hello rubert i'm jillian hi julian and it's our first time here
as you began to answer this last question i was envisioning that if i was a newborn child
and the first things that i heard my mother father speaking to me was
this way you described i could first you said i really could say that i don't know
but then you went on to explain this so simply and beautifully to know thyself
and i had recently listened to a discussion that you had with someone named mark vernon and it was
it was transformative to listen to the two of you speak about
being ready you said something about this is we're in this moment of a modernization and
he was both a psychologist and a strong christian and so he had a lot of duality but also
was a psychologist dealing with people's traumas and and things and i heard you say we're ready
this is this people are ready to to have a direct path and and we sit in here and we hear
the glimpse and we we we we know it but what happens if this that you are speaking about
is told at one month two months this is this becomes the understanding of reality and we then
grow up maybe trying to figure out maybe you said about the artist do we have these artists that
see what's behind the art and this is what they express and they can can't live in the world but
but they can't live in the world because the world is organized in this opposite
yes complicated ways so
can we begin from this point and still i think you say awareness and aliveness or i've heard this
we can first begin as awareness learn aliveness or creative play or some of the ways that you
say it but the default is first to know thyself is this are we ready for this i think i would
like you to write that nursery rhyme or for my grandchild i don't know my child's 31 now but
this is no this can be much simpler we struggle to you walk us forward you walk us back you walk us
in you walk us out we walk in we walk that just seems yes i i i agree with you i think our um
world culture is ripe or in fact overripe for this simple direct understanding that knows that needs
no affiliation to any teacher or tradition it needs no special practices no special language
no special it's just that the clear raw unadorned truth and the vast majority of people
in theory everybody but let's say the vast majority of people would be able to understand
perhaps not some of the sophisticated models of the infinite having to become the finite in order
that but that's not necessary remember all that is necessary all that is necessary to understand is
happiness is the nature of being and we share our being with everyone and everything now who is not
capable of understanding that or at least being open to the possibility that that is true and then
taking very simple pathways to verify the truth of these statements in their own experience i
think everyone is capable of understanding this and our world culture is is crying out for it
i think this is the the age of the direct path in fact i think that something and i've
only recently come to this understanding that i think that something very remarkable happened
in history in the middle of the 20th century if we if we go back 2 000 years and we see how
it's very hard for us to because we all have such a strong developed sense of personal identity
but it's very hard for us to imagine two thousand years ago that people didn't have
didn't feel themselves to be personal identities in the way that we do now so
personal identity has evolved over time century by century and become more and more established and
what happened in the middle of the 20th century is that these three um sages appeared in india
all in much the same time ramana maharshi atman and the krishna menon and the sabada maharaja
and they were all in their own way pointing to the same thing which was the personal identity
turning around and investigating itself that was something remarkable that was a that was um
historians in two or three hundred years time will look back on that event and and will
realize that something momentous happened then when when the the personal self turned around
and began to investigate itself every bit as important as the discovery uh that that um
that
the sun doesn't travel around the earth or that the earth is not flat or
that this but it could only have happened when it happened it couldn't have happened a hundred years
earlier because the sense of personal identity had to go all the way almost almost to destruction
remember they appeared just after the second world war or just around the time of the of the second
so these two world wars that happened that the humanity had to go to the brink of destruction
before these these three people almost within i can't remember their dates but
same place same time all pointing to the same thing that this turning around
of the the self an investigation into itself that that was the initiation of a of a new era
for i think it was a new it was the initiating of a new era for humanity a new possibility
where humanity was had the possibility of being founded on something that was truer
than personal identity and what we are doing here is simply the
the echo of what was initiated then
that's a beautiful and loud echo at the moment
it couldn't be any louder and um thank you thank you for bringing it with a clarity
of listening it's we were speaking it's so easy to hear you and and it's beautiful to listen to um
francis i mean it's different i somehow you are able to to distill the simplicity well i'm sorry
just with appreciation for for that um although the kinds of conversations
from where we come from you know this the to hear someone like francis speak so plainly
or to you to speak when someone says tell me about my past lives or all the people
i've been and i think i've heard friends i say well you'll have to talk to someone else about
that because i'm quite confused i don't know how you can recarnate if you're not incarnate anyway
you know it these these in there we laugh right it's something tells us that's so truthful and yet
we're off with another reality another reality like how many
you know yeah so yes i i'm just doing with this
um with this understanding exactly what i did when i was working as an artist in in
my studio for 20 years i just made pots all day every day for 25 years just refining and
refining and refining and finding until i felt at one stage towards the end i regularly had the
the feeling i i there's nothing else to make i can't go anywhere from here
and it's so i'm just repeating the same process i'm not manufacturing it but i notice now that i
have a bit of distance now that i've been doing this for 12 years or so i noticed that i'm just
going through the same process just making the same bowls out of words over and over and over
again and slowly slowly slowly they get clearer cleaner simpler shorter
meditations there's more silence in between the words before it was lots of words and little
sciences now there's a little bit of words and longer sciences none of that's manufactured it's
just it's just the way i i notice it just like those of you that have been around for a while
you notice it it's just the way this refinement is just just taking place and until you
until you get until you just cannot say it more cleanly or more more simply
so if i project this process into the future i think one day i used to make bowls out of
clay and now i make bowls out of words but as it goes on it'll just be bolds out of silence
they'll they'll just be there just to be less and less and less need for words