Practical Guidance: From Person to Presence
28 March 2021 | Satsang Excerpt (with subtitles)
[Mooji] 'Dear Mooji, for such a long time
I felt separated from God and from you.
It's combined with a great fear that I believed in a long time ago.
This habit is really strong.
And it became very clear now
that it is the root of all suffering.
Due to your pointings,
I know I can say out loud, "It is not true!
Those things are not true!"
This is one exercise I really felt to share with you,
that sometimes a certain thought
unexpectedly drifts in front of you,
and like some reflex, our attention goes to it
and you begin to fondle it, and all this kind of thing.
But now you see, 'But wait, it's not true!'
So, rather than just, 'OK', like this, No!
I say to speak it out.
'This is not true! This is not true!'
I'm not saying that if you're in a full restaurant
and a thought comes while you are sitting by yourself,
to stand up to say, 'This is not true!'
No, no, no. You know what I mean.
But you find your time to confirm, 'This is not true'.
And look at how,
when you have such a presence with you, and a clarity,
you simply will not accept this.
'It's not true!'
Somehow you turn the attention from that and it drops away.
Because it cannot live without your attention.
It can keep on coming.
It's like anyone can come and knock on your door.
But unless you open it, they cannot come in.
And some thoughts are here, and they are trying to ...
They are almost like, I say, auditioning for your attention.
And if you say, 'No, no', don't even say 'next', OK,
because the next one will show up.
Just say, 'No, not this, no'.
Just turn away. Drop it. Learn to chop things.
When you see, there is no spiritual nutrient in that,
you also recognise that this will amount to some form of distraction.
That's a waste of time. Just cut it.
Say, 'No, this is not true'.
So Paulina is already saying that, you see.
'This habit is really strong,
and it became very clear now
that it is the root of all suffering.
Due to your pointings, I know I can say out loud,
''This is not true!''
And if it is so,
the person that grew on that belief cannot be true, either.
What a relief! Thank you, Guruji.' Yes. Yes.
'I am so blessed to know you, to experience such great love.
My only wish is to stay in your love,
and to be open every minute of this worldly existence.
Love you so much, Paulina.'
What does it mean to be open, Paulina?
You write here at the bottom,
'I'm so blessed to know you and to experience such great love.
My only wish is to stay in your love
and to be open every minute of this worldly existence.'
What does it mean to be open? To what?
[Questioner: Paulina] Open to whatever comes
and not playing by habits, not acting by habits.
[Mooji] Yes. Ah, I needed to hear you clarify that.
So, you are not blocking things from coming. They can come.
And it's good that you say that.
Because sometimes, I have been misunderstood
where people might have felt that I was saying,
'No, no, no', to whatever arises.
No. In fact, you say, 'Let it come'.
And, you trust in your discerning ability to look.
And then you can say, 'No, no, no, thank you'.
We are not living by waiting for what is to come.
You are abiding in your natural being.
Otherwise, what tends to happen,
as the waking state arises, say, in the morning,
does it mean that your mind and attention
are automatically put in gear?
This is a general question.
Have you noticed, as the waking state sprouts
with the arising of the feeling of 'I' ...
Because if you wake up at six o'clock,
at 5:59, what was your state?
You don't know.
Say at six o'clock, somehow, the waking state appears.
It appears. In what does it appear?
It appears and with it arises the sense of 'I'.
The sense 'I', which is actually the 'I am-ness' itself.
But due to habit and conditioning,
that is quickly swapped or exchanged
for the sense 'I am this body', 'I am this person'.
As soon as this 'I am this person' is present,
it is as though we are compelled into some kind of relationship
with the world and the mind and intention,
and past and memory and attachment.
All these projections come alive.
Why? And to whom do they come with such force?
It's the 'I-me person',
the sense of personal identity and existence.
May I ask, in the arising of consciousness,
are we compelled into duality?
Are we compelled into gear?
Does the mind get into gear,
and are we always compelled into negotiating and projecting?
Is there some way,
that a deeper awareness is present in you? Of course!
I'm speaking with my sangha now.
[Mooji] So you can catch it, even at first, somehow.
[Mooji] in the beginning, it feels like it's a task
to keep remembering, 'Oh, I am not this'.
But gradually, you see, it should come with a joy,
an emerging joy.
Because it's almost like some reflex.
You are already in the uniform.
You are already in the character of personhood.
But watch what is taking place.
The more you honour,
you marinate your attention in the recognition,
that all things that manifest are perceivable,
and they are perceivable,
but that whichs perceives them
is not trapped in the bubble of their scenario.
Then you are aware of a greater space
of just silent being, or silent awareness, more and more.
So what may, in the beginning,
seem like an exercise, a practice, an effort,
gradually, it seems like two points ...
'I' which we assume to be 'I - the person',
or even a spiritual person,
'I am now offered an exercise
to keep remembering my Self'.
So then, there's a 'Self' and there's 'I'.
But as the exercise continues,
and I say it bears fruit quickly,
as you continue to focus,
the sense of separateness between the two meets here.
And the sense of someone trying to become something
dissolves increasingly in that recognition.
And so, the background of the sense of oneself
shifts from being a personal self-image,
the self-portrait of oneself as a person.
That is changing now to the sense of presence,
a quality of emptiness and spaciousness.
And there is a softness in this.
You may notice already,
the reflex to be panicked or anxious is thinning away.
And there is a stability in this.
And yet, there is no one trying to be stable. It's just ...
The stability doesn't belong to an entity called 'me'.
It is just what Is.
And this separate sense of 'I-me-ness' has become that.
It's just a sense of Being, that is with you.
That is what 'I am' is, that root Being.
More and more you are seeing,
even without any intellectual or mental exercise or practice,
that this wonderful ease of Being
is replacing a very anxious background to personhood.
It is true, or not?
[Mooji] Surely it is true.
[Mooji] So ...
'Now I understand,
I am so blessed to know you, to experience such great love.
My only wish is to stay in your love,
and to be open every minute of this worldly existence.'
So, I wanted to clarify with Paulina, what do you mean 'open'?
And you have put me in my place. Very good.
'Open' simply means not being afraid of what is to come.
'I am present. I am here before anything appears.
It appears in front of me.
It plays, as much as I am engaged with it.
And by its own time, it disappears also.
I am not that. Because when it disappears,
if I was that, I would also disappear.
I'm here to watch everything come and go.'
This is stabilising in your real Being.
Wonderful.
[Q.] Yes. I wanted just to say thank you.
This is my first One Sangha gathering,
and it really is amazing.
After four years of listening to you,
something shifted, as you said.
Every word you said during this gathering
was just going directly into my heart.
Yesterday night I was writing this letter
because it was all seen so clearly.
[Q.] And I'm so grateful for that. So grateful. [Mooji] Very great.
And I'm also grateful for all you did, all sangha in Sahaja,
because this experience was really beautiful.
This experience was really powerful.
Thank you very much for that.
[Mooji] So you mention this experience was very powerful.
Is it finished?
[Q.] No. [Mooji] The substance of it ...
[Mooji] I have to remind you of this.
The trigger was in time,
but what you are discovering cannot come to an end.
Just continue deepening in that.
I say this before the mind gets a chance to tell you,
'That was. It's past now. Get over it, OK?'
[Q.] Thank you, thank you.
[Mooji] It doesn't pass. The mind passes, not this.
[Q.] Yes! [M.] Wonderful Paulina, wonderful.
[Q.] Thank you very much.
[Mooji] All love to you, darling. Very good. Full power!
[Q.] I love you. Thank you.
[Mooji] Love you, love you, love you.
Thank you very much. Thank you. OK.
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