This essay is a near-verbatim adaptation of the live spoken teaching, edited only for continuity and readability.
As I begin, I invite you to take a moment to curate your environment—perhaps light some incense or a candle, and set the space. Bring your attention to your heart, letting go of any resistance within. Allow yourself to begin to smile, inwardly or outwardly, with a sense of joy simply for being. Invoke that possibility. We are letting the momentum of activity slow down—the wheel of becoming, slowing to a stop.
I am excited to share some truly special wisdom concepts today—ideas I have found personally life-changing. It may take time to integrate them, so I recommend reviewing, studying, and considering what we discuss. But it is truly pivotal.
Today, I want to talk about art and mastery. What does it mean to be an artist? What does it mean to achieve mastery? How can that be accomplished? This is very closely related to love and meditation, and also to mathematics. For many people, that seems paradoxical, because math often appears to be the opposite of art, but that is not the case. Math is art. It is the art of the universe, but it is also the art of the self.
To be an artist is to express yourself with utter honesty. Honesty—to be completely free. And to share meaning with life, with the world. It comes through you because of what you are. So your state, your inner state—what you are.
Let us start with a word: autotelic. The word autotelic means to do something for the sake of doing it. If we are engaging in an autotelic activity, it means that we are in the flow. It means that we are present, and the activity itself is the reward.
Often, we do things for the results of our actions. I am going to be disciplined, right? And I am going to bear with it and complete this action because I want some sort of future result. This is not autotelic. Autotelic means that I pick up the guitar and play because that experience itself is fulfilling to me. It is true to myself. It is freedom.
It is important not to deceive yourself, because you may pick up the guitar and say that, but really, it is all about your ego. The question is, can I live in such a degree of humility that I do what I love to do without thought of egoic reward? Both the reward in the future, through money or results of any kind, and the inner reward of egoic gratification—such as, I am special, I am better, I am worse, or whatever it is that you wish to be. But to act in a state of complete humility and self-abandon.
This is autotelic, and autotelic activity is an essential part of spiritual practice, because when you do this, you dissolve the ego. You are doing things that are antithetical to egoic development, to egoic calcification.
Autotelic activity needs to be something that you enjoy, but it also needs to be something that stretches you ever so slightly. If you are a guitarist and you play the same song every day for 30 years and never challenge yourself, that is not autotelic either. Autotelic means that what you are doing is invigorating to your sense of freedom and vitality, because you are always taking it a little bit further—not too much further, but just the next step.
When we engage in autotelic activity, we begin to develop mastery, which itself has a few ingredients, but we are getting better and better at what we do. You may have seen my animations evolve over the years. They actually have evolved quite a bit. I am always trying to do the next thing. I cannot stand staying at the same level.
Autotelic means—auto means self, so to do something for its own value. Intrinsically, it means that you are doing it at the edge of your ability.
Maybe take a moment and think: what is the activity that I like to do? Usually, people have one central thing, or perhaps one, two, or three central things. Sometimes they integrate. Usually, one of them is really reflected in the others.
For me, mathematics is my autotelic activity, but so is writing. I love to write. But when I write, I see the mathematics in the writing structure, in the psychology of the writing. Another thing is coding. Obviously, for me, that is very mathematical, so all of these things integrate together.
Perhaps consider, what is something that I would love to do for the sake of doing it? It could be dancing, it could be writing, it could be drawing interesting patterns of geometry, even. It could be a number of things—just let that idea come to you.
Let us talk about a few more concepts. What is the difference between inspiration and motivation? Motivation means I want a reward. It is not good to be motivated. It is good to be inspired. Because motivation means that, from a spiritual standpoint, what you are doing is not what you truly want to be doing. You just want the result.
If we live our lives not doing what we want to do, our energy cannot awaken. The enlightened being is always true to themselves. That means, in this moment, I am doing what I want to do—not in an indulgent sense, but in an integral sense.
If you want to eat cookies, and then eat more cookies, and more cookies, that really has nothing to do with being true to yourself, right? In fact, being true to yourself might look more like this: I want to have juice every day, make a beautiful juice in the morning, wake up at 7 a.m., make it all colorful and beautiful, put on some wonderful Stan Getz music, and just feel the freshness of the sun in the food. That is more in line with being true to yourself. And then, the question is: do you actually do it?
So, inspiration versus motivation. If you look at someone and think, "They are so motivated," consider this: a student who just wants to get into a particular university and pushes themselves—they are very motivated. But then, think about another student, a high school student who simply loves what they are studying. They get into that great university, but they did it because they were honest with themselves. That is more honorable.
