my question is about the the topic of using uncomfortable feelings as a doorway to finding the
eye and there's one particular video called going to the heart of an emotion
and that's my main reference and i've watched that video for four years
and amongst others but that one i keep coming back to it
and it was just the other day sunday morning i watched it for the last time and it finally
came together where i finally understood what you were laying out and what you laid out was
an uncomfortable feeling comes up and you look for the one who is being upset the one on whose behalf
this uncomfortable feeling is is uh showing up for yeah that's the vedantic approach yes
right and you talk about the two approaches this is the more intellectual one and also the
more visceral one which i've gotten involved with as well but getting back to this one so
you keep looking until you find it but you see that it's really just made out of whole cloth
i call it a you i forget how you refer to it it's a false self separate self i call it a persona
but there is something there an entity that seems to be in charge that's running the show
behind the scenes but really is it's just a house of cards requires a lot of maintenance and
all of that stuff once you do that and then you suggest doing this over and over again whenever
uncomfortable feelings come up you will finally see that the whole bottom falls out to these
uncomfortable feelings you will be left with no true eye and even the sensations
that go with it tight gut tight chest stuff like that those two which support the
the false self they have nothing to support anymore so those two will melt away am i getting
this right yes i'm wondering what your question is going to be you seem to understand very well
so the question is this represents to me a com what you could call a complete curriculum
and yet the body part the concentration and the focus on sensations
it doesn't seem to be really required and my experience with with sensations
i've spent a lot of time with those i'd wake up in the pre-dawn hours i'd have a terrible
tight gut and i i spent hundreds and hundreds of night times you know looking at that
until i finally gave up because i realized what i was doing was just trying to get rid of it so
i don't mess with that anymore you see what i'm saying i know you place uh you you even
started the the session by talking about you know sensations and how important it
is getting into the body but i had uh i just couldn't get anywhere with that
you're right the the pathway that you described is is a complete
curriculum in itself it is the direct path to peace
and it's true nothing else is really necessary however even if you take this direct path you you
go in search of the cell phone whose behalf your afflictive emotions arise you never find it you
trace your way all the way back and all you find is the inherently peaceful presence of awareness
and to begin with this is just a glimpse or a recognition but in time you
stabilizer in that or more accurately as that however this recognition
even a series of recognitions does not by itself put an end to the residues of
feeling that lives in the body that in most cases was laid down early on in our lives and has been
was buried was turned away from early on in our life because it was too too unpleasant to face
and remained buried lit layer after there so these this accumulated storehouse of residual feelings
in the body is not um dissolved overnight by the recognition of our true nature so this
further exploration that we do of the body and indeed of the world is a way of
inviting first of all these
buried residual feelings to come out of their hiding place in the body exposing them
to the light of awareness and allowing them to be dissolved in the light of awareness so it's um
it's what francis once referred to as post enlightenment sadness
which sounds rather exotic it's not exotic at all it just means that the the the exploration we do
after the recognition of our true nature with the purpose of realigning the way we feel the body
and perceive the world with this new recognition
so that's the purpose of it but if it doesn't
if it doesn't resonate with you if you're simply uh happy to take the direct path back to the
innate peace of your being and to reside there then that's fine
because when i would wake up and experience these um sensations i would i
actually did i actually did learn quite a bit did these sensations take you away from the peace
of your true nature absolutely well that in that case i i would recommend
during this week together that when we begin to explore the experience the felt experience of
the body i would i would recommend that you you stay tuned follow and i'm sure you will i don't
mean to imply that you were not intending to that you that you follow because it's not self-inquiry
it's not tracing our way back to our essential being ramana maharishi didn't speak of it
it it's um it's another approach it comes from the tantric approach of kashmir shaivism
you didn't hear you'd never hear admin and krishna
speaking about these matters the understanding was
contained subliminally within their teachings but they were not explicit about it so here we make it
we make it explicit we make it more of a science so in fact it's more of an art
of this investigation of the body and the world whereas in the original in in the case of
ramana maharishi and others the it was understood that the realignment of the
body in the world was something that just took place naturally and effortlessly well it it does
in time we're just giving it a bit of help i see because the associations i'm sure you're aware of
this the associations that a person has with these like speaking from myself they go back they're
ancient in my life they go back to my earliest experiences they're always associated with dread
yes you see that the separate self is not just a belief it's not just the belief i am a temporary
finite separate consciousness it is a feeling a felt sense of being contracted separate apart
other in fact the deeper root of the separate self lies in our feelings and in it it is relatively
easy to uh spot the sense of separation in our beliefs it is less easy to um flush the
sense of being a separate self out of its hiding places in the body it's more subtle it doesn't
the feeling of separation doesn't respond to rational scrutiny as does the belief
something more subtle something less easy to speak about something less rational
but the reason why
uh jean klein and and francis and and we here pay so much attention to this aspect of our
experiences because i suspect now that if i were to ask how many people here understand
that they are not temporary finite separate selves i'm quite sure that most if not all of you would
would put your hand up but if i were to ask how many of you feel that you are separate
a lot of us would put our hand up in other words there is this discrepancy between what
we understand and and i don't mean to knock our understanding it is genuine understanding
there is a discrepancy between our genuine genuine understanding and the way we feel
ourself and really of of the true of the two our felt sense of our self is is the truer
so that's why we we place so much importance on it in in this approach so that this understanding
doesn't just remain at an intellectual level which is a genuine understanding i'm not
i'm not knocking that but this understanding is taken
deeply into all aspects of our experience that means not just the way we think but the way we
feel the body the way we perceive the world and the way we act and relate with others
and just on that last point about acting and relating with others that
is for instance one of the reasons why we don't
walk around in silence not making eye contact with one another it is legitimate
uh to hold retreats like that i'm not criticizing it but
but the fact that here we we there's so much uh contact between people it is um
it's part of the teaching part of the process of aligning
the way we act and relate with this understanding