Tara Brach - Awakening Consciousness in Shadowy Times (2016-10-26)

Episode Date: October 29, 2016

Awakening Consciousness in Shadowy Times (2016-10-26) - On both individual and societal levels, suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. This talk looks at two interrelated ways of practice that help us to awaken from a limiting self-sense characterized by "something is wrong with me, or you."  In addition to guided meditations, our time includes sharing from participants. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to start with a story that came my way that's relevant to the season we're in, and it's about a politician who's out there stumping for votes, and he goes to a pretty, he's in the Midwest, he goes to a pretty removed, a grayer in community. It's kind of an agrarian sect that it's kind of removed itself from the larger society

about a century ago became isolated, its own customs and kind of used the old language and so on, Germanic. So those in the community gathered to listen to this politician and he's there pretty fervent saying to them

you know, you're an important constituent to me and almost like a chorus they said Voler Kusayeb, Voler Kusayeb. So that he's getting enthusiastic and they're with them, you know. I'm going to dedicate myself to farming subsidies to help you people out. Voler kushaib, voler kushib, you know, the pitch is raising. More promises, education, new technologies, you know, each time they're more and more fervent, voler kushaib, volkushib, so he's feeling pretty good about, you know, he's about what's gone on. And then

afterwards he's talking to one of the elders and, you know, he's, it's a farming community. He's a big field and there's some bowls off at the distance. And he said, you know, I was a farmer myself. You know, I'm wondering if I could, you know, go over, take a closer look. They look like fine specimen. And the elder says, well, sure, but I want you to be careful not to step on the piles of Buller Cushaib. I thought it was cute. I think I have never experienced in my lifetime and I'm hearing others say the same. How many are feeling appalled? and yet riveted. Do those words match for you? Let me see by hands. Appalled. We got appalled for 100%. The riveted, not so many. Range reactions. The deep level for many is a sense of so jarred by what

a mismatch it feels like that's going on to who we really are, that we are belonging to a larger system that has such a deep shadow that's expressing. And for some it's kind of like it's an embarrassment. Others, one friend just said, I just wanted to be over with. Others, I can't believe. One friend tonight was talking about a close person, a relative whose vote is going in the direction that is horrifying to her. Really the sadness is what came out. The sadness of, you know, how could in some way there be an affirmation of something that's so violent and anti-human. There's a big inquiry that's going on is how to relate. My husband Jonathan said, you know, there's all this frustration and hopelessness

and he says we're experiencing a lexile dysfunction. He came in with a smile this morning and he thought he would kind of shine the light for me. So how do we relate? and, you know, I think we're asking that on a societal level, how do we relate to this level of a shadow playing out? And as I often do, I'd like to focus our inquiry in this class is how do we relate when we come into contact with a shadow in our own psyches? because if we can honestly and courageously look in that direction, we intuitively begin to know how to talk with each other and respond on a larger level,

but we have to be willing to look within. So we'll look at that. We'll look at how when there's conflict, whether it's conflict with ourselves or conflict with others, and that brings up the aggressions and the defensiveness. How do we find a pathway to get out of limbic reactivity, that real reflex, a fight-flight freeze, and inhabit a more evolved consciousness?

How do we do that? How do we avoid this repeating pattern that many of us find ourselves in? How do we avoid stepping on the Volerkerchev and really waking up to a larger reality. And it'll be a shorter talk because I'd like to have a couple of experiential pieces and my hope is to have time for questions and sharing. But we'll see how it goes. I never know how it's going to go. So the metaphor I really find very helpful is that image from Joseph Campbell of a big circle representing awareness and a line going through

and that what's below the line is the shadow is what's unconscious. So, let's say aggression's going on, what's below the line is the fear and the beliefs that are fueling it, okay? And what's above the line is what we're aware of. And that our practice really, in a very, this is a very kind of simple yet direct understanding, our practice is to shine a light on purpose on what we might not have been looking at. And the story that I love is, you know, people going to this wise sage to really solve their problems. And each one of them has to go through all sorts of huge challenging obstacles to get there, you know, jungles and crossing over rocky crevices and so on.

