66 - Two Types of Meditation, Nonattachment, Painful Meditation - Q & A

Edited live session where listeners participated in questions and answers supporting their practice.  All of these podcasts are designed to enhance and support the listeners path to awakening whatever that might be.  In this podcast we addressed the main two types of meditation and how to do them.  Meditation for calmness and meditation for awakening.  Also, we address the nature of the observer.  Additionally, what are the effects of simply ignoring troubles and focusing on Awareness versus experiencing troubles and Awareness together.  Another asked the meaning and experience of "Being in the world but not of it".   And another asked why meditation is so hard and not peaceful.

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Welcome everybody. I trust you're doing well. It's good to see you all. Today, maybe you have some questions for me regarding your practice or the podcast or really anything on your spiritual path. While you think over your questions and see if you have some, I'll just talk a little bit and maybe that will spur some thoughts, but feel free to type in your question if you have one along the way. And hello Elena, Jennifer, and Little. Good morning. Let's talk about meditation. Somebody asked me a good question last time about meditation and maybe I'll address it a little bit more thoroughly this time. And in the podcast, I address it maybe around the third or fourth podcast, fifth podcast, somewhere in there. There's a little group of podcasts about meditation. There are basically two kinds of meditation. One kind, which is what we're more familiar with in the West, is meditation to calm ourselves, to relax, to release stress. We have a busy day, a busy week, lots going on. We're stressed and we want to be peaceful. So we do this kind of meditation. And in the West, often that's synonymous with meditation. That's what many people feel that meditation is. And it is that. My friend Bob, an awakened being, he always says you want to get out of the pounding surf first before you proceed. If your life is very tumultuous, it's hard to have a spiritual practice because you're being distracted so heavily by all of the pain and the stress and the turmoil. So in cases like this, this would be a very good place to start with the calming kinds of meditations. Many guided meditations are calming. Take a deep breath, begin to relax, begin to let all the stress go all the way from the top of your head down through the tips of your toes. Or picture yourself in a beautiful meadow by a beautiful stream. Begin to relax. The sky is blue. You're in a wonderful shaded area under a beautiful tree. And as you relax deeper and deeper and deeper, you feel your troubles, you feel your problems. And this is a good time to let them go, isn't it? You see some leaves drifting by on the river. Take your problems, take your troubles, put them on the leaves and watch them drift away. Feel that, accept that, receive that. How does that feel? Meditations like this are calming. And they teach us to let go. They teach us to relax. They're very, very good. So that's one group of meditations. And there's a thousand of them. There's music, there's all sorts of things. There's even active meditations. Really, you could, if you want to call even running a meditation, you could, because you've got all this stress and you're releasing it and you become one-minded, one focused as you run and release. Or walking meditations. Many different approaches. All good. Now there's a second kind of meditation. And although we work with both kinds, the second kind is where I gravitate most to these days. And it might be called, I think in the Bhagavad Gita, they call it absorption. That's where you are absorbed in your deepest being. Michael Singer, he wrote a great book, Untethered Soul. And I believe it was in that book, or maybe somewhere else. He said, you know, when you're looking at that river, we'll keep with the river metaphor, and there's a lot of white water, tumultuous splashing, and the water, the surface of the water is not calm. He said, really, what you want to do is if you remove the rocks from underneath the water, that's all you have to do. The water will become calm. The first kind of meditation that we talked about, calming meditation, generally doesn't remove the rocks. Although, you know, that's an oversimplistic view. There are kinds that will start to chip away or wear away those rocks. But just as a broad generalization, it's designed to calm you without necessarily resolving the deep issues that are creating the tumultuous feelings to start with. Those at the deepest level, as we've talked about in lots of earlier podcasts, those are fueled by a separation from ourselves. And when we're separated from ourselves, from our true nature, of course, we feel anxious. Separation anxiety. There is only one anxiety in life. If we feel anxious about anything, it's because on some level, deep down inside, we're separated from ourselves. That creates anxiety, and then that anxiety bleeds out on different issues in life. Oh, I'm going to be late for the bus, or I'm getting low on gas, or it's not going well at work. Could be a variety of things, but any of those are expressing the anxiety that we already have. The second thing, when we separate from ourselves, we feel abandoned. We're cut off from our essence. We're cut off from the infinite because the infinite is us. All religions talk about it, but we don't need a religion to talk about it. That's what we find in