when I was a kid. Jazz drama. So Vinnie Calud is considered to be the greatest jazz drummer in the planet. He's considered to be the best. He's very intelligent. So he had he says if you're an improvising musician he said thinking is death. So what I like about that statement is it's so absolute. Not a little thinking is good here a little thinking is good there. So says thinking is death if you if we don't give rise to the creative process which he's a master makes it very simple. So he Vinnie says thinking is death. This he's a very expressive musician. He's a genius as a musician. Thinking is death. So it works through the same way in this process. Thinking is death. Well, if I'm not going to think about this, how am I supposed to do it? I've told you how to do it. Stop thinking and trust and listen. You're not giving me anything to do. Yes, I am. So the way to awaken the authentic self is to be quiet at the level of ego positive ego negative ego shut up. So then it narrows the option. So then you so then when you speak the idea is only to speak from the authentic self. And also as I've explained about three four times on this retreat for all of you smart guys this constant chattering and thinking about what's happening. This is you're constantly trying to objectify this inner subjective experience destroys it as you're thinking about it. You're being where everybody's playing the playing that the wise professor talking about the thing but you be when you talk about it you push it away with your mind you push it away. Thinking is death. So you get smart guys get together to talk about an interesting experience. They can entertain themselves and think are we clever. Look how many perspectives we can take on this one, one event. This is an intellectual exercise. It's an intellectual exercise of ego. But it doesn't help us awaken to the thing itself. Constantly trying to objectify, constantly trying to objectify, trying, constantly trying to objectify. Helps us in limited context, but not every context. Especially not this one. It'll destroy the the experience of freedom itself, the direct nosis of spiritual depth. Do you want to understand this or do you want to experience it? Who feels nervous? It's your [ __ ] ego, man. Does your authentic self care about silence? Ego is a little intimidated, right? I'm having fun. Just playing a game. Don't take it personally. It's your ego. Is your ego getting nervous? Does it matter if your ego if our ego gets nervous about eating at a table full of beautiful people? Does it matter? Because we're trying to go deeper and deeper. And the way to go deeper and deeper is to limit our sphere of our thinking. Does that make sense? It really makes a difference. If you spend all the time between our sessions talking about mundane things, it would take away from the focused intensity of what we're doing. But for the ego, this is very challenging for everybody. So it's when your ego gets unhappy, then you start feeling uncomfortable. But not necessarily because something is wrong. When things go right, the ego can get very uncomfortable. There's no room for me to breathe. I'm going to die. You know, people are afraid of me. I'm I'm a nice guy, which this is how I am all the time. I don't have two personalities. is that one personality, but I scare the [ __ ] out of people. I I don't know what I do or what I say. What you what you got a you gotten a good dose of Andrew over the last 10 days. That's me. I don't find myself very scary, but it's what I represent. What I represent, what I represented is egoless consciousness. And uh I have a lot of friends in town here who are all interested in enlightenment and they love to hang out with me as a friend, but they're afraid of me as a teacher. I never said anything offensive or frightening to them. They really like me. They hug me. They kiss me. They're very adoring and kind and affectionate, but they don't really want anything to do with who I really am, what I really do, but they respect me, but they're scared to death. So I've had this problem all my whole life as a teacher that there's a feroc there's a ferocious nature to the dharma as it comes through me and it's not just the words I use but it's the place it comes from. I don't know why that's the case. That's my destiny. That's my karma. I don't understand it but it's but it's the but people know this is real and so that makes people's egos get a little bit uncomfortable. So please just appreciate that. But you have to be careful of your own ego. We have to be responsible for our own ego is this it's a real thing ego gets agitated because you can start to see in the way that I teach this is very there's a lot of austerity it's very austere because there's no room for the ego to breathe I feel like there's no oxygen I'm dying which is how sometimes I make people feel but that's my job last time I read the enlightenment It's about transcending ego. Follow up. So if you can hang in there with me, you'll be glad you did. In the past when I used to teach very big retreats within the first three days, people would just leave. I I didn't I said what happened? I didn't say anything. I just ging. They would just l they would leave without even saying why they left. Nothing. Nothing happened. Because people feel the threat of ego death and suddenly they say I got to get out of here before it's too late. So we only have I think four days left. So you'll survive I'm sure. But uh please take me take seriously what I'm sharing on it own terms and real and I know that what I teach is dangerous because of its power because it authenticity because of its realness. I don't apologize for that. That's one of my gifts because it's so powerful. And don't listen to your ego. Remember the drum, the famous drama said thought is death. And what I'm teaching work, this actually works. If you apply these principles on their own terms, they actually work.