Andrew Cohen - N°7 - LAST RETREAT - January 2025

Have you ever thought about wanting to be free more than anything else? So this is the foundation of the whole teaching. It's all you need to know if you want to be free. So this means simply I want to be free more than anything else. I want to be liberated more than anything else in life. More than anything, it's my heart's desire. I'll do anything for that goal and I have no doubt about it anywhere in my body, mind or personality. So this is the foundation of everything. I've been speaking about this for 35 years. And how this came to be the foundation of my teaching was that one uh a guy who had been a friend of mine became a student 35 years ago and he had been a Buddhist monk for about four or five years and when he was coming to my teachings he was struggling he was having trouble so he came to talk to me and I said have you ever thought about wanting to be free more than anything else he'd been a Buddhist monk for four or five years he said no I never thought about that I went are you [ __ ] are You kidding me? How could you become a Buddhist monk and not consider whether you want to be free or not? This was impossible for me to understand. Like I couldn't get it. It was craziness. So then it occurred to me that a lot of people don't do the obvious apparently. They don't consider these things. Do I whoever I am want to be unconditionally liberated absolutely totally completely forever here and now? It's a very basic fundamental absolute question that we address to ourselves. Whoever we think we are and based upon whatever however you answer the question it will shift the direction of your life. Your relationship to life will change accordingly. I came to discover the hard way after working with many people that unless the answer is an unconditional absolute irrevocable eternal yes you'll never make it. And I also discovered that for the ego, for the separate self sense, it's absolute eternal, irrevocable, eternal. Yes. Like it feels like a death sentence, which it is. So this is why in my teaching work, I stress these basic foundational spiritual principles from the very beginning, knowing that most people don't know what they're dealing with. Takes 10 years to understand what this means for real. So the point I wanted to make this morning which is carrying on from what we were sharing yesterday is that this if you if you think about do I want to be free more than anything else and you decide with passion with liberated passion and awakened conviction. Yes I do. Enlightenment is all I want. I feel like the Buddha must have felt before he left his kingdom. I want unconditional liberation more than anything else. I don't know what it looks like. I don't know what it's going to feel like. I want to be free and I'll pay any price for it no matter what without making any excuses ever. It's the real deal. So what I wanted to say is that this is still the case and I wanted to talk about this with all of you if you want to talk about it. This is the foundation of everything. Most people think they get it until they run into trouble within themselves. They come in, they run up against their own blocks, their own fears, their own doubts, their own unconscious impulses, and they get smashed against the wall without being ready for it. So the cultivation of the absolute intention prepares you for all outcomes. If you're serious, you'll be ready because of this decision alone. If it's blind, absolute conviction, blind, and it's absolute your ego in the dust. Unless this is very, very strong, you'll forget. You will lose your way eventually. Some karmic event will happen in your life and you'll get distracted from your spiritual interest and you'll lose your way. You fall off the path as many people do. The idea is to stay on the path without losing it and losing your way. So that's one point. It's foundational. It's absolute and it's eternally true. And because it's such a simple concept, clarity of intention, I want to be free more than anything else. Some people say, "Yeah, that's obvious. It's so simple. It's so obvious." Say, "No, it's not." Not when it involves your soul. It's not so obvious at all. And this takes years to discover how profound this particular tenant actually is. That's why it's the foundation of everything. So if we discuss the first tenant, the first principle of the teachings in alignment with what I was trying to share with you yesterday, which is the shifting nature of manifest reality. Manifest reality is a shifting sands. As I said yesterday, as the Buddha said, everything's changing all the time. So manifest reality is is an experience of constant change. Things are in constantly shifting position. Things that were true one minute ago are no longer true because there's a change in position. constellation shifts. What was true before is not true now. Within the complexity of this everchanging shifting perspective, wanting to be free more than anything else also can be challenged. You might decide you want to be free unconditionally, absolutely, totally and completely in one context. But if the context changes, you lose your balance. I wanted to be free, but in this context, I'm not sure even what it means anymore. So the cultivation of the intention to go all the way has to be stable whether the context change or shifts or not and it will life is very precarious unpredictable so that the context will change when you don't expect it to change and the question is will you be prepared for what you don't expect most of us aren't. So if the intention for liberation becomes your most profound aspiration more stronger than anything else and you need takes years to cultivate you have to understand that the difficulty with this first tenant is it's so intellectually simple most people think that's easy any idiot can do that but it's actually the most difficult one of all that demands everything from you no matter if the context changes or not