The motivated student is really self-serving. Here is the big distinction, and why it relates to enlightenment: the motivated student is serving their ego—they are self-serving. The inspired student is transcending their ego. That is what I mean by humility. They love what they do, and they lose themselves in it. They do not care what anybody thinks. And therefore, they live in integrity.
There is more: inspiration, motivation, and also aspiration and ambition. What is your aspiration? That is good. Your inspiration leads to aspiration. I aspire to, for example, make this beautiful music come out of the violin. It inspires me, and I aspire to be able to manifest it in total freedom, and to have it include these subtle intricacies of music theory that are really fascinating to me, audibly, for myself.
Ambition is, "I have to have it, I have to have it all. I want to be the best." It is not as evolved. It is very much on the other side of the spectrum. I am ambitious, I have to get into the best university, I do not care if anybody is in my way, I will push them aside. That has nothing to do with being aspirational. The aspirational person wants everybody to succeed. They are in freedom. They are in compassion. They love life.
The motivated person, the ambitious person—they are not living in love. They are living in deficit, in insufficiency. So, we feel the moment is complete and full and overflowing with joy in inspiration and aspiration. In ambition and motivation, we feel the moment is not filled with joy, it is not complete unto itself, and therefore we want something else. We are always living in the future, like a donkey with a carrot hanging in front of its head.
This is all involved in being an artist. When I say being an artist, I mean being true to myself, and growing towards mastery by constantly living in autotelic activity. I am inspired, and I aspire to things that make me smile, that I enjoy moving toward. I do not care what anybody thinks. I do it for its own sake. Life brings me people who are meant to be in my life because I am being true to myself, and I will resonate with them, and they will resonate with me.
And then there is mastery. Mastery is also an important thing. It is a little bit of a separate topic, but I think they can go together today. How do you achieve mastery? Well, all of this is involved and applies. But mastery also means that you love the basics.
In mastery, if I am a martial artist, I love the basic punch, or the basic stance, or the basic block. And it is not that I leave it at a basic level. It is that within that mastery, I become a master of standing. I know the subtleties. It is like the pianist who touches the key, and you think, "Wow, how did you touch that key that way?" There is a difference. You can tell if someone has been playing piano properly for 30 years. They might play a basic song, but when they touch the keys, it is just right. And that is simply how they touch the key. So the master knows how to touch the key. The martial artist knows how to stand. The mathematician knows how to connect with the number 3—or 4, or 5.
The basics, the fundamentals, are an interest, and only someone who is really autotelic will be interested in the fundamentals. And when I count, I get a kick out of it, because it is for me. I love numbers. I love quantities.
Mastery includes returning to the basics. The master is a perpetual beginner. The expert is all enmeshed in methods and all the advanced things, but the master comes back to simplicity. John Coltrane, the saxophone player, he started playing the 9th, and the 11th, and the chord, and he made it work, because he saw that was possible, and he was creating art—avant-garde art—him and Miles Davis.
Study artists, people who did this. These people did this. You look at them and you say, well, why was a Steve Jobs a Steve Jobs, a Miles Davis a Miles Davis, a Bruce Lee a Bruce Lee? Think of the dancer. Think of the writer. Think of the politician who perhaps did that—a Gandhi, a Gandhi.
All of this might sound like nice theory, perhaps, and maybe it is aspirational, but then you come to the point where you are trying to do it, and you maybe cannot. It is hard, right? Because it is not just something that you do. It is certainly something you can commit to, but what are the things that prevent this? And how can we awaken the ability by navigating—or by removing—those impediments or obstacles?
First of all, love makes this possible. In love, we accept ourselves completely as we are, and we accept everything as it is. So we have to practice love. Stillness, wholeness, meditation—if we feel incomplete without being liked, if we feel incomplete without being... Any of the things that can interfere with our integrity, right? We have to be free. So freedom is essential. The artist is free.
Meditation and Bhakti are essential to cultivating freedom. Bhakti is the yoga of love. The more love we have, the more we simply do not mind what is happening. Everything becomes so beautiful. It does not matter if it is a cloudy day, or if I am just sitting still. I am overflowing with so much beauty, because I have a richness within—within my heart.
That makes us free. When we become completely independent—inwardly independent—because we are overflowing with ecstatic bliss. And meditation is a part of that. Love, loving, being loving, living in a loving way, being kind to others—all those things open the heart in that way. And meditation, which is being still, being an open channel, a conduit for the divine to come through.
If you are so filled with ideas like the expert, you cannot be the master and simply embody spontaneity. The master has already gone through the stage of being the expert. There is a kind of curve: you are a beginner, then you become an expert, and then you come back down and let go of the rules. But you do not conflict with them. You have transcended the rules. That is what I mean—John Coltrane did that. He broke the rules, but he did it in the right way. Because the rules were not absolute; they were guidelines.