meditation, for ourselves, the direct experience of that. The third thing that, when we cut off from ourselves, we feel anger, frustrated. Life is not going well. We're cut off. The meditation of absorption heals that. What's happening is how we cut ourselves off is we, ourselves, are blocking ourselves. When we stop doing that, we find we're there. We're perfect. We are peace. We are love. We are well-being. We are happiness. We don't have to do anything. We're already that. When we remove a block, it feels. It's an optical illusion, kind of, but it feels like we're being absorbed into the infinite. We already are the infinite, but it feels like it. Like when you look out your car window and you see, as a kid, you see trees going by. I remember with my grandfather, he would be driving me, and I would look out the side window, and it looked like the trees were moving, and we were stationary. That's what it feels like in awakening. It feels like we are absorbing, but we're not. We're just stopping, blocking, and that stopping, as we melt, as we melt the blocks, more of our true self is felt within us because it is us. So, that's the absorption kind of meditation. Now, of course, once we are in the midst of ourselves, love, peace, joy, happiness, those rocks are out of the river, and the river becomes calm automatically because when we experience ourselves as peace, peace flows down through our body, our mind, our nervous system, our relationships, our jobs. So, we get to the same place. The problem is, when you do the absorption kind of meditations, all of those rocks, as they dissolve, they're felt. You feel them as they fall apart. Now, something under the surface isn't put there because it's made of deep joy, well-being, and happiness. It's repressed because it feels like pain, hurt, fear, and anger, the symptoms of us separating from ourselves. So, who wants to do that? Nobody. Unless you're in so much pain or you're so focused that you want to awaken, you want to be your true self, and I'd say all of you here do. That's why you're here. But it's hard, and when people first start to meditate, they become nervous because, or they feel, they're not doing it right because they indeed, they are doing it right, and they're feeling all those boulders under the surface melting, and they're releasing their hurt, fear, and anger. And so, thoughts are being generated, emotions are being generated, and it feels very troubling. So, they think, well, this is not peaceful. I'm doing this wrong. Let me go back to the meditation for calmness. I don't want, we don't need to remove those boulders. We'll go to calmness. And again, back to what my friend Bob said. If it's too overwhelming, and also just like when you're working with PTSD, which many of us have knowingly or unknowingly, when you move too quickly, you shut down. It's too much. So, it is good to back off some at times. But we'll talk about this meditation of absorption. It's very simple, and really, it's all through all of the podcasts that I've done. Let me just take a look because SNL said, so grateful for your podcast. Thank you so much. Can you give some examples of being the observer of thoughts? Perfect. Great question and great timing. So, yes, this is the awakening meditation. When you sit, and this is the basics, and then we'll get into it in a little bit more detail. If any other questions come up, yeah, you all ask. This is a good time to ask. But what you do is you just get comfortable. You sit down, and this is a generality. You don't have to be in any particular posture, but the idea is that you don't get yourself distracted or uncomfortable. So, if you want to sit in a chair, sit in a chair. Close your eyes so you're not distracted by things going on in the outside world, although that's not mandatory. You don't have to have your eyes closed. It's just to keep distractions out. So, let's say you have your eyes closed. You observe your thoughts, as we've talked about, and emotions, and anything else that's going on inside of you. Groups of thoughts and emotions creating stories and creating dramas and telling you things that you need to be doing or not doing. Worries and tensions in your body underneath. When we're distressed, we have a distressing emotion. We will generate a solution using a thought. We will hallucinate and create a thought. Thoughts and hallucinations are synonymous. They're the same thing. So, we will hallucinate, create a thought. Emotions, by the way, are also hallucinations, but they're more 3D. So, Alexander's asking something. Could you please talk more about who we are in terms of awareness, consciousness, attention, and mind? Yeah, very good. Oh, I am a bit confused about what is it that is lost in a drama. And this is a half statement. I see it didn't come out all in the typing, but I think it's address it or move it to the side. How do you deal with these things? Excellent question. Oh, does the awareness follow the attention or is attention can block the awareness and move it to a side? Very good questions. So, we'll keep going here, but thank you for that. You are right on it. All of these questions are perfect. So, here we are, our eyes closed and we are observing our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. These are things we have created. We have generated them. We're generating them as a way to solve a problem, which is because we previously separated from ourselves and we've created hurt, fear, and anger. So, those are emotions. So, we generate more thoughts. We hallucinate thoughts. What do I do? I feel angry. What do I