the point I want to make which I find very fascinating is that I was thinking about a lot of you dawning on me how the the first time people are exposed to these teachings if they're receptive and open and interested the teachings make sense to them and they say yes I accept this is true I accept this is true because it's simple it's profound it makes sense it makes sense it makes sense but what a lot of people don't realize if these teachings or if this dharma makes sense to you because of their simple rational nature the deep truth they hold they actually become more demanding over time because of the life circumstances And the way things shift this context of shifting context and shifting sands and the precarious nature of being vulnerable confused individual the demand of these principles will get stronger demand more from you last over time. So the relationship to these principles can't be a static one. If you think you already understand it and you're doing it without thinking about it, you might be deluding yourself. So our relationship to these fundamental principles has to constantly be scrutinized by ourel to ourel and upgraded because your life is always changing. Personal circumstances are constantly changing and your attention is constantly being called in multiple directions all at the same time. So why a lot of people find these teachings difficult to stick with over a long period of time is because they get distracted. It's an inward distraction because life is very complex and demanding. It's understandable. I'm not blaming any of it. I'm just making an observation. So, what people don't realize is if you say yes to this first principle and you mean it as much as you're capable of meaning it at this point in your life, you're saying yes to something that's going to be more demanding in a few years than it is now in ways you can't even see now. It's the enormity of what this is is what I wanted to share with you. This is true for all these basic principles that we'll talk about this morning. So the awakened truths that you discover when you say yes to these absolute principles will increase in power and significance as you develop and as you as you live your life it'll become more significant, more profound and most importantly more demanding. So wanting to be free more than anything else now is one thing especially if you're a beginner. Sure of course I want to be free more than anything else. Who wouldn't? But over time, these principles get will get more demanding on you personally for better and for worse. Nothing wrong with that's the way life works. But you have to be spiritually prepared for that and most people aren't. Follow my point. So being in alignment with your own deepest aspirations requires constant reassessment between yourself and yourself, yourself and your teacher, however you want to look at it. You have to be constantly reassessing and checking on yourself in relationship to these fundamental distinctions. So you're always in alignment with the edge of your own development. A lot of people think because they said yes at one point or they understood the teachings at one point they said yes I did that. That's ancient history baby. What are you doing now? What difference does it make? Follow my mind. Choice. Choice is a very big theme in this teaching. I am the doer. You are the doer. Say, who's the eye that's the doer? Whoever it is that makes the choices. If it's your ego, then it's your ego's fault. If it's your authentic self, then it's your authentic self's fault. I don't care who you think it is. As long as you take responsibility for who's ever making the choices. Somebody's making the choices, right? Somebody's making the choices. So whoever that is, we, I, you and we, if we want to be free, have to take unconditional, absolute, irrevocable responsibility for the totality of the entity inside us who's making the choices, positive and negative. Ego, true self. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Just have to keep that covered. I'm the doer, which means I'm the chooser. It's the only way karma can be defeated. This is how you get the ego trapped. So the second principle of the teaching is the law of this means this calls us to it says I want to be free more than anything else. I want to be free more than anything else. So in order to be able to do that I need to be willing to aspire to take unconditional responsibility for the to some totality of my karmic predicament past present and future. So because I'm an evolutionary, I'm an evolutionary thinker. I'm an evolutionary idealist. I see our karmic extreme as being part of a continuum that that precedes and transcends this lifetime. So when I'm speaking in this context about taking responsibility for our karm extreme, it means for whatever happened before we got here, which is probably a hell of a lot, what we're doing now, the choices we're making right now, and the choices we're yet to make in the future. So this is a cultivation of a cosmic aspiration to take responsibility for the sum totality of our karmic predicament. Now, nobody can actually do this. It's too demanding. But we can aspire to do it. We can reach beyond our limitations and aspire to take unconditional responsibility for the sum totality of our karmic predicament karmic stream. Even though it's technically impossible to do, we can aspire to do the impossible. Unless we aspire to do that which is impossible, we'll never take a step forward into that which is new. So you have to reach beyond our limitations constantly. So this is a very big ask and it has to do with the way you think about yourself and your karma. You have to aspire to be unconditionally responsible for yourself and all of your complexity and confusion and contradictions and paradoxes that make up the self. You want to own the whole confusing package including the spiritual impulse, your worst mistakes and everything in between. You want to own it. It's all me. It'll