How do we do this? Meditate. Be kind. Meditate every day. This is why it is about routine. If you follow your routine—if every day you meditate at the same time until it becomes a part of you—that is how you can become an artist and achieve mastery.
Also, mindfulness. When you find that thing you love, that you live for, that is autotelic, you can recognize it. See it everywhere. Let it be the lens through which you interpret your whole life. Every moment is an act of that thing, and you can begin to make it an act of that, to live it completely. This gives us beautiful vitality. If everything becomes dance for you—even when you are showering or cooking or whatever—then you are living that completely.
It becomes a lens through which you see the world, and something that you do in every activity. Let your language become that. You know how I like to use mathematics in my language. I use the metaphor of mathematics, the metaphor of physics, the metaphor of philosophy, in a very particular way. To me, that is—I am living it.
I do not have to use the colloquialisms of the cool kids next door. I use my words. And I do not care if they like me or not. Because I would rather be true to myself, right?
I am inviting everybody here to explore what that means for them, essentially. How great would it be if all of us—think of us, we are all like wildflowers. Every wildflower is different, right? The beautiful gift to the universe is your unique autotelic aspiration and inspiration. And this all relates to Dharma, of course. I am talking about Dharma from a different perspective.
Sometimes it is hard to do when you are kind of locked up. I used to be locked up. I think a lot of us get locked up at some point. Meditation and energy work changed that for me. When we do the energy work, the auric aerobics, this should clear the energy. Because it is actually in your aura. When you love, your aura purifies. When you meditate, your aura purifies. It is a part of our biology—subtle physical, electromagnetic, nervous system, but not even just the nervous system. It is more like auric.
When you do a metaphysical practice—like, we usually do not do it this way. Instead of just feeling love and going into stillness, into light, this is almost like clearing the body so you can go deeper. The body, the nervous system, the chakra system, the nadis, the sheshumana, all these different channels, and the aura—when they get dense, you cannot go as far. So this is a little bit like a kundalini yoga practice. It clears it. You can spend hours on it. When you are done, you are just like, wow, I feel powerful and clear. Then the whole idea is you just drop in and the mind stops. It is a different approach—one of the approaches to stilling the mind.
Let us talk about excitement. Excitement seems like a good thing, but it is actually not really a good thing, and let me explain what I mean by that. Excitement is usually associated with anticipation. There is a sense of up and down. The inspiration I am talking about is very steady, because there is a polarity that excitement introduces.
The artist is inspired and overflowing, but there is a sense of aloofness about it. It may not be outwardly expressed. What is there to be excited about? My life is one effulgent excitement, independent of circumstances. What is exciting is that the boat is facing the right direction. The boat may be at any level across the journey. We do not want to miss any year of our lives. Is 18 better than 42? Is 42 better than 3? They are all good. It is unfolding, and we get to experience every flavor of development temporarily in the unfolding of our destiny. Think about how 90 is going to be—that is going to be cool. Every age is great, unless we start thinking, well, 90 means I do not have as many years left. But do not think of it that way, because you are just so in the moment. There are no years, there is only now.
That is an aspirational, spiritually developed perspective. Excitement, I have found, dissipates energy. To really retain the energy, maintaining a kind of aloofness is important. I am in such integrity and wholeness that I do not mind—I am simply moving forward. There is a sense of charge in that. The charge comes from being true to yourself.
To thine own self be true. Shakespeare said that. You cannot be false to any man. There is a powerful vitality if you can find that small opening in the universe that is integrity—being honest and true to yourself. A cosmic momentum of power moves through you in every moment, and you are self-fulfilled, autotelically, through your integrity.
Sometimes I think, oh, it feels good to be excited, but you have to be careful with it. It cannot come from lack, essentially.
Now, let us move into practice. Bringing attention to the body, various systems, the chest, after the moon, scan your body. Soften by becoming aware of any resistance in the scanning process. You can soften and let go. And if you have any energetic pain, just observe it. Try to let it release itself, or accept it. Trust that resistance will soften with this process. We are becoming immersed in the moment, the cosmic substance.
Let us bring our attention to the heart center, right in the center of the chest. Or, as we say, "I am so-and-so." You can put your finger there. We are bringing your attention to that spot, revitalizing it through attention. You can put your finger there, or simply feel that spot within. You can even tap the spot.
Now, go to the third eye—right between the eyebrows, a little above. There is another spot, a vortex of energy. Just bring your attention there, or focus your energy there. We are just doing a quick scan of the chakras before we get into the aerobics. You are looking at that spot, managing your third eye. It is a center of potency.