When they get there, he says, I have one question and he swears them to secrecy on this. and he says, here's my question, and it's, what are you unwilling to feel? And when there's a shadow that's this big in our society and when we run into our own, it means there's something inside that's fear-related that we're running from. So it takes people, more and more people, that are willing to say, okay, what is that? And I'm willing to get in touch. So we have this circle and we look at what's below the line and when we're in our daily trance

and by trance I mean our minds are narrowed and we're kind of forgetting what really matters and on automatic and usually we go through the day and in some way we're trying to make ourselves feel better we're trying to get things done we're trying to solve problems figure things out avoid what can go wrong and it's very me-centered

but it's not it doesn't necessarily set off that big sense of, oh, I'm caught in the shadow because it's very familiar. And then there's the times when our fears of failure, our fear of rejection, our feelings of unworthiness get really strong, and then it becomes clear the way we're behaving that we're in the grip of something. And that's when our attention is drawn. That's the flag. Okay, there's something going on. suffering is the flag and it usually takes one of two forms either we are fixated on a sense of something is wrong with you there's a there's a conflict and somebody outside is bad or wrong

or it takes the form of something's wrong with me those are the two main presentations of when we're at odds with reality when there's something or unwilling to feel. The inquirers I'm saying is that how do we bring online the more recently evolved part of our brain so that we can regard what's going on with an awake heart and mind? How do we shift from your bad and I'm the victim or I'm bad to a sense of compassionate presence? I've spoken of this many times, but either way when it's your bad or I'm bad, we're

operating off the survival brain's negativity bias, which is we're just scanning for the what's wrong. And when we're in that, that's all that we pick up over and over again. We're not seeing the larger picture. That's why it's called a trance. When you are feeling unworthy, a sense of failure, a sense of not enough, the mind is absolutely rigged to only fix on evidence for that. And similarly, when we're fixated on somebody else being bad out there, we're tracking evidence for that.

So how do we shift? There's a story of Sol and Mort. They're walking from religious service, and Soul wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying. So Mort says, well, why don't you ask Rabbi Schwartz? So Saul goes up to Rabbi Schwartz and says, Rabbi, may I smoke while I pray? Rabbi Schwartz says, No, my son, you may not, that's utter disrespect to our religion.

Soul goes back to his friend, tells him what the good rabbi said. Mort says, I'm not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try. So Morke goes up to Rabbi Schwartz and says, Rabbi, may I pray while I smoke? To which Rabbi Schwartz eagerly replies, by all means, my son, by all means.

I'm playing, but the idea is this, that the bottom line or the ground of what we are is this awareness, this love, this wakefulness. That's our essence, consciousness. And we get fixated on waves that narrow us. We get caught in a narrative. If you're suffering, it's because you're believing that you're more of a limited and separate self and forgetting the ocean. And that's the key teaching. If you're suffering, you're believing something that's not true. You're identifying with a set of waves.

The pathway back is a remembering of the ocean. And we have two different ways that we train, that you've all been exploring to different degrees. where we begin to find our way back from fixating on the waves that say, I'm bad or you're bad. In other words, conflict with reality, believing something narrow, to remembering the ocean. We're going to do two different practices tonight,

and they're completely interrelated, on how to wake up from the trance when we're in conflict and come into more of a sense of wholeness. and the first one is the basic steps of mindfulness where we start right where we are. For example, some years ago I went to a six-week retreat and I was in a lot of inner conflict when I first went. And it was like I was really not okay with my inner reality. I had some sort of a sinus infection so I was feeling sick and I was also going through a lot of a lot of sense of guilt and anger around the way my divorce was unfolding and my concerns for my son

and so on. So that's when I began practicing what I call a yes meditation. And the yes meditation is these two wings of mindfulness where we just plain notice what's going on right this moment and agree to it. And I call it yes because I would whisper yes to what was going on. Just a very soft whisper in my mind. And yes did not mean I like this. When I was feeling the ache of my sinus infection, saying yes to the ache didn't mean yay, I'm feeling horrible. It meant more, yes, this is the reality of the moment. Okay? So I wasn't fighting the waves. I was just naming them and allowing. them. So that's the yes meditation and the way it worked for me was I would sit there and I'd feel

the unpleasantness of the sensations of feeling sick and I'd mentally say yes and then I'd feel then I'd have a thought about how, you know, in some way I felt like I was letting down my son in terms of how things were unfolding in the tension between his father and myself and I'd say yes to that feeling of guilt and then I then we were at IMS a retreat center and there were these window wars where they'd get opened for the people that wanted more fresh air and clothes for those that were cold and this was going on. And I started feeling really irritated by that. Yes to the irritation. It went on and on. So at first, the yes was like I was just slapping on the word yes. It was very mechanical. I was just doing it because I thought this is what I need to do right now.