help you to take responsibility for yourself and become selfresponsible, autonomous. Finally, you want to think very big. You have to have to think beyond limits. And this is a very important one. A lot of people think they want to be autonomous and want to have free agency. But you can't be autonomous and path free agency really at a deep level unless you're willing to take full responsibility for the totality of your karmic predicament to the best of your ability and really mean it. You be leaving things out of the picture you may or may not see. So this is like you or me as the as the vulnerable individual aspiring before God to take responsibility for the sum totality of who we are in an evolving cosmos. So it's a huge commitment and it's a very heroic commitment if you mean business. So to repeat what I said, it's not really possible to do, but we're aspiring to do the impossible so we can develop and grow. You aspire to do the impossible. That's how evolution we catalyze evolution that way because we're reaching way beyond our limits. It's intentionally too much. We know it. But unless you reach that far, you're going to make a lot of mistakes that you wouldn't make otherwise. Right? And in the same way as with the first tenant of the teaching, what it's going to mean to take unconditional responsibility for your karmic stream, past, present, and future in the present moment is going to be harder in 5 years than it is today probably. So when we embrace the evolutionary context, we want to realize that the context is changing all the time as being influenced by by karma, by past and present circumstances, by unforeseen events. So the ground is always shifting. This is not a static endeavor. The only thing that's static in this enlightenment context is the ground of being. The uncreated, the unborn. That's the only thing that's static in in reality. Everything else is changing and moving and shifting. Nothing else is static. So keeping this in mind, we unconsciously believe that all kinds of things are never going to change, but they always do. When we embrace the evolutionary context, we want to embrace the truth that the ground under our feet is constantly changing. So our metaposition, our own personal philosophy, metaphysics has to embrace that truth. So it's kind of like dancing and moving balls all the time without falling down hopefully. And in the midst of all this, everything that's changing and shifting, you want to do your best. That's why I was saying yesterday, we want to do our best. We're not trying to be perfect, but we want to do our best. So this, if we want to do our best, it means you have to do the spiritual work. It'll make it possible for us to be aware enough to be able to respond to this kind of complexity every single day. A lot of people in their ignorance and unconsciousness assume the reality. It's not as complex as it really is. It's not as unpredictable and not as dangerous as it actually is. And also a lot of people don't want to deal with the karmic implications of being conscious. The more conscious you become, the implications get bigger and bigger and bigger. I keep on reminding all of you that it's you. It's you, baby. It's not him. It's you. And if you unless you have a big heart and you're really working on letting go of your ego every day, you won't be able to handle it. So a lot of people in their arrogance make the complexity of the totality of reality less than it is less of a challenge, less of a burden. Just because they can't handle the spiritual burden that it presents itself to be just because you don't want to face it doesn't mean it it doesn't doesn't make it less than it really is. So the enormity of what we're dealing with here just the more you understand this the more your more the nature of reality reveals itself to you. It doesn't get smaller. It all only gets bigger. Never goes in the other direction. It always oh my god I had no idea. It's never oh I didn't realize it was that small. It's always only oh my god I had no idea. It's bigger and bigger and bigger. More overwhelming more overwhelming. More more overwhelming. Can you take it? Most people can't take too much reality. I got enough problems of my own. So, so the evolutionary context brings the reality of our appreciation of constant change into the picture. So, these teachings are trying to tell us what what's the perfect position to take if you want to be liberated. That's what these teachings will tell you exactly what you need to do to take the perfect position in relationship to the change. the position you can you can take the perfect position in relationship to it in order to save your soul and be able to consciously evolve but you have to be aware that it's not a static process it's not something oh yes I've done that I did that 10 years ago very good just because you did it 10 years ago doesn't mean anything about today baby so the point here is that the demands on your soul will get more will grow they won't become less This is not something you can just take care of and be done with because the nature of what we're dealing with is the some totality of all of reality. Got to let it in. What I'm saying it's kind of overwhelming. So the demand will increase. The third tenant of the teaching is the hardest one. It's very difficult to practice cause. If you want to be free more than anything else, you want to take responsibility for the sum totality of your karmic stream, past, present, and future. And if you want to do that, you need to be able to practice to the best of your ability and all your imperfection, facing everything and avoiding nothing. Takes care of all the psychotherapy. Now, so I can say I don't believe in psychotherapy. Listen to this. This is psychotherapy. when it's well practiced. So this one is the hardest one because it says face everything and avoid nothing. Very difficult to do that. It's ultimately demanding. But you have to be willing to try to do this