do? Oh, I need to do this or I need to do that. We might think about things to do in the outside world. I need to talk to Bob. I need to talk to John. Or we might be thinking of strategies. I need to sit down. I need to go for a run. I need to do push-ups. I need to do something. I need to get a pillow and beat the bed. We will come up with a lot of different things. So, in Awakening Meditation, in Absorption Meditation, rather than latch on to these solutions, what we want to do is reverse the problem. We don't want to be separated from ourselves anymore, therefore creating the anger, which then causes us to hallucinate, to look for a solution, and therefore talk to Bob. That's fine and there are places where, yeah, you better talk to Bob. But in general, the deeper healing is you sit still, close your eyes, and you observe your thoughts. You observe your emotions. You observe your tensions, which are always underneath these emotions. That's where the separation is happening. Or it's happening because we get swept away by these emotions and thoughts. So, to reverse it, we just watch them and we don't get involved in them. When we get involved in our thoughts and our feelings, if you watch yourself carefully, ask yourself, why are you getting involved? It's because we're addicted to them. We cannot stop it. There is a difference between looking at a bottle of wine and drinking a bottle of wine. There's a difference between looking at a thought, which we do as the observer, and drinking the thought, which we do as a personality or as a drama inside of us, and now we're in the middle of it, and then Bob said that, and I did this, and so on and so forth. We're off to the races. That's drinking the wine. It's exceptionally hard to put the bottle down. That's why we're lost in this so-called, it's not an illusion, it's a delusion. Because when we don't put our hallucinations down, when we don't quit drinking the wine, the whole world is colored by our drinking. That's how we see. If we've got pink lenses on, we see the world as pink. So when we observe our thoughts and our emotions, and we don't drink the wine, we don't drink the thoughts or emotions, what happens is they will flare up, and they will be so compelling. Drink me, drink me, drink me. That's the addiction. Drink me, and we don't want to put it down. We want to drink. Yeah, okay, I'll just think about it this one time. This one time I need to think, nope, you're not going to be perfect at all. But if you can, to the degree you can, don't put the bottle down. Put the thoughts down for a second, and just watch them. When you watch them, they will expend their energy. They're full of energy, and they will expend it crying for you to drink them. They will show more anger, and more fear, and more, they will get really wound up, and they will spin, and they will go crazy, and they'll generate other thoughts, and you don't have to do a thing. You just watch them. If you can do that, they will fall apart. They will fall apart into what they're made of, because they're an illusion. The thoughts are an illusion. When you look through your thoughts, you see a delusion. The world is, it is there, but you're, so it's not an illusion, but it's a delusion because you're looking at it through misty or colored lenses, affected lenses, these thoughts and emotional hallucinations. So when you put your thoughts down, and you look at them, they fall apart into their basic nature. Everything is made of hurt. I mean, I'm sorry. Ultimately, everything is made of love, peace, well-being, all the qualities of being, of who you are. Everything is made of that, because everything is made of being, and being is often maybe a term of what's in this world, and as you meditate, you will also intuitively go beyond this world to that which is uncreated, before creation, and that is very fulfilling, but very silent. You actually can't find it with your senses, so you could look for years. Where is it? Where is it? You won't find it. You have to open intuitively and find it very subtle. So back to that great question about the observer. The person, but as you observe these thoughts and feelings, they all melt away, and in the end, all there's left is being, and when you see things out in the world, you see through the illusion of their outside, or the delusion, and you see that the inside, and it melts into consciousness. It's there. You still see the tree as a tree, but you feel one with the tree. You feel the love of the tree. You become a tree hugger, or something like this, you know, because you can feel it. You love walking on the beach. You love looking at clouds, because it's supporting you, and you're supporting it. It is you, yet in this world, there are distinctions which are important. I'm here. The tree is there. We have to have boundaries, otherwise we'll leak out of our bodies. We can't have the worldly experience. So this observer, back to that question, the observer who's watching all these hallucinations, that's a great place to keep your attention, because that's you. All the hallucinations will melt away, and you're still here watching it. You go, wow, they all melted away. When that finally does happen, it could take quite some time, but when they melt away, you're the one watching, and what is this one watching? It has no thoughts in it, no emotions in it. It can create a thought or emotion if it wants to, but it's one with wellness, one with peace. It's radiant light. It's well-being. That's you. That's the observer. Now, when you first start meditating, and even if you've been at it