How has the teaching changed since my sabbatical?

since my return to teaching I've received a lot of questions good questions about what's different about evolutionary in life what's different about the teachings what's different in my understanding of the teaching of evolutionary enlightenment it's application so it's a very good question I'm gonna try and answer it now to be honest I'm still in the midst of finding out because as I'm in the process of teaching and sharing the teachings with people I'm literally in a process of self-discovery about the answer to this question so this question is could the answer I'm gonna give today's by no means complete but you know when I met my teacher in Howard love porn GG in 1986 I as most of you may be aware I had a very quickly had a very profound transformative experience I went through a very dramatic alchemical process for several weeks that really left me quite changed and in the most extraordinary way and I became a teacher overnight so for most of I'm in India the banks of the river Ganga so it's very noisy India's a very noisy place but for the next 27 years for most of the time that I was a teacher and I was doing a lot of teaching almost constantly for that period of time I was more or less in a state of free flow so it was easy for me I never had to struggle I was I was fundamentally living according to the principles that I was teaching which were based in it which are based primarily on or essentially on letting go surrender unconditional trust doubtless in this fearlessness and free fall and because I was living according to these principles it was it was pretty easy for most of the time I really didn't have to struggle very much and I didn't have to make much effort so even though I had a very clear teaching you know the five fundamental tenets of was during Lyman is a very clear and coherent and I still believed perfectly coherent spiritual teaching enlightenment teaching evolutionary teaching and really gives us the recipe tells us everything we need to know that everything we need to know about how to relate to our own experience in the human experience if we want to be free if we want to be liberated if we want to be enlightened if we want consciousness to evolve in and through us it tells us more or less everything we need to know and everything we need to do and I still stand by these fundamental teachings wholeheartedly it's just that because it was so easy for me when I saw many of my own students struggling and faltering under the enormous challenge of the aspiration to be free I couldn't understand why it was so difficult for them I didn't understand why it was so challenging I really believed as strange as that may sound that if you made up your mind is the one who go all the way and you want to be free and facing yourself unconditionally letting go in any moment without any hesitation would literally be easy if you want it to be free more than anything else this is how it seemed to me and I know this might sound crazy but that's I'm just telling you the truth of my experience so when I would teach most of those years I described the process of letting go and the process is facing oneself especially facing difficult things oneself as potentially being very easy every time and even though I would speak about the the challenges inherent I was just I was describing it from a perspective in which it was implied that it should be easy should really take no effort ultimately if you want to be free and the implication was that if that if it wasn't easy every single time that meant you didn't really want to be free and therefore you had if you were struggling you had to inquire into how authentic or how profound or how sincere desire for liberation was and I think I was wrong about that I mean I'm sure I was wrong when I took some time off from teaching and I really struggled with my own issues and my own shadows in my own mind and emotions I suddenly and this is after being a powerful teacher for 27 years I suddenly found out what it was like to struggle and what it was like to experience terror and fear and struggle if you really went through an existential crisis that most people can face much earlier than I didn't it was just a very late stage in my life and after and after having gone through a profound awakening process and teaching for so many years I really had an existential confrontation of profound existential confrontation with my own ego as strange as that sounds and as a result of that it really brought me to my knees it's humbled me enormously I feel a lot of compassion for what it takes now to actually manifest spiritual freedom in the context of being inherently flogged human being like we all are and it's a compassion and it's a compassion for what it takes and understanding what it takes that I simply didn't have before but this is the fundamental difference and I and it was really as a result of my own struggle my own suffering my own existential confrontation with my own issues there woke me the hell up and they didn't wake me up anymore to the to the to the truth of enlightened awareness to me and me in the imminence of spiritual freedom that's available to us in every single moment the promise of the possible because that hasn't gone anywhere nothing's changed in that area but where I've where I've woken up and where I become humbled that was very much in relationship to the human dimension of always which I was shockingly oblivious to for so many years and as a result of that I think many people suffered under my guidance in ways that I do feel very bad about I feel ashamed of and some people think I was getting some kind of malicious pleasure out of other people's suffering a torment is simply no truth to that and it never was I was utterly blind and ignorant to what people were going through I mean I was objectively aware of it but on an emotional level I think I was out of touch with the emotional drama the emotional agony and terror then when some people did experience and especially because I've been such a radical teacher you know I've always been a radical teacher in my own case I wanted to go all the way whatever that was going to mean and initially I succeeded varied remarried dramatically and I called people to live in a very radical spiritual life and the power I think of my community the power they're teaching itself as if so many people were attracted by that call