to the best of your ability and all your imperfection every day if you're going to make any spiritual progress. This is shadow work. People that are interested in shadow work, you don't need help. You just have to face yourself and use all the complexity of your everyday day-to-day experience to help you see into your own unconscious motives. Face everything and avoid nothing. It's very very very very very hard. Most people don't do it and nobody can do it absolutely anyway. Nobody can do this absolutely but some people are much better at it than others. And it has to do with this the sincerity of our interest in liberation. Because if you can start facing everything and avoiding nothing, you're going to be very humiliated by your own stupidity and unconsciousness, small mindedness, pettiness of the ego. It's humiliating, frustrating. But if you want to be free, you'll do it because you don't want to torture other people with your own unconscious motives and aspirations and tyrannical intensity. And this facing everything and avoiding nothing is obviously has to be done every day. There's no relief in facing the truth about yourself because the self never goes to sleep. So you have to be very very vigilant in relationship to yourself. And this is very difficult to do. But you have to want to do this between yourself and yourself every day to the best of your ability. Nobody's perfect. Everybody's going to fail at this. But if you want to clean up your act and do better, I always say we have to do bad do our best. If you want to be sincere about doing your best, practicing facing everything and avoiding nothing is foundational. It's foundational and it's hard work. But it's the only way through the maze of unconsciousness and confusion. Also, if you want to cultivate the capacity for agency and autonomy, profound independence, self-respect and inner freedom, a lot of it depends upon your success in practicing this tenant. You're getting to know yourself better than anyone else knows you. Becoming really self-responsible and self-aware. So you want the inner the the inner observer your own inner observer the best part of yourself is paying attention to what you're doing to be on duty all the time and even if you're paying attention all the time to the best of your ability you're still act out of unconscious emotives anyway at least you'll be more aware of it than you were before so this is eternally this is eternal dharma and these three principles clarity and attention the love delutionality and the facing everything avoid nothing are all you need to know to be free in the context of what I call personal enlightenment. Everything you need to do, all the dharma you need to understand practice is in these three principles. All the fundamental dharmas here. If you put that together with the meditation dharma, what it means to assume no relationship to the content of consciousness plus these three principles, you're on your way. You know everything you need to know. Then you just have to practice them. Everything is there. Because everything's changing all the time. You're living in a world of shifting sands and manifest reality. Basically, everything avoiding nothing is going to enable you to become aware of all these changes that are happening all the time. Shifting your position, shifting your position, shifting your position, shifting your perspective, changing your opinion, changing your ideas about life, reality, other people, and yourself most importantly. I used to have a saying was something like always leaning forward slightly off balance. Always leaning forward slightly off balance because it's so overwhelming. You have to be willing to lean forward slightly off balance all the time in order to create the room inside yourself to see all this. And once again, the stakes get higher as time goes by. Because if you've been practicing, if you claim to be practicing facing everything and avoiding nothing for two months, nobody's going to expect any great uh insights or change. You're just a baby. But if you're practicing facing everything and avoiding nothing for 5 years, diligence, you should be a changed person to some degree, right? In terms of self-nowledge, when people gain self-nowledge, I'm not talking about self-nowledge in the sense of true self and authentic self, but self-nowledge of their emotional psychological complexity, they change. They wake up. They become a much better person, a much more conscious person, a much more available person, much kinder person because you're stopping to resist, avoid, and deny reality about yourself and reality itself. changes. You follow paying attention to what you say and what you do. What do you say and what you actually do? Self inquiry, self-observation. What's the truth about the nature of your relationships with other people and yourself and your own emotions, your own thoughts, your own fears, your own desires? Where are you really at? It's very difficult for us to see ourselves clearly. It's almost I think it's impossible for anybody to see this themselves clearly. But we can see ourselves more clearly. You want to look at the whole picture. How am I doing? Are we doing better? Are we doing our best? We all know if we're doing our best or not. Are we doing our best or could we try make a more sincere effort to get better? Now the difficult thing here is that uh in this kind of selfanalysis it's not being done in a personal context it's being done in an impersonal context context here in which this facing everything and avoiding nothing is I want to be free. So if you want to be free your relationship to facing everything and avoiding nothing will be different than if you're just making yourself feel guilty about something. Because I want to be free I need to see the truth about myself. That's the guiding principle here is the desire for freedom itself. The aspiration for freedom, not self flagagillation or self-hatred or shame and guilt. That's an