I need to stop fighting reality. Then it became kind of entertaining. It was a very mechanical. It was like I just, you know, yes to all these things and, you know, it's just kind of amusing. And then I started noticing some space would open up every time I said yes. And I started sensing in that space the who I was was shifting. I was no longer the beleaguered victim. I was opening into inhabiting a space of presence that was just bigger than the waves. That's the magic of starting where you are with these simple two wings of mindfulness. With mindfulness, we are, and this is very, very basic, we're activating a part of the more

recently developed brain. We're going from a limbic reactivity where we're caught and identified as the irritated self or the fearful self or the angry self. And by naming what's going on, okay, anger. In the moment of naming, and this is research. UCLA did some research showing when you name an emotion, you activate the left prefrontal cortex and start reducing the activation of the limbic system. When you say yes and allow it, which is the completion of mindfulness, it's not just

recognizing but also not judge, making room, then you get a much more full activation of the prefrontal cortex, which is our most recently evolved part of our brain. It's where we have access to empathy, mindfulness, perspective, more rational thinking, morality. This is the evolutionary shift. We're all part of this unfolding. It's happening through all of us, this awakening of consciousness, we're removing from fight-flight freeze as that reflexive reaction. And that's the shadow that's playing out in our culture to this potential where we have access to the frontal cortex, which really means we have access to our awakened heart and awakened mind. And we can respond instead of react.

So for me that yes meditation is just an example it's very useful if you have a way for yourself to just to name things and agree to them of actually shifting from a small self a beleaguered small self to a much more open and benign and happy presence when we're in conflict this is what allows us

to, instead of continuing the pattern, have other choices. Give you an example that some of you might remember, I've shared it before, because it's one of the ones that most has touched my heart. One of the big ways that conflict shows up is in anger. We're seeing it now really big time. And in many anger management programs now, especially there's ones that are being offered

to the military, mindfulness is a key feature. And so it was that one army surgeon was in an anger management program that taught a lot of mindfulness. The story that I heard about him was that he went to a supermarket. And at the end of the day, he had a whole lot to do when he got home. He fills his cart, gets into line. He's not in the express line, a full cart, but the woman in front of him only has one item. and she has a child

and she takes the child and hands the child to the clerk and they're ooing and eyeing over the child and he starts going berserk it's like what is she doing in my line what are they doing cooing over this baby

I'm a busy important person I've got a lot of stuff to do so anger starts building up okay limbic system shadow remember what am I unwilling to feel he catches it he goes okay, mindfulness, mindfulness, let's get mindful. So he starts naming, okay, so anger's here, you know, and allowing the anger to be there. And when you name and allow something to be there, these two wings of mindfulness, recognizing, allowing, it allows you to start noticing what else

is there. You start touching into what you've been unwilling to feel. And he could sense under the anger this anxiety that if he didn't get everything done, his life would fall apart. You know, things would go crazy. How many of you have had that feeling? You know, if I don't get everything done, some terrible consequences around the corner, right? That was what he was experiencing. So he got in touch with that fear,

and when you get in touch with what's really there, you're more inhabiting a whole quality of presence. So he looked up, and he saw that the little girl was kind of cute, the one that were handing back and forth. So when that woman was gone, and it was his turn, he said to the clerk, you know, that was a really, really cute little girl.

And she beamed. She said, oh, well, that's my daughter. In fact, my mother brings her over to visit me. My husband was killed in Afghanistan last year. So this is my only way of having some time with my daughter. She comes over twice a day with her. So I share this because not everyone we meet, and certainly not every time we're annoyed or angry at somebody,

is there that kind of a drama in the background? But in a way there is, because everybody is struggling hard, and the people that we're most angry at in some way have their own suffering that we're not seeing in the moment we're angry. Remember the trance, it narrows,

so we don't see the whole picture. But if we're willing, instead of following our angry, narrative, to come into our bodies and open to what's here, to recognize and allow to say yes, then we open into a presence that can see more truly the other. And it doesn't mean that we don't make boundaries where we have to make boundaries, speak the truths we need to speak, vote the way our hearts tell us to vote, we do all that. but we don't carry that trance-like fight-flight-freeze reactivity that keeps us small.

