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Emotions and feelings belong to your vehicle: the human robot.
Beyond the robot lies the essential self.
Transcript:
Somebody wrote recently giving me the link to a TED Talk, Brené Brown, and she was talking about things like shame, vulnerability and many of the human emotions that people, we could say, suffer from. And it’s all true … to do with … a lack of self-worth, I suppose, self-judging.
So, I was listening to her talk. I’ve heard it before, and she presents very well, very humanly, real and funny. I love humor in presentations. And then, I was thinking that’s so far away from where I am now. Human emotions seem so old fashioned.
Now, I know that’s where practically everybody lives, but I’ve come to see that they’re so … insignificant. Now, I know that that’s not true, that most people live there all the time, they’re in one emotion or another all the time, and to me, they’re outdated. So, this is what I mean by that is – I know I’ve talked about this so often – all these things belong to the human robot. And then we divide that. We say… or I divide it, ‘robot’ and then… I don’t know what to call the other, the essential self.
As we’ve seen so often and I’ve experienced, babies do get born differently. Some do come in with anger, some do come in with different sorts of things. They come in there, and then they have the influence of the parents, and the teachers, and the religion and so on. And I see that now so clearly, or it seems to be so clearly, that all of that has to do with what we’re living in, that is not us.
Now, most people know … I think most people know that when they realize they’re depressed, it’s not the depression that realizes that they’re depressed. There’s something else that says, “I’m depressed.” Now, who’s the ‘I’? So now this I, this … this essential self is … all that has any meaning at all now.
And what I’ve noticed is, when the … robot goes into a phase, whatever it is, if it’s allowed to be where it is with no interference, it will process what it needs to process and complete it. But we don’t do that. We get involved. We want to … enforce it with our anger or our resentment or our complaint, or suppress it, or work on it, or cure ourselves and all of that keeps reenergizing it instead of: let it be. It’s doing its job. Leave it alone!
That nursery rhyme, “Leave it alone and it’ll come home, wagging its tail behind it.” It’ll just complete. It will! It will! It does. Leave it alone! Be there, have what you’re having … and it’ll complete. And you’ll start to realize, there is something else.
Look, again we’ll call it ‘the essential self’. You are not that body. You are not those emotions. You are not those thoughts. You are not those actions. They happen all on their own. Look! When you get angry, do you want to get angry? No, it takes you over, doesn’t it? It’s automatic. Leave it alone! You’re not doing it, it does you. Get out of the way and it’ll take care of itself.
Don’t express it, don’t suppress it, leave it alone. And then you’ll start to see, that’s not you. That’s what you’re living in, and you need to take responsibility for it. Leave it alone! And then you’ll start to realize, there is something else. And that will become your priority.
We could say, “Well when the anger comes up, have a look where the anger comes….” No, don’t bother with that. That’s so old fashioned, and it doesn’t work! Just be you … here … now. And you’ll find there is something else. There is! You are something else. There is something else. You are part of something else.
And then I think, “Well, where do we get those ideas from before we have the experience?” Well, we get them from the East … thousands and thousands of years ago … not to take these things seriously that, what we call ‘reality’ is … is just an illusion. It is! You’ll see that. Keep looking! Make consciousness your priority, and you’ll see that. Absolutely. It’s an illusion. It has a reality, but it’s not the reality.
As you go along, you’ll notice that you don’t actually know anything. That’s what Lao Tzu says, “Everyone’s so certain and I walk as though upon thin ice.” Not knowing. But you don’t know what is, but it is so clear what isn’t anymore, what is no longer appropriate, what you’re wasting your time on. And your personal stuff is a waste of time. Just be with it. And then you’ll start to see, there is something else.
Jesus said, “Take no thought of tomorrow. Let tomorrow take thought of itself.” I don’t know any Christians that do that, let alone non-Christians. Let things be!
It came from the East., I think it’s Zen says, “Know thyself.” And there isn’t a self. It’s a trick, the know: N O thyself. There is something … some sense of something, and when you melt into this something … there’s a sense, there’s a feeling we’re not separate.
It does seem that though Aboriginal people know that. When I say know, they live that way. They’re not separate from what we call ‘nature’. There’re not separate.
Same is when … the elders die, they don’t go anywhere. The elders are still there. The ancestors are still there and there still there to talk to, and they talk back. There’s a naturalness that we in the West – we’ve developed many things in the West – but we’ve lost touch with that. We need to combine now with what we’ve developed, with what’s our, I would say, our essential self … being … one … with. And of course that’s not just nature, that’s each other.
If you just look in a practical way, we’re all part of each other: the people that produce our electricity, and do our roads, and the doctors that take care of us, and the finances and everything. We’re all co-dependent.
So that’s one way of looking at oneness. But the other is, sometime … just sit with a tree … maybe just close your eyes … and be.