ego trip. I'm such a bad person. I'm not talking about that. Yesterday I was calling the negative ego is a kind of masochist. Someone who enjoys to hurt themselves. They enjoy self-inflicting pain. So the negative ego in many people is in is a massochist likes to torture. It's like self torture. I'm a bad person. I'm a miserable person. I'm a guilty person. I'm a shameful person. I'm a terrible person. They feel like [ __ ] But the negative ego delights in this bad feeling and sometimes twisted, unhealthy, unh wholesome way. I'm not talking about anything like that. Nothing to do with any of that. That's self torture and I don't believe in any of because the aspiration for liberation is a very mature high aspiration. So you have to begin with a not only selfrespected respect for your own humanity and respect for our humanity and respect for the spiritual quest in itself. So it means you're trying to do something big and noble and beautiful. And part of that quest might be painful but you you'll see it in a bigger context. It's not about feeling guilty about anything. It's about wanting to see the truth so you can be a better person. Make sense? So in contemplation, we want to have the right relationship to the mind, to our emotions. That's contemplation. Meditation no relationship. One is the practice of contemplation. The other is the practice of meditation. So if you're going to practice meditation, have no relationship to the mind. No matter what the mind is saying, it doesn't matter what it's saying. No relationship because you made a decision that you're going to do that. If you want to practice contemplation, then you do that. And then you want to understand what's the right relationship to all this confusion. What is the right relationship to all this mental confusion, to all this emotional suffering and pain? What's the right relationship to it? No relationship to the mind. And but you have to believe me that if you give it enough time, it will straighten out your thinking. It will make your thinking more complex, more simple, more profound. It will help you to think more deeply. By stopping be involved in thinking, it will help you to think in a much more meaningful way. So it's not like thinking is wrong or bad. It just is we're out of control. It's like we give the mind too much attention. It starts becoming this kind of machine. It's moving way too fast. It's making us cognitively nauseous. So be dedicated to thinking less. That's the whole thing. I get the sense from when you're describing your experience that you're paying very close attention to these different events happening inside you and drawing conclusions about what you think they mean. So I would encourage you for the time you're here on the retreat not to do that anymore. It may happen but just disregard it. Say right now it doesn't matter. Just let it go. Let it be more dismissed. and you'll discover space will open up as I've been saying where you don't know you don't know what this is you don't know what that is you know what that you don't know what it means ah what a relief you will feel better the problem as I said is a lot of smart guys like you you're smart so smart guys realize that they're gifted intellectually gifted so if you're intellectually gifted the ego can be invested in the gift So if you're intellectually gifted, you have to learn how to not be so invested in that talent. That's why I had this strange experience of meeting a lot of especially in the integral world a lot of really really smart people who are trapped in their own experience of cognition, the complexity of their own cognition. So if you don't pay attention, you can they can seem to be very brilliant and wise, you realize it's just a cognitive layer. Even if they're very smart and they understand a lot of complex concepts and how they work together, this their self is not free in all their complexity, they're not liberated. And the problem when the ego identifies with intelligence, it's very nasty. It's a big problem a lot of people have now, especially with the AI world coming up, makes people very weird, creates kind of distortion in the personality. So we want to learn how to be smart but not attached to being smart. So that's why I keep saying the metaphosition of the teaching is I don't already know. That's the solution. I don't already know but I want to know. Make sense? Because you see saying I I don't already know but I want to know gives us a free pass. I don't already know. So you can start from zero. You don't have to already know a damn thing. So it frees you from carrying the burden of all that knowledge. Like you can put that put down the weight of all that knowledge. But you don't have to give up your intellectual curiosity which is positive at all. You just want to start from a different place which is a place of innocence and in a freedom. Right? There's no spiritual bypassing here at all. But the spiritual bypassing comes in say yeah I understand all this but I I want to be unconditionally free of all this garbage. I listened to a sat saying the other day of another teacher who's here in town who's teaching a retreat. He's powerful guy. So the two people that invited him were students of my guru Punji. So he said in the introduction I was a student of punji but I couldn't speak about my emotional problems with pun because when I brought them up to him he said it's awesome sorry forget it and he said with this new teacher we can embrace both. Yeah, absolutely. And we can also deal with our emotional problems. And he was saying, you can speak to this teacher about your emotional problems. He he'll be there for you. He'll hear you. So, they thought this was a very beautiful thing. This is a good response to the narrow-minded position of the extreme transcendence position of Puji. So, I was thinking when I heard this, yes, it's true. Punji was a radical transcender and he knew the difference between samsar and nirvana. Like, no, most