Touching Eternity
Who You Are Is Not Captive By Ideas
Received in December 2022. Listen to the complete audio on SoundCloud
Breathe in deep and feel your body. Now try breathing towards your head, filling your skull, filling your brain with oxygen. Breath is like a channel between what is outside and what is inside. It's a bridge between our subconscious and conscious mind.
Lucky for us, we don't have to think to breathe; it just comes naturally. When we pay attention to it, everything slows down, and we become aware of what we were not aware of before. When we concentrate on it and pay attention to it, we find that it can only ever happen in this instance, in this moment.
If you follow that line of thought, you'll find it's not just our breathing, but everything that we experience in this life. The only place that ever happens is in this instant, in this moment. We can never experience the past, and we can never experience the future outside of this moment. It's impossible.
This moment arrives by itself and it never leaves. This is the same moment that our grandparents lived, our ancestors lived. And when you see that, you see that it extends in all directions and has nothing to do with time. Ayahuasca can take us to timeless places. Even though we cannot experience the past or the future, this medicine can heal the past and the future through this moment, by what we do in this moment, by what we choose to correct, clear, clean or heal inside the mind.
When you do that, here and now, you do not only affect the past or the future for yourself but for your lineage, your lines, your ancestry. Many of us carry a lot of weight that has been passed down to us. Our parents have carried it, and their parents carried it, and there comes a point where you wonder if you need to carry it at all or if it is even yours to carry. You ask yourself what must I believe in order to carry it, if it's really serving you, and if it will serve your children. This medicine gives us an opportunity to lighten our load. Because life isn't necessarily a thing to be heavy-lifted.
We are all building our homes by the seashore, and it is low tide. Everything is changing, and the tide will come for all of us. The secret is to hold it lightly, because the secret underneath that is that we don't actually hold anything. We can't hold anything. Our suffering happens when we hold too tightly. It's like we are grasping at the river, and we can't hold on to the river. We can’t stop it from flowing or push it forward. This life, in this moment, is like that stream.
It is not life that hurts us, but the tightness of our grip. It's the tightness of our fist, wanting things to be a different way other than what they are, wanting it to be different, wanting it to be the way it was or what it could be. And as long as we don't see it for what it is, we live in an illusion; we fight. There's a conflict between us and life. But if you look a little deeper, you see that the tight fist, when you relax, it opens. What's inside? Nothing. Struggling for nothing.
A closed hand holds a little; an open hand holds it all. An open hand can hold things ever so lightly. What is it to hold and be held by light?
When we leave this world, we take nothing with us. Letting go then is very simple; it is when you realise that there is actually nothing to hold on to in the stream of life. Pema Chödrön says something to the effect, "To be fully alive is to be thrown from the nest." It is this falling and finding your wings, and falling all over again and finding your wings that is the spiritual path. Chögyam Trungpa says something to the degree that “the bad news is we are falling through endless space, no parachute and nothing to hold. The good news is, there is no ground.” That's the good news. Perceive this moment completely, and you come close to something that is eternal. If you contemplate eternity, you will find no end. And if you contemplate the space that we exist in, you find that it doesn't have a beginning either. What doesn't have a beginning or an ending doesn't have a birth or a death. And so right now, in this moment, we can touch eternity.
It doesn't take a thought; it doesn't take an idea. It is the result of dropping everything that is in front of it. It's like our life is a movie on a screen, and we get so wrapped up in the characters and the story on the screen that we forget the screen. And whatever happens in the movie, it never scratches the screen. If there is a flood in the movie, the screen doesn't get wet. The screen is never dirty or tainted by what happens in the movie, or by what you think of it, or by what you think you are. But at the end of the day, when the story is over and the movie turns off, when you are gone, the screen remains pure.
In India, the word "akhanda" means indivisible. What is indivisible cannot be taken from, cannot be added to; it is whole. So, underneath all of the story, is the author. Underneath ideas of who we are, is who we are. It is not an idea. It is just like this moment, a process, eternally ongoing, outside of time, held in space, spaciousness, without dimension. Without dimension, it extends and lends itself to all directions. But if it doesn't have an end, then there are no directions and there is no centre. And that's the good news. The task is to seek the greatest, the highest supreme being, and then be that. And the big being is not an entity-being, but it's more of an action, a verb. It is to be, it is beingness itself. It is a this! It is a thisness. It is an isness. It is a suchness. And the way we find it is when we just be.