for years, because we're so distracted and caught up in the hallucinations of our thoughts and emotions, we're so captured by that addiction. It's like watching TV. We can't turn it off. We're looking through a world of thoughts and all the dramas, and he said that, and she did that, and I need to do this, and what if I didn't do that, and what about awakening, and what about this? Those are all thoughts, but when they dissolve, there's nothing. It's just, well, by nothing, I mean it's not things of separation that at the root have hurt, fear, and anger in them. It's more peace, well-being, love, things like that, kindness flowing through your body and actions. Now, this is a process. It takes a little while for all this to happen, but that's the observer. The observer is not a thing because it's like a rainbow, and if you follow the observer back, it goes out of this world, out of existence, and when something doesn't exist, it means it can't be felt by the five senses, so you can't know it through the mind because that's five senses, what we hear, what we see, what we touch, so on and so forth. The five senses, it's beyond that, so it has to be known intuitively, but you don't have to go all the way back that far to know yourself, and I use this because that's kind of how it feels, this direction of going back, but really it's everywhere, like every moment I see the world strobe in and out of existence, maybe a billion times a second, I don't know how fast it's just very fast, nothing, something, nothing, something created anew every millisecond, so it's everywhere. That's you. That everywhere-ness is the observer. That is the observer. There's no set thing. At first, it may seem like a set thing, but even those boundaries will dissolve. If there are any inner boundaries inside of you, any tension, any emotion, any thought that is usually coming from separation, it's something that can be let go of. If it can disappear and you'll still be here, it's coming from separation, process of elimination. It's not you. It may be something you've created in order to go through the world, and that's a very handy and good thing. I'm not saying they're bad. I'm just saying what's what. You are, and in this world, we kind of break things apart just because this is a world of distinctions, so I'll say you are the observer, but once that melts a little bit, you see you're everything you're observing too. It's all one. So Alexander asked a very good question that I haven't gotten to yet, and that is, I think I understand the question. Let me answer the question I think I'm answering, and if I don't get it, Alexander, you can rephrase it for me, but often there's a school of thought that says, just do what I've just proposed and everything will dissolve away, and although it'll appear that you're being absorbed into the infinite, it turns out you are the infinite, and all that's happened is your blocks have been absorbed into the infinite, and you just let everything come up. You let everything come up so that it can be dissolved. The problem is when it comes up, it could be depression. It could be anxiety. You have to kind of stop yourself a little at a time. Otherwise, you'll get overwhelmed, but you will feel it all because it all is grist for the mill, and it all is melting, and by the way, the energy in depression is very strong. The energy in anxiety is very strong. You don't want to lop that energy off because that energy is your aura. That is the energy of the infinite. It's just twisted into an uncomfortable form at the moment, but you want to absorb it, not block it for deep, full awakening all through your body, mind, all through existence. That's to me the way to go. However, there is a school of thought, and it's used often in the East and even in the West. It's like, just drop the bags. Put them in the past. Don't go there. Don't let them distract you. Don't put your mind on this. Do not focus on that. Just push it to the side. Focus on yourself. Focus on the observer. The hallucinations, your thoughts, fine. Just push them away. Don't deal with them. Put them on a leaf and let them float down the river, and do that every day, and you just stay with the observer and stay there. In effect, what that does is it can be very powerful. If you can do that, it can be very powerful in that you keep watering the positivity, your awareness. You keep your focus there on the observer, on awareness, and it gets bigger and and maybe the rest of the stuff, when you get so radiant, maybe it will melt into that. Maybe. I don't know. But often what happens is you get with one of these gurus, and they're very powerful because they have been sitting in this radiance, and they have been blocking other things off, and they are powerful. However, somebody says one thing they don't like, boom, they explode, and they lose it because they haven't dealt with this stuff on the side. I can't tell you either the number of times I've seen that, or I've talked to the wives, or one wife that was married to one, and I've heard it, and I've personally witnessed it. So, if you don't resolve the stuff, you haven't resolved the stuff. So, in the West, we have the advantage that we can work on all strata of the rainbow. We do have a psychological self, and we can work in the West. We have very powerful tools that will work on that. The problem in the West is sometimes we get stuck in therapy. Therapy is good. That's what I'm referring to. We can use therapy to work on and unclog some of these personality things, and that is very powerful and helpful. However, if we