people don't have any idea what their difference really is. But he really meant it when he said this is all garbage, don't have anything to do with it. He meant it. And I think few people have the spiritual audacity and spiritual enthusiasm to really be able to appreciate what that means. It takes so much courage and fullhearted spiritual intentionality to truly let go of all of our psychological craziness and madness. We take the drama of the ego so seriously. So he's saying, "Forget all that. Forget all that. It's all samsara from the perspective of nirvana. It is all just samsara which means doesn't mean anything from the absolute perspective. It has no meaning. It has no substance. It has no validity. It has no truth. None from the perspective of the absolute truth. How many people can hold that truth? For most people that's just an intellectual distinction. They don't really feel it. So Punji was one of the rare spiritual masters who lived in that state of utter transcendence and he could transmit it to most people but most people couldn't hold on to it because they were so screwed up in their personal life. So I thought it was I thought there's something tragic about this situation because uh he could transmit enlightenment and nirvana to people like no one else could and that we have to be grateful that the rarest of rare gifts because you have to have the experience of seeing that samsara is unreal from the perspective of the absolute reality of nirvana be able to understand what enlightenment is all about for real on its own terms and to have the experience of seeing it doesn't mean that damn thing about who about the truth of life all of your pain and your suffering and all the tragic nature, the tragic twists and turns of your personal story from the perspective of nirvana consciousness have no significance at all. If the ego goes whoa really no significance at all, zero. That's the foundation of liberation. That's the foundation of liberation. So the reason why I put these foundational psychological principles in my teaching was not because I think that our personal egoic story is important for its own sake, but I think unless we can get very clear in our relationship to our own psychological confusion, we're going to make a mess out of our own life. This is not about validating the ego story. It's about finding out how to clean up our own story, clean up our own relationship to life, and be liberated. We talked yesterday about the three selves, the ego, the soul, and the true self. So if you're an enlightenment practitioner, the only thing that means everything to you is the true self. That's where you you've committed yourself to the absolute truth. You are aware of the relative truth. You are aware of it. You have compassion for the relative truth about yourself and other people, but you don't care about it. You care about liberation. I care about liberation. I care about liberation. the light of liberation, unconditional, absolute, once and for all, forever, totally free, unimaginable cosmic freedom. It's the only thing I care about. I don't care about anybody's problems. I don't lack compassion. I've suffered also. I still do sometimes, but I don't care about it. I care about inner freedom and enlightenment. And I think that if you really want to be enlightened, it can't be part of an integrated package. Here I'm practicing enlightenment for a few hours a day. Then in a few hours, I'm practicing integral psychotherapy and I'm practicing this, I'm practicing that. It looks good on paper, but it doesn't really work because if you're going to be spiritually free, you got to let go of the whole damn thing. You level up your soul. You got to walk away from the story. And nothing less than that's going to be enough to be enlightened. You see this energy that comes through me, it's because I let go at that level. I'm not doing anything. That happens by itself. That's because I let go at that deepest level. I gave my body and mind to that energy. My guru said to me, "Andrew, I want you to take responsibility for the work." So he knew I needed to be devoted to what he was teaching me and he was giving me more than anything. And I just said, "Okay." I didn't know what I was saying yes to, but I just said, "Okay." So it's a letting go of the story and our belief in the reality of the story is what awakens us to enlightened awareness permanently. Now, that being said, as I've been saying, if we don't face everything, avoid nothing and take unconditional responsibility for our unconscious impulses, we're going to mess things up. So, we need to do the psychological work. We need to do the psychological work. But the reasons we want to do it is so our liberation can be unfettered, unobstructed by ego, unconscious, egoic impulses. Now I feel to me the the truth of liberation is so glorious. It's so beautiful. Nothing relative could ever compare to it. So at a certain point you stop caring about your psychological problems. And I think we all have to get to a point where we're clear enough about ourselves to stay out of our own way, not to make a mess. That's enough. It's not endlessly fascinating to kind of study ourselves and to listen psychologically. A lot of people these days are endlessly interested in shadow. I don't know how they could be so interested in all because it's not that interesting once you once you get what it is. It just it is what it is. It's not the light of illumination. It's just patterns, unconscious patterns full of unprocessed emotions. They're relatively real. They're not absolutely real. So what I want people to experience is the the ecstatic joy of unconditional liberation. And if you experience it, if you taste it, if you feel it, if you know it, nothing in the relative world can compare to that truth, to that experience. So when you experience that kind of joy, that kind of happiness, that kind of liberation, you want to spend as little time as you need to to take care of your