I think of this as making a U-turn that gives us a tremendous amount of empowerment where we go from angry narrative making other bad or our self-bad and we move from the narrative that keeps us small back into our bodies and our hearts. We make a U-turn and come back home by naming and saying yes to what's inside us. So that'll be our first practice, okay? Take some moments to, this is not, these are not long practices, but take some moments to find a way of sitting. And in this pause, you might feel your breath and let the attention collect with your breath. I'd like to invite you to scan and sense it.

a situation that might have occurred today, yesterday, recently, that led you to feeling down on yourself, that you spoke in a way you didn't like or behaved in a way you didn't like. So in this case, the not liking or the judgment or the blame, this kind of limbic reactivity is aimed at yourself. The conflict is a part of you against a part of you. A judge and the judged. Take some moments to sense perhaps what you're believing about yourself, what your thoughts are that are in some way putting yourself down, making the U-turn or the shift from the thoughts that are aimed in aversive way at yourself right into your body and your heart and just start noticing

what actually you've been feeling. Is it a sinking feeling, a guilty feeling, an anxious feeling? You can practice your own version of the yes meditation by just naming what you're aware of. If there's guilt, you might just say guilty and then that yes, it's a very gentle, kind yes. It's a yes that allows the feeling to be there. It's not judging yourself for it. Just Guilty? Okay, yes to the guilt. Anxious or afraid. Maybe there's a fear that you'll be rejected because of the way you acted. Okay, yes to the fear. Maybe there's shame like, oh, that really means I'm bad in some ways. Okay, gentle, gentle, yes to the shame. Just adding that kind of from your heart, that allowing, yes, just whispering. So you feel more and more of a

quality of intimacy, an intimate presence with what's really going on inside your body and your heart. Experiment by seeing if you can deepen the yes so that it's unconditional. It's like your whole heart and heart space is allowing the life inside you, the feelings in your being to just be as they are, like truly saying yes and allowing just as you are. And you might sense what is the experience of your being when you're truly saying yes to the life that's here? When there's mindfulness, naming and allowing, what's your experience of your own being? Can you begin to sense that beingness, that pure presence, that can include the different waves and conditioning, but it's not limited, it's not identified.

You can continue with your eyes closed or if you'd like to open your eyes. So this is the basic pathway back into presence from being identified in a small way to relaxing open into who we are, just to name and say yes, open to. There is a related pathway that I'd like to bring in where we intentionally call on the most wise or compassionate part of our being. And this is in the Buddhist tradition, it's sometimes described as taking refuge in Buddha nature. Or in some way we're remembering. We're feeling stuck in trance, but because Buddha nature is what we are, there's some place in us that says, oh, please, can I just have access to that wisdom and that compassion?

Because the frontal cortex is there, just that we're not fully activated in those moments. So in some level we're saying, can I please activate the frontal cortex? But if you're more spiritually minds, you might say, can I take refuge in the Buddha? And that's really, that's what we're doing, right? This is our evolution or our direction. Another way that you might frame it, and I find this very, very helpful. is to call on my future self. And the reason I find it helpful is because future is just an idea.

Time is just a concept, but it's a useful concept for me because it's what we're evolving into. We're manifesting more and more this awakened heart and mind. And the whole path is forgetting and remembering. So in a moment of remembering, we're really remembering to a inhabit who we're becoming. It's always here and available. We just don't always realize it. So I know for myself when I in some way just can sit here and say, okay, so how is my future self experiencing this moment? There's immediately a sense of a much more open and benign

awareness, a benevolent awareness that's always here, but I was temporarily identified in something smaller. So it's like that, that quick, that there's a relaxing back into what's always here but forgotten. So there's different ways of exploring this and every one of us, every one of you who's listening right now has tasted your high self or future self or Buddha nature, whatever language you have, whether it's in a moment of loving, with another person, or a moment of awe where your sense of separateness drops away and you're just in awe at the beauty of nature, or in a moment of real silence or quietness? And you might not have named it as such, oh, here's my Buddha nature. In fact, if you do that, you're kind of out

of it in the moment. It's like then you're back in your cognitive mind. But the more moments we have where we're not in that thinking narrative of a separate self and we're resting in that sense of connection and open-heartedness and awakeness, the more familiar that high self or Buddha nature or future self becomes, the more access we have to it. So there's different ways that we each find different pathways that wake us up,

to it and mostly it takes practice. It's a life practice to call on this high self and in some traditions were guided to first imagine a deity like the Tibetans have these different deities that you visualize and you imagine that deity kind of pouring love and wisdom and light into your being until you just merge with that deity. There are guided practices where you choose someone who really expresses in your life that wisdom, that beauty, that consciousness, and just imagine that being's consciousness and imagine that filling you until every cell and the spaces between the cells are filled with that consciousness.