to go all the way which is quite unusual and very rare in the world today but I think I think where I failed as a teacher was not appreciating the emotional implications of this challenges these challenges at the level of the soul I understood them intellectually but I can honestly say because I didn't struggle myself I could I really couldn't empathize in ways that I should have been able to do with a lot of a lot of the inherent suffering and challenges that one's faced with when one wants to really go as far as I was calling people to so how this is affected the teaching is not fun is not not in the fundamental teachings themselves because the teachings are sound and I think really do tell us everything we need to know but I think it's more of a an awakening to compassion for the human ordeal in all this that what we have to be while while I still am a radical teacher and I still have the radical inspiration that I always did it hasn't gone anywhere as a matter of fact it's real wakening evermore profoundly I have a much greater appreciation for the dramatic nature of the existential confrontation of the kind of letting go than teaching like this is actually calling people to and this has softened me as a teacher and as a person and as a man and has also softened the hard edge of the teachings themselves because now what's included in what's being embraced in the teaching in the radical teaching of evolutionary enlightenment is the appreciation for the vulnerable and delicate nature of our r.v of our individual and shared humanity it just wasn't there before because as another teacher once pointed out to me but I didn't recognize what he's pointing to at the time that in the emphasis of in the huge significant important emphasis on awakening to a process perspective and evolutionary alignment we can lose touch with the emotional predicament the existential emotional particular intervene every unique individual and become blinded by the exquisite and the thrilling evolutionary potentials in the impersonal nature of consciousness itself and the enormous promise or the possible which I was very much in trance by but as a result I've lost touch with a lot of people's humanity and many times my own is as a result of the process so that's the fundamental difference so how this is being translated to play it out I think is just unfolding in time very much very much as a result of my own suffering and yeah suffering a lot of suffering a lot of painful excruciating suffering over a very long period of time grinding suffering awakened a part of my heart that had been frozen that had been dormant that had been cold and cut off and I know it's almost trite to say that but it but if something really happened to my heart and and what happened was there was an awakening to the truth of suffering that a fundamental part and parcel of the human experience is ongoing inconceivable pain and suffering for all sentient beings it's part of the unavoidable reality and truth of sentient existence of life of life that's being lived in this universe that unbearable and excruciating suffering is part of it there's no avoiding it and we can do a lot to reduce it but it takes a lot of courage to face into the truth and as a result at a certain point it facing into the nature of my own suffering I had a breakthrough and I had a revelation a direct cognizant of the truth of suffering itself as an as an unavoidable existential fact the truth of life and I realized in that moment that if one's not awake to that truth then most I don't no matter how awake one maybe two hi in deeper states of consciousness the causal awareness the ground of being the ecstatic nature of the evolutionary impulse unless once it unless one is powerfully poignant ly deeply in touch with in awake to the truth of suffering one isn't fully awake because one is either unconscious of or in denial of a fundamental truth of sentient existence and so I very much have I'm bringing and incorporating this understanding of my own tutorial teaching and to be honest and I'm not proud of this but I didn't understand why the Buddha's first noble truth was the truth of suffering for many years I didn't really get it I said when you when you're awake to to the ultimate truth which is the freedom that we realize in in being itself what is all this talk of suffering all about and in the same way I felt that if one's awake to the ecstatic nature of the evolutionary impulse which comes from the source of creation itself what's all this truth of suffering all about I didn't get it I should have gotten it the truth is obvious to me now but for a long time I simply didn't get it so this has really been the most fundamental change which has to do with embracing the reality of what it means to be human to be inherently flawed to be in a process of an ongoing process of development of course but it's awakened enormous humility cater thoughtfulness and tenderness and dimensions of the human experiences and spiritual realization that just weren't part of my experience before so I realized many people suffered as a result and I'm terribly sorry about that I I didn't mean because suffering to anybody I was blinded by my own inspiration and I was cut off from certain very important dimensions of what it means to be a human being from my own psychological reasons that I've come to understand and come to terms with over the last five years or so but the teachings themselves are fundamentally the same that fundamentally intact and and I'm as excited about the the print the fundamental principles of evolutionary enlightenment and I find him as compelling as I always did and their sound they're just imbued with the humanity that was fundamentally missing before and that's that's what changed everything so I think that it's the transmission of the teachings that's changed more than the teachings themselves for most of the reasons that I just described to you and inherent in us I think there's so much more potential than there ever was in in this extraordinary teaching and that that potential is to give rise to a - in it to a palpably enlightened evolutionarily inspired human context for existence and for meaning and purpose it has the potential to catalyze enormous change and change at least a dimension of the cosmos it's begging for our it's begging for our attention and it's begging to be developed it's being privileged so anyway thank you very much