unconsciousness. You're doing it so you can really do your best. Because if you don't face your unconscious patterns, you're not going to be able to do your best. You'll be sabotaging yourself like most people do, right? So we don't want to do that. So we have to do the psychological work. We have to do it. My guru was a mess personally. He was a he was a woo Jesus. He had a lot of heavy karma. But what was so confusing is that in spite of this heavy heavy [ __ ] karma is outrageous. He was really a wild man, very self-indulgent, out of control. But miraculously and in a strange way his liberation existed in a completely different category of his of his self and it was radiant and liberated and passion and wild and untouched by his own personal karmas. So it seemed to me that one doesn't cancel the other. So his statement which I constantly repeat as nirvana has no beginning and no end. So samsara has no beginning and no end is my mantra as I constantly repeating share this truth every time I teach nirvana is the self-contained world space and nirvana is its own dimension of reality as is samsara so from an enlightened point of view it's not a matter of working out one problem or another is sort of getting out of that hell realm it's a hell realm going to hell hell is a self-contained universe so when you wake up In nirvana, you literally go into a different realm of reality, different dimension of reality where hell is nowhere to be found in that state. It's a state and the individual makes the choice. Very few people make that choice. But the Buddha was very clear. He wanted to get the hell out of samsara at any cost. So the most profound realizers are uncompromised when they committed to nirvana. So now that we have a greater understanding of this of human psychological complexity, we really want to learn how to deal with it in the most sufficient way possible. Not denying to the point of the fact that we're avoiding anything. This is why I say here, face everything and avoid nothing. So I'm not teaching escapism. Now the problem with the with a lot of transcenders is uh more often than not they deny that samsar exists to the point of selfdeception. That's bad. So we're actually in a position developmentally to be able to say that samsara is an illusion to the degree that we can actually defeat it in ourselves. So it makes it a little bit more difficult to make these throwaway statements. Follow my point. So this is an integrally upgraded version of postmodern enlightenment. Nothing's being avoided. But I'm carrying the flag for enlightenment which most people have forgotten about. Everybody's got so absorbed in this darkness that comes from shadow that they forgot about the light. When you speak about the light of enlightened ways, they say, "Yeah, but no buts, baby." Yeah. Yeah, but it's the wrong party. Beloved Ken is a very complex per he's a very complex person. He's absorbed so much into some totality of reality in his thinking. that he speaks out of different sides of his mouth sometimes. So he said to me this beautiful phrase 15 years ago. He said, "Yes, Andrew, I agree. All therapists are pimps for samsara." He he said it, I didn't. And when he said it, he meant it. So he's saying psychotherapists are pimps for samsara, for ignorance, for stupidity, for unenlightenment. So my understanding of Ken's position is that he appreciates the absolute nature of what I've been speaking about on its own terms. He understands the feeling, the knowing, the exuberance, the thrill. He appreciates it on its own. That's why he was so adored Adida so much because no matter how crazy Adida is or was, his enlightenment could never be denied. And Ken was not going to deny the truth of his enlightenment just because he was a crazy guy. Ken's mind and capacity to appreciate the complexity of the human predicament is big enough to fully appreciate both. For most people, their thinking is too dualistic. They can't contain these contradictions. They can't contain these paradoxes. He can hold the paradox without contradicting himself at all. And yet he's also very much very aware of human psychological complexity and the significance of psychotherapy and the development of psychological worldview and why it's so important and how much we've learned about human development. So he appreciates both fully and that's his his gift as kind of a transpersonal genius. He speaks about enlightenment with great passion and it's unconditional nature with great passion. He speaks about psychological development with great passion. He he appreciates both fully. I'm an enlightenment teacher, so I'm very biased towards one side of that picture. He he's not, you know, as Ken often says himself, most people can't hold more than one perspective at a time. It sounds like a contradiction, even though it's not. Very few people can hold two perspectives at the same time, let alone three or four. So, most people don't don't understand them in my opinion for that reason. No, but this is where I'm saying this teaching. If you want to experience total transcendence, you have to assume the position of no relationship to body, mind, personality, world, and cosmos. Absolutely. I can easily totally you have to enter into samadei. Don't come out. That's total transcendence. No, no relationship to body, mind, personality, world, and universe. But the minute you come out of the state of total transcendence, you have to have some kind of relationship to body, mind, personality, world, and cosmos. That's not total transcendence. Then there's a relationship, a dualistic relationship between self and body, mind, personality, world, and cosmos. So you're entering into the world of duality. Then there's no avoiding. It's not wrong or bad. It's just part of nature. In total transcendence, there's no relationship. There's no duality. Engaging with the complexity of relative duality is a big part of what we're all faced with every day. You see, a lot of people