And there's, as I mentioned, ways that we can be guided into imagining our own awakened heart-mind and then just merging with that. So I'd like to do that final practice with you of a guided meditation into recognizing and merging with our own awakened heart mind and we'll practice with that one. What we'll be practicing is really how to work with conflict, how to call on that and then work with conflict. So again, if you need to do a little moving around and then come into stillness, so the first

practice was start where we are, bringing the two wings of recognizing and allowing, of mindfulness and compassion really, to the moment. And this is an extension. We move from presence to calling, intentionally calling on the awakened heart and mind. And as I mentioned, this is a life practice, so no need to feel discouraged if it's difficult to access. immediately because the truth is what you're longing for, what you're calling on is already here. So if you're sincere, if you have a yearning to realize it and you're willing to experiment, you'll find yourself organically drawn to your own potential. In this practice you might, as we did earlier, sense a place where you recently felt stuck, this time where there's been

some conflict, some distance or difficulty with another person. And if there isn't a good example for you of that it's fine to of course work on somewhere that you feel at odds with yourself too. Either way where you feel reactive where it's hard to really call on the best of you. This might be a conflict with a partner or family member, somebody at work, where you feel reactive. You might pick a place where you kind of repeat again and again the same pattern. You might imagine now that you can just put that aside for the time being and project into the future, 20 years, 30 years. and imagine your future self

and you might imagine where that future self is living so you can kind of see a space that that self is in that you're visiting right now imagine how they're dressed what might be around them the environment or space they're in looking closer at your future self just since you're there to engage and look at your future self's eyes, let them be kind and welcoming and understanding. This is your most evolved, caring, awake self, this body, mind manifesting consciousness. And imagine that this future

self's consciousness, this awake consciousness, could fill you, that you can actually feel it filling you, your body, your heart, your mind. So you're able to look at the world through the eyes of your future self, this awake being, and with the heart of your future self, this awake being. You can imagine with this wakefulness and compassion entering, re-engaging in the situation that you brought to mind, that place where you got reactive as a small self, and just sense as your future self what your intention is as you re-enter this. difficult situation with another person. What's your deepest intention?

And from that intention, imagine and sense what choices open up and how you respond to the situation. Now feel yourself right in these moments, feeling your body, your heart, sensing that awareness, that presence inside you, around you, accessible. might listen deeply as your future self and send some message, some reminder that will be helpful in the days and weeks to come, the years to come to your current self. Just listen, sense what the message is from your future self. Two meditations we've done are not mutually exclusive. There are many times that will come into presence by naming and allowing what's

here and then call on the highest part of ourselves to deepen that presence and that caring. There are times that we'll start right in and call on the highest parts of ourselves and then as we call on that, we'll then sense more of a capacity to name and allow what's here. So they're very much interweaving. They both have to do with calling on presence to meet the moment so that rather than fight-flight freeze, we can inhabit the more evolved and awake part of our being. So with that, I'd like to open it tonight. I don't often do this. We have mics available and ask you, maybe it'd be interesting to hear in the room what messages some of you got from your future self. That can be a

really valuable thing. Or if you have a question or something that was a takeaway for you, you might want to share that. Raise your hand if you'd be willing to to speak, brief sharing. And when you do, to keep the mic right by your chin so that everybody can hear, there's a tendency to have the mic float away. So anybody would like

to speak, raising your hand. We've got a person right here, Gary. The person I was imagining is someone I've always seen as a bully in my life. And what hit me was the reason I find this person so difficult to be around is his anger

triggers my fear. And what I got to was his anger is coming from his own fear. And I spend a lot of time wishing he could work through that. And it hit me that, yeah, I have a little more work to do. You have what? A little more work to do on my own triggers. That's a beautiful realization, though. That's the beginning of waking up out of trance,

when you can really see how what you've been reacting to, how that person's coming from their pain, that opens the door. Thank you. Yeah. I like seeing my future self as this lovely woman who people, this might sound weird, but people enjoy spending time with me, and I don't understand why. So being in the presence of my future self was very special. So I got to visit with myself 20 years from now.