just stay there, and that's as far as we go, that's not going to work. That's very limited. We limit ourselves to our hallucinations. We clean up our hallucinations, but we limit ourselves to our hallucinations. By hallucinations, part of what I'm talking about is our personality. It's a useful fiction. It's made of thoughts and emotions that work for us, but that's all they are is hallucinations. We use them to get through our lives. We need one. We can clean up that personality that we've chosen, but we're still not our personality. However, it's much nicer to go through life with a clean slate. You want to drive a car. We're not the car we drive. We just drive the car. If it has a flat or something's wrong with the carburetor or it's out of gas, it's not me. It's the car that's out of gas. The car's not working. However, I'm the driver of the car, and I want that car to run nicely so I can get to work or I can go to the store or I can go for a drive. I don't want it shaking all over the place. Well, I'm not my personality anymore than I'm my car, right? I'm not my personality, but I don't want it crazy. I want to be able to walk down the street and say hi to somebody without losing it. So Western psychotherapy is very helpful, and also our personalities can become so obscure and opaque that we can't see through them. So how do we awaken? It's very difficult with a messed up personality. They're very distracting. The biggest obstacle to awakening perhaps, or one of them, well a couple of them. Ignorance. We don't know what we're doing. That's one, and that'll get us more pain, which will get us looking into what's going on, and then we will know what we're doing. But the second one is we get lost in the drama. We can't put the bottle down. We get lost in our thoughts. We can't quit drinking our thoughts, and we can't quit drinking our personality, which is a group of thoughts. We get lost in our dramas. You know, life is so wondrous that on another level, who cares? We get lost in our drama. That's fun. We like movies. We like dramas. We star in our own drama. It's not awakening, but it's part of life, and according to the Eastern view, and according to probably what most of you feel deep down inside intuitively, life doesn't ever start, and it never finishes, and so it goes on. So this is one part of it. What's the hurry? Enjoy it. But if you're in a lot of pain because you're cut off from yourselves, that's where awakening is really helpful. Then you can be in this world, but not of it. That's helpful, right? Okay, I hope I answered some of your questions. I tried. I answered what I thought you were asking. If I didn't, where I could be a little more precise, please let me know, or if some of the rest of you have some questions, please let me know. Oh, thank you, Jay Bird. Thank you. The other podcasts I've done, and now I've already published about 60-something, I think. They go through all of this very thoroughly, I think. At least they start you off in the right direction. Why did I do that? Because I didn't know what I was doing. I was blundering around. Maybe I still don't completely know what I'm doing, but I know more than I used to, and I was wanting somebody to show me, and for a long time, it was hard going, but then eventually people showed me stuff, and it was very helpful. So that's what these podcasts are about. I'm trying to put in these podcasts, step by step by step, the places that I feel are very productive. It doesn't mean they're the only places, but they were productive for me. From there, you decide what works for you, what doesn't, and go deeper. Jennifer asks a good question. Be in this world, but not of it. You know, this phrase actually is a very potent phrase. Thank you for that question, Jennifer. Really good. I saw this phrase almost word for word in the Bhagavad Gita. Bhagavad Gita is a distillation of Upanishads, ancient eastern wisdom in India, and Hindu wisdom found in the Hindus Valley. Hinduism is a western word, which means anybody that lived in the Hindus Valley, if they're Christians, or Jewish, or whatever, they are Hindus, because that's the area they lived in. But ancient Hindus, it was a whole variety. Christianity did not exist back then, so it was a whole variety of methods on how to become one with God, or the divine, or the whatever your word is. So the Vedas, the Upanishads were written, and the Vedas stem from the Upanishads, and then the Bhagavad Gita distilled all that down into a short little story. It's a great little book. You should read it, if you would like, one day. So in the Bhagavad Gita, they talk about Krishna, the divine, is talking to a warrior, Arjuna, and he says, he talks about being in this world, but not of it. Now, interestingly enough, Jesus also talks about this to the disciples, being in this world, but not of it. I think it's in every major spiritual work is something like that phrase. Be in this world, but not of it. What that means is, you're awake. You are in this world, but you're not addicted to this world. When you truly realize yourself, peace, well-being, love, joy, you don't have to get anything to get peace. You are peace. You don't have to do anything to get joy. You are joy. You don't have to buy eight houses so you can be happy, or get three cars so you can be happy, or have the best relationship in the world so you can be happy. Those are all great things, but you're already happy. So you can be in this world and enjoy your house, enjoy your car, enjoy your relationship, and glow, and flow through it, and completely enjoy creation, you