have this fantasy about enlightenment like it's like winning the it's like winning the lottery and you win the prize and then all of your problems are over forever. I'm trying to teach all of you guys in a way in which you realize your life will get more complicated and more demanding and more beautiful at the same time. What are you living for? So, I'm living for the highest truth in my experience, which is total transcendence. That's what I'm living for. But I think that what people will begin to feel when you kind of straighten yourself out is that you're people become aware of your the purity of your soul, which is your motives. People start to feel what your motivation is, what's driving you. If >> you're not a corrupt person, you don't lie to yourself or other people. that you are who you appear to be. You'll become a beautiful person. You become a beautiful, trustworthy person who's the real deal. But in my understanding, as we awaken more intensively, as we awaken in a more intensely, profound way, we fall in love with manifest reality. We want to participate more deeply, more profoundly in it because we know that manifest reality needs our help. So it means we want to be here instead wanting to escape and never wanting to experience pain. The desire to be here, not for personal reasons anymore. That's what it means to be bodhic satta. Our spiritual practice, our spiritual commitment through spiritual work, hard spiritual work, our spiritual sad increases our power of agency, freedom to make choices. So we're not totally trapped in the karma of the body, mind, and personality. Usually we're we're so trapped in that karma, we don't have any access to freedom of choice. And even if the 5% is there, we don't even know where it is. But if we're living the spiritual life with earnestly with great commitment, we develop the capacity for greater agency. So a spiritually realized person should seem to you like we're creating the world that they're living into their own choices. They're not just living in someone else's world. How I think it works is that at the beginning it seems like I'm doing something. But as we develop as we become spiritually more developed the distinction between grace and our intention becomes very indistinct becomes the same thing. If you're totally surrendered to the God principle and you're committed to transcending the small self no matter what, the boundaries become very ambiguous and we can't tell where you end and grace begins becomes truly non-dual. But we should stay humble and say it's grace, not me. As you're fighting the war in the manifest world of duality, part of it will be your the grace that you've awakened to that's carrying you forward and also your own heroic intentions would be a mix of both. But the fact that I am sick isn't stopping me at all. What's the role of grace? spontaneous grace versus personal effort in the response to kind of the challenges of living in samsara. And I said at the beginning it feels like you're doing something but if you're truly awakened at a certain point you won't know the difference anymore. It'll all become one one flow one non-dual unfolding. Well I don't really know. I think of the soul as a metaphysical organ container of karma and momentum, karmic momentum. The soul has self- nature to it. The soul compared to the ego feels like me. The ego feels like this is a me. But the soul feels more like me. When people have a soul awakening, when they come upon some kind of memory or some kind of intimacy experience, they awaken to their soul, they start becoming very vulnerable. The feeling of the soul sense feels more truly me than my ego. But when you awaken to the true self, the true self is recognized to be a million times more who you are than the soul and the ego combined. Infinite depth. So the thing is the soul will feel as real as it feels before you awaken to the deeper part of yourself. You awaken to the deeper part of yourself. You're aware of the soul but it doesn't have as much significance as it did before you discovered the true soul. So I'm very appreciative the way a lot of you are responding to the teaching. The more everybody can respond the better. There's a passive dimension to this receptivity. We're being passive means you're receptive. Vulnerability, openness, and receptivity means you're paying attention. You're listening. You're taking it seriously. You're feeling it. Have to process. The other process is responding to that which you feel is most important. Reacting. Are you alive or dead? So if you're alive and you react or respond to that which you recognize to be most important to that which you feel most touched by that which you feel is most important for you most important in general you will react. So it's not good if you feel touched and moved. You have important questions that you're not pursuing because you you need to act on your own spiritual interest. You don't play it safe. Passively awake and alert. I learned how to actively respond. That's how you develop. If you don't respond, you're not going to develop. You might understand things. You won't develop. You only develop by responding. Responding. Responding is an action. So it goes back to what I was saying about no relationship versus right relationship. No relation to listening is being very passing it seriously and reacting to what you feel is important will help you to develop. Have the courage to respond to what you feel is most important. Have the courage to do then you'll develop and become more awake and follow. Don't create a space where you can be invisible. Be willing to stand out and be seen. Have the courage to be seen. Stand your ground. God love you more. You have the guts to be true. There's consequences for going so deep. You know that everybody, you're all aware of that. It's like uh making love is not karma free either. There's always karmic consequences for your experiences of radical intimacy and truth. So just know that.