I felt this beautiful peacefulness. And when I hugged her, it was very nice to hug her and to feel that connectedness with her. And thank you so much for that visual. It was very powerful to me. Thank you. Thank you. So a comment is, do it many, many, many times.

You all know the teaching neurons that fire together, wire together, which means the more times that you connect and feel that, the more quick the access will be to it, the more available that quality of connection will be. Thank you. My future self said, you're navigating some difficult terrain, and you're doing a good job.

A good job. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you. I have a friend that is going through a very big depression. He's my best friend, my brother. I tend to want him to... converse with me right now and he's not able to do that and I have

been taking that as a rejection. He can't talk to anybody right now with all the mindfulness. I want to educate, do this, do this, this will help, this will help. He's shutting me out and it's making my fear kick in that he's never going to want me around him because he's going to reject me

because I'm trying to help him and I visualize that he knows this is coming from love and he knows that I love him. I have to respect that this is his way to turtle. He has to turtle. But we have plans to move to California, and I have visualized us there. You know, we have just come from there, and I visualize us there, and I just saw myself away from now, and I just heard myself say, trust. You know the path. You know what's going to

happen, but you're pushing and grasping and clinging isn't going to make it happen any faster or any better, and it's certainly not helping him. I have to focus on me. Yeah, thank you. I teach writing classes, and I have a student who was not willing to do the exercise that I had proposed. So I spoke with my future self, and my future self said that the nature of an invitation is that people are allowed to refuse it if they want to. Oh, that's really beautiful. Thank you. Yeah.

I'd like to pick up on the bully story again because that's my story. Before I came here this evening, I had already realized that the person was coming from pain. But regardless of that, I needed to figure out how to stop the bullying because of the harm it was doing me. As far as the meditation this evening, what I reached was just to say, to myself the feeling of frustration because what I have found very difficult to do is to speak my truth and to set a boundary. I'm not sure what the words are to even say to this person. What I realized as people were talking here, what I didn't do was call upon my higher self

to help me. I didn't get that far, so I'll have to try that. Thank you very much. That's a really powerful sharing because it's absolutely part of what we have to do to speak our truths and set boundaries. The question is what is the quality of energy that we want that that comes from? Do we want it to come from a feeling of being victimized, angry and hate or do we want it to come from the place in us as just taking good care of ourselves?

And that's the value of reaching to that more evolved part of your being. So yeah, thank you very much. My future self said, slow down. Remember your intention. Wow, that one could carry all of us. Thank you. Yeah. My takeaway tonight was that my future self is just light.

You know, like there's just this beautiful golden light. And so anyway, that's my takeaway. So I have a question for you. So there's golden light for your future self. Were you able to sense that light filling you and in some way have that inform how you be in the world? Yeah, it was kind of an enveloping light. And the message that I was receiving, there was also an image of an older person where I'm to be living. The message was, you're going to be okay.

It's going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. So it was very encouraging. Trusting. Yeah. Let me ask you a question. How many of you had some message that had something to do with trusting? Yeah. Thank you. There's something about when we really inhabit reality, we trust reality. And that's the message is to trust how things are unfolding. So thank you. That's just one flavor of it. but I appreciate that. And I want to just add another comment, which is part of the value of this future self or high self meditation

is not to go off into, okay, non-dual, just formless light, but also to sense how that consciousness really is waking up through these body minds and can be engaged in a very real way. So spirituality doesn't become compartmentalized. There's not the sense of, oh, this is just, you know, my enlightened self and then here I am slumping along trying to do my relationships. There's actually a way we can call on that wisdom and light to inform us. So we have to stop and your comments are beautiful and I thank you.

I want to just have a chance to close together the last few moments if you will. So just coming into stillness we started the this evening really talking about the shadow and clearly within our own being and within our society we can't transform unless we face the truth of how it is courageously. And in facing the fear and the aggression if we really want to wake up out of a reactive trance we need to call on where the light is, the awakeness, the compassion. We need to see what Thomas Merton described as the secret beauty. I'd like to close with his words.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the eyes of the heart, divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. Namaste and blessings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

please visit tarabrock.com.