as a human. Enjoy your incarnation, but you don't need it. So you're in this world, but you're not of it, and not of it. What that means is, you know who you are, and you're that which created the world. You're that which is the entire world. You are everything. You're one. So you're beyond individual yearnings and needs in one sense. The human being always has those, just as a human. We have them, but you're grounded in a constant light of love, well-being, and peace, and your personality reorients around that. So you're not trying to do things in order to get something you have to have because you don't have it. You already have it. The main things, peace, love, well-being, joy, happiness, fulfillment. If you want power, you've got power. You are everything, so of course you got power. It's just not, power is misused when, it's almost a dirty word these days, but it's misused when you're addicted, and I need power to fulfill my addictions. That's when it becomes kind of off kilter, just as does love, as does every other quality of being. But you are all these things, so you don't have to get them. Be in this world, but not of it. I hope that makes sense. Great questions by the way. I would say the most powerful thing you can do, well, again in the Bhagavad Gita, let's talk about the four things that Krishna says to Arjuna to do, that are most powerful. Let's see if I can remember them. One of the four is to see clearly, to have a good understanding, and I hope these podcasts are doing that. That's my intention. But, and you supplement and add to them in so many ways. You listen to other podcasts, you google, you read. One of these podcasts, I'm going to give you a book reading list that, maybe five great books. All these things add together, is what I'm saying. You see saints, you see beings that are radiating well-being, and that opens you up. You go, wow, this is possible. It's not just a fairy tale. Wow, this person has done it. So, clear seeing is the first thing. Through education and experiences, you want to see clearly. Actually, the first thing that Krishna said is, be consistent in your practice. Every day meditate. Every day, if you're going to do yoga, do something every day, whatever it is. And if you can hardly do anything, sometimes we think, oh, I don't have 20 minutes to do this. I don't have three hours to do this. Fine, do it for five seconds. Just do it every day. It's so important. Do something every day, purposefully, every day. Consistent practice, see clearly. My guru and friend always said, to see is to be free. You don't have to go through 10 years of therapy in order to get over your anxiety of snakes. If you look in the corner of the room and see that it was a rope and not a snake, when it was dark, it looked like a snake. You're freaked out, taking medications, everything to calm down. Daylight comes, it's a rope. You see clearly, and now you're free. Wow, fear gone. Look, it's not quite that simple, but you get the idea. The third thing that Krishna said was non-attachment. And what he means by that is what we do in meditation and eventually all through our day, which is we let go of our addiction to thoughts and emotions. We put the bottle down. It's different, as I said earlier, just in case some people have tuned in after I said this, looking at a bottle of wine is quite different than drinking the wine. Looking at the bottle is different than drinking the bottle. Looking at a thought is different than drinking the thought, getting involved in the thought. So non-attachment is don't drink the thought, just observe it. And that's what we do in meditation. That's what we talked about, the observer. If you can observe it, it's not you and let it go. How do you let it go? Just simply by observing it. It begins to melt in the heat and the light of your awareness. It will melt. It's like an ice cube on a hot stove. It may not melt instantly, but it will melt. Also by just letting it spin around and let its energy fly and you not get in the middle of it and try to stop it. It's like a rubber band releasing all of its energy and poof, it melts or it expends its energy and a rubber band that's expended its energy is loose and limp and relaxed. Done. So that's non-attachment. If you get into the middle of the rubber band and try to stop it, you actually wind it tighter. If you try to think a thought, if you get into the middle of the thought, you refreeze it back into the ice cube. It quits melting and it gets more, it gets stronger. So that's what Krishna meant by non-attachment. It's not, and it's on an inside thing. When you can do it on the inside, you can let go of things on the outside, right? Because you're not emotionally, the reason why we grab stuff is because we're emotionally on the inside attached. When that melts, what's left to grab? There's no grabber inside. You're in this world, but not of it. You're not grabbing. You're in it, but not of it. And the fourth thing is, he says, have faith. Krishna says to Arjuna, rest in your faith. Now that's a tricky word, right? Faith. Ooh, it's got so many connotations from so many different religions. I remember when I was in theological school, I spent a long time investigating the Greek meanings of faith, the Western meanings of faith, so many meanings. Faith. What Krishna means by faith, hold on to your faith. It's rest in your faith. It's your true self. When you sit long enough and you are the observer, you observe the observer in a way. You get to know yourself, that which is always there. Your thoughts and emotions, your hallucinations will