[Pause]
The river is always going so strong, so fast that we get caught up in it. We hold on to rocks and sticks. We look at the different channels leading to the ocean, and we can't wait for the ocean, but we are terrified of the ocean. But when we relax, we see that the river is going by itself, and there's not much that you can do. You can't push it, you can't fight it, you can't hold it, you can't squeeze it. So the biggest task is not to forget to take moments to completely be. I know of no other way to clean and heal the mind and the body. No better way than to submerge it completely in this beingness, in this being.
Just like that.
The question is not how to get there. The question is, why do we always run from it? Because its face is peace, its voice silence, and it doesn't need anything. Not needing anything, it is content. It is happy. We always search for our happiness somewhere else. However, if we look beneath our search—and see what we are, what is searching—we find that happiness is already there, peace is already there. That's what is meant by “awakening.”
Awakening is just seeing what is, just as it is. And seeing that everything we need is not outside of ourselves. Awakening is waking up to this very moment, realising that all of our seeking pulls us away from what simply is. It is to wake up in this moment and see that this moment holds everything. With everything being here, there's nothing left to look for. And then we can get on with our lives, with happiness, with peace.
So this medicine shows us what is inside; there is an infinite room inside and it lacks nothing. But sometimes, for some of us, we’ve cluttered it with so much that we must sift through the layers to rediscover that space. We must face the fear, the contents of our mind, and the absurdity of life itself before unveiling the beauty that lies hidden in the heart.
Tonight, I'm giving a lot of gratitude for this peace, for this being. Tonight, I felt a very good space here in this room; that the medicine tonight was with a lot of clarity, with a lot of gentleness. We drank this same medicine that I prepared last week, and it was very different. Tonight, drinking, expecting something, and then seeing the way it is, is very beautiful. I know that it wasn't all peace, calmness, and tranquillity inside of all of us; there were moments of turbulence, for sure, for some more than others. But whenever we have a peaceful night like this—that ends in a meditative state, where our mind is fresh and clear, where our body is illumined and radiant and vibrating—to me, that's a very good sign.
Because we don't always need big signals, big experiences to show us that we've experienced something. Sometimes we come to these places, and we drink things like this, and we do things because we want to feel something, because we think it has to be hard. We look for the difficulty, because without the difficulty, we think, the transformation doesn't happen. The flower doesn't bloom the way it should. But if you look closely, you see that the flower blooms effortlessly. And some of the best things that we can learn is how to learn with gentleness, with kindness, with peace. Because if we always learn from extremities, and if we always push the envelope, we will always miss peace. Peace is a high priority. Don't miss peace. Because at the end of your life, you'll look back and you'll say, "I wish I had looked for it." So the good news is, it's looking for you. It's waiting for you. And it's always ready.
So tonight, we're going to end in a peaceful way. We don't need to celebrate; I wont make you dance. What we are going to do, those of us who are present, is just close our eyes for a moment and feel this immense vibration, this immensity inside of yourself. And do just what we've been saying, what has been said: just be with it. It's like you become the river. And there is so much streaming through the mind.
But in a place like this, in a time like this, it is profound to witness that it streams without you holding on to it, without you getting attached to it. Because if you look closely, all day long, our thoughts come and they take a hold of us. We become captive, captured by the contents of our minds.
Right here and now, however, there's a stream, and you can feel what it's like not to be captive, not to be holding on to anything. It's like being underneath a waterfall. Every time you shower, you could remember this, to let the water wash over you. And imagine it washing over your mind—to be in the river, to be in the waterfall, and not hold on to something. To let the thoughts in the mind come and go, because that's what they do. They will always come and go. But if you can stand underneath that shower and let the water wash over you, you can bless yourself with the clear light of a pristine mind. And you can see that such a mind can hold a lot of wonder and hold a lot of beauty, if we only empty it out every once in a while.
