Andrew Cohen - N° 5 - LAST TEACHINGS - Dec 24 _ Feb 25

The personal stream, personal sphere. It suffocates absolute spirit. Suffocates absolute spirit. So the problem is most people don't want to give up the personal sphere because they think that's who I am. Say that's not who you are. It's not who you are. It's not who you are. It's not who you are. Can you let go of it? It's not who you are. But people don't want to let go of it. They want to stay attached to it. It's just personal. That's the where the illusion is. People want to know what the illusion is. The illusion is a personal existence. That's the biggest illusion that there is. These days, we're being trained to focus on how much we've been beat the up. So focused on trauma and pain and grief. So if we we've been taught how to think about it and get into it and identify with it. So it's it's just like stirring the pot. It makes things worse and then you get like say getting sucked into a wormhole of pain and grief gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And it's a 100,000 therapists out there willing to torture you with all this Forgive me. I've suffered and traumatized traumatized others. You've suffered. You've been traumatized. used to traumatize others in this lifetime and 100,000 other lifetimes. We're all guilty. We're all right? So, why don't we just accept it and stop? I'm sorry. Should we go into my story? You want to hear what my Very good. Because if you tell me your story and he tells me his story and she tells me her story, we'll be here for a thousand years. We'll cry for each other. crying for the same thing. So if we're interested in enlightenment, is is that what's most real? Say no. So what if you want to be enlightened, why dwell on that which is ultimately unreal? So the ego, all that feels more real than anything else, but it's not. That's the big lie. So, you can go to these trauma workshops and these these uh therapeutic emotional indulgences and and having these cathartic emotional experiences, but it's not going to set us free. It just just makes things worse. We start realizing I'm very precious and I'm very sensitive because I've been wounded. You have to treat me carefully. I hope you're trauma aware. It makes us more hyper hyper uh sensitive. Whereas if we want to be three, we have to learn how to be strong, which means we all need to learn how to be emotionally resilient. So the thing about enlightenment is if it's real, for most people it's not real, it's just a game. If it's real, we've got to drop the problem. It doesn't mean you haven't been hurt, wounded, traumatized, but you've got to let go of your attachment to it. That's what nobody wants to do. Everybody wants the freedom to be a victim. And if you're going to really be enlightened, you have to give up that freedom forever. That's what makes you different from everybody else. You've really done it. Most people think that's the most important part of who they are. The part of them that's been beat up. It's not. It's not a matter of not facing it. You have to you have to want to be I want to be free from all that garbage. Doesn't mean it wasn't painful, but I I can give it up now. I'm not going to learn anything more about it if I just spend more time thinking about it, crying about it. Trauma doesn't go away through spending more time on it. Trauma disappears when you think about higher things, bigger things, more meaningful things, higher truths. Then the pain of the trauma disappears because you're dwelling on something more real. That's the whole point. That's liberating. Then you have to live a different life. It's not based upon all this nonsense. A lot of the spiritual workshops that people are doing are just not going in the wrong direction. They're all psychologically and emotionally self-indulgent, making things worse, not better. So we have to learn how to be dispassionate with our own pain. That's how the ego gets killed. Make sense? Dwelling on our woundedness is like heroin. You met a junkie that can't stop. And and a junkie loves it when you really identify with their pain. Let all that go, baby. You might be spiritually bypassing. You don't want to avoid anything. No, no, but try. So, while I agree there's the danger of spiritual bypassing, there's a greater danger that we won't succeed at spiritual ever spiritually bypassing because we're so stuck in the garbage. So much garbage sucked to us that we can't even get away from it. That's where most people are at, man. Who am I? Who am I really? Am I the true self or am I the small self? The true self's never been hurt, wounded, or traumatized. Right. Right. Free from grief, free from history. That's what Ramen was talking about. So if we were going to aspire to be that free, we have to be willing to let go of our pain and our suffering and we have to forgive every forgive the our torturers, our mother, father, sister, brother, family, friends, all the ways we've been betrayed, victimized. Let's let it all go if we can. That takes more courage, no, more spiritual strength. So the the enlightenment's perspective is if you see that we're all in this together, all this these we're the conditioned robots acting out the same nightmare over and over and over again believing in the reality of the small self. So the real the difficult thing about enlightenment is really letting go of the small self, letting go of the small self, letting go of the small self and its story. The small self has a story. His small self has a story. It's a narrative. My small self has a story and a narrative. We have to drop the story. If I dropped a narrative, it's not who you are. If you don't know anything about consciousness, you'll think that is who you are, but it never was who you are. It's a small part of who you are. It doesn't mean damn thing. And so the spiritual courage is letting go of the narrative, letting go of the story. Letting go of your ego story, not working it out. Working it out is different. Letting go of the whole story is how you find freedom. Now does it look like spiritual bypassing? It might. But if it works, hey, why not? If it works, then do it. But then we have to really let go though and when the pain comes back we have to we have to say no no no I know who you are I don't believe you. You imagine if you believe you've been involved in this process for hundreds of thousands of years. The pain or the conditioning has been happening for all that time. So it doesn't disappear overnight. We have to we have to find out who the enemy is and then be able to recognize and just say no I'm not going to I don't believe you. You can't touch me. So in this teaching I call it what does it mean to have no relationship with the content of consciousness? No relationship. I understand what you're saying Andrew but my memories come and they they trouble me. I say will have no relationship with the memory. Can you choose to have no relationship with the memory? Can you choose to have no relationship with the memory? You can choose to do that. The memory doesn't have to disappear. You just have to choose to have no relationship with it. Then you have an opportunity to be free in spite of the fact that the memory is present. I promise you if you explore and you keep letting go, coming back to zero, You'll only feel good, only feel good, only feel better, only feel lightness of being. It's like being in a balloon. You throw a rock out of the balloon, you start feeling light and lightness of being, you know, carrying all that garbage around in your mind. So the result of letting go of fear and pain and bad memories. It's only lightness of being and it's always available to us if we just remember. It's the memories are almost like like junk like heroin to a junkie. So you have to resist the temptation to identify with all that garbage. And you have to see your personal experience is not any more valid than mine. Mine is no more valid than yours cuz it's all just personal. That's their if you're interested in enlightenment that's the illusion. But it's an illusion most people cannot give up. And you see what happens a lot of people when you they get challenged to give it up. They get scared cuz they say well without that story I won't know who I am. So then they get very scared terrified of being nobody or terrified of not already knowing who they are which is samsara which is hell father. So I have a little mantra I help people with. To be free means to have nothing, to know nothing, and to be no one. Go back to zero. It always feels good. Not going back to something, going back to nothing. Always feels good. Always feels like a new beginning, a fresh beginning. It's always liberating, always lightness of being. Always without exception. The memories come back in. Uh desires come back in uh judgment comes back in uh comparison comes back in uh it destroys freedom. Having nothing, knowing nothing, being no one, going back to zero. So remember before we finish, there's two parts to this path. The first is having no relationship to the content of consciousness, which is what I'm speaking about. Once we've nailed that, once you get pretty good at that, then you have to be able to work on now that I have no relationship to consciousness, what is the right relationship to the content of consciousness. They're different. Cuz if you only practice no relationship, you're you're abandoning the world. You're spiritually bypassing everything all the time, which is a one-trick pony. It doesn't work. So, you want to master no relationship, become a good yogi. And once you've mastered that, then you begin to question what's the right relationship to body, mind, and personality. What's the right relationship to life? Because if you don't know what the right relationship to life is, you won't know what you're supposed to be doing. You can't only let go. You have to the letting go is the foundation. Then you have to find out what's the right relationship to being here. And it comes from making the right choices.