dissolve. You'll still be here. And what's still here, that's the observer. And what is that made of? Peace, well-being, joy, so on and so forth, the qualities of being. Well, that is the faith. The observer is the faith. From there, there's infinite power, because why? It's true. It's unassailable, because it is everything. There's nothing but that. So it's not like believing in something that you really got a lot of doubts and you got to take a deep breath and pucker up your face and try to believe something. That's not what faith is. Or it's not taking somebody's word for it. You know, he said this, which is OK. That's fine. That's a step. But it's not that. It's a direct experience of unshakable who you are. And from there is a laser willpower that flows into the world. You create from that power faith. So these four things, consistent practice, that's the most important thing, I think. It's hard to say what I shouldn't even say. They're all important. Why am I saying that? But it's very important. The second thing is see clearly. These kind of podcasts, books, be with saints, be with beings, take a trip to India. Later, some months from now, I'm going to do some podcasts on how to even get to India, where to start, what to do, you know, because people get overwhelmed. And so we'll be talking about that. So clear seeing to see is to be free. Third thing is. Oh, my. I don't know what the third thing is. Oh, non-attachment. Don't get let go of your addictions step by step. You can't let it go all at once. Don't be glum if it's not gone all at once. Just start somewhere. I like what this one woman said, Susan Seagal. She wrote a book, Collision with the Infinite. She had an instant awakening, very rare. She also ended up having a brain tumor. So I don't know. But the awakening was real. And she said when her personality completely blew apart again, this does not need to happen like that. It just did for her. But what she would do would be the next obvious thing, she said. Well, what do you do during the day? The next obvious thing. So whether we retain our personality, which 99.99999% of people do. Regardless, do the next obvious thing in your day. That's the next thing to do. So you don't have to be perfect in your non-attachment. Just do the next obvious thing. Baby steps. And then the fourth thing is your faith. Get to know the observer. The person who that which is observing and meditation to do that. Generally, you got to sit still and watch stuff and then watch that which is watching the stuff. Get used to that. It takes a while. So you got to start somewhere. So let me Rachel's. Typed in a nice question. Thank you for explaining these doubts all beginners in meditation have. I always struggle with so many thoughts which keep disturbing me. Thank you, Rachel. Yes, that is the number one observation I hear. And it's when I first started meditating. I didn't know what to do. And I don't mean it resolved itself quickly because I didn't know what I bumbled around. It took years. It's helpful to have guidance, which these podcasts are and talking to friends are. But in my early podcasts, I talk about this. I even I think number podcast number four or five or six is why can't entitled? Why can't I meditate? And it addresses this exactly. And we talked about it a little earlier in this particular talk. And I want to come back to it real quickly because it is so important. And thank you for asking. The reason why all this is going on is because you're meditating correctly, most likely, because when you meditate correctly, you unearth all that's repressed or a good hunk of it. It starts spinning, releasing its repressed energy. And it's very distracting. And it hurts because we don't repress happiness and joy. We repress hurt, fear and anger. So all that's getting released and it's terrible. And because it feels so bad, terrible, we start hallucinating a new crop of thoughts on how to handle it. Oh, well, if I said this, or if they had said that, and if I did this, and I'm going to stop doing that. And I think I'll meditate for another five minutes and I'll have a glass of wine. I'll do. How can I make this stop? Because it's releasing so much. It's so a good meditation is not peaceful. Generally, it is not quiet. It's horrible. It feels horrible. Why? Because you're releasing poison and you felt it going in. That's why, because our lives have been extraordinarily difficult. We felt it going in and now we feel it coming out and it feels really, really bad. So that's what you're experiencing. You're doing it correctly. It is important to only take as much as you can and then stop. Stop before it gets to be. You don't want to be in so much pain that you create more pain for yourself. I mean, you shut down, you clamp down, you tighten up your nervous system because you're in so much pain. You don't want that. Um. OK, you guys have asked a lot of great questions. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it. All of this information that we've talked about is in these different podcasts that I've done in the past. So go through them if you'd like or better just see you in two weeks and ask me directly. I love that. Thank you so much. You're doing great. And just the fact that you're here. I had a teacher tell me this and it's so true. The fact that you're here means that you're going in such a good direction for yourself. And if you want to awaken, you will awaken. There's no doubt about it. You're going to awaken anyway, whether you want to or not. So. OK, take care, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Bye.