Now let us do the navel center. It is one inch below the belly button. If you feel this one strongly, it begins to release a sense of heat. But you can also just feel the magnetism or the power of it. One inch below the belly button—or half an inch below, actually. Apparently, it varies from person to person just a little bit. This is the power of the will. You can feel that quality of power there. The heart is love, the third eye is vision and clarity, and this is your power. You need to get in touch with the power. Try to feel this spot and invoke the magnification of that power. If you cannot feel the energy as much, simply feel the spot. There is an energetic aspect to that. You can magnify it that way, but even just feeling the spot with your attention and energy is really nice.
Go back to the heart. Now, this time, try to feel the heart center's expansion in front of the chest. There is a spot—about six inches in front of the chest. I put my middle finger in that spot and feel the heart arc—like an electrical arc. We connect a tether to the finger. We are going to do an intensity hold. Feel it connect to the finger, and for 10 seconds, feel that intense connection. Then relax for 10 seconds. Ten seconds of intense connection with the finger. And if you do not want to use your finger, you can also just feel it with intensity. Now just relax and let the momentum carry. Ten more seconds. Relaxed. We are doing this with gentle intentionality. Do not strain yourself. I would definitely give it a pulse. Ten more seconds. Relax. With each reiteration, you can take it a little bit further. And in mere seconds. Relax. Now just enjoy what you have earned. Your heart should feel more open.
Let us move to the third eye. Always stay active in the heart, though. It is the center of our practice. The third eye. Feel the spot. Just do a 10-second intensity pulse. Relax, let go. Again, 10-second pulse. More intensity. Let go. Next time around, just a little more intensity. 10-second pulse. Notice the heart and third eye are very active.
Let us go to the navel center. This one should be fun. Just feeling the spot to start. Triangulate the position for love. Your tension. Now we are adding the power. 10-second pulse on the navel center. It is making me laugh. Oh, it is surges of energy. It is good if you can really get it to have a surge of energy—that is a good goal. Relax. Just enjoy it for now. Another 10-second pulse. A little bit more intensity this time. One inch below the belly button. Hold it. And letting go. Again. A more intense 10-second pulse at the navel center. Relax.
Now just scan the three dots in. The three chakras. Manipura is the navel center. Anahata, the heart center. And the third eye. Agni Chakra. Feel them all active at the same time. You should feel stable from the navel. Should feel expansive. Contentment from the heart. And you should feel steady attention from the third eye.
That is enough exercises. Now is a good time for us to go into the dissolving state. So we do all this work, which is not really meditation—it is more of a precursor to it. We have cleared our space. Now we can let go. There will be no activity. We will just become absorbed in the freedom we have just opened energetically. If you begin to see the luminosity, the brightness within the fabric of your mind, let that brightness expand. Let it wash you away. Into impersonal existence. Absorbed. In the state. Of the unknown. Being what you are. Not thinking about what you are—just being. Coming still. Lights.
Really revel in it. Wistfulness. With gratitude. When you are ready, come out of the meditation.
Sometimes, after these practices, people experience sensations—light, energy, tingling, pressure, swirls of color, expansion, or a sense of gravity. The qi, the kundalini, gets very dense, and it is not supposed to be dense. It is supposed to feel fluid in the body. It should flow, like electricity. And it should be very charged, right? Your hand should have a lot of life force energy in it. When you focus on your third eye, you can start to move that energy. Doing this together, in this way, is really interesting because you end up accomplishing more than you would otherwise. It dislodges things. You might feel better, but also somewhat unsettled, because something starts to move. But you can sense that it is better—it is just processing. The tingling in the head is very good, too.
When you do a metaphysical practice, it is almost like clearing the body so you can go deeper. The body, the nervous system, the chakra system, the nadis, the sheshumana, all these different channels, and the aura—when they get dense, you cannot go as far. This is a little bit like a kundalini yoga practice. It clears it. And when you are done, you are just like, wow, I feel powerful and clear. Then the whole idea is you just drop in and the mind stops. It is a different approach—one of the approaches to stilling the mind.
Sometimes, when the full moon is near, the energy has this charge—it is almost like catapulting you into the stars. There is an ambient potential charge in the metaphysical space from the moon. You have to feel it. If you had told me this twenty years ago, I would have thought you were simply believing in something. The point is to feel it. Try to get into nature, sit and meditate, and try to still your mind. Meditate on your chakras. I like to get a "moon tan." If it is not too cold, go outside, take your shirt off, and let the moonlight touch your skin.
You can use things like crystals, which you can actually feel, and they can open your energy so you can sense the moon more clearly. I would burn some sage—there are all kinds of things you can do. Light some candles and get quiet, turn off the phone and the computer, and just listen. Just listen.
I always let reading about it be an invitation to direct perception. If we read about it, we might think, "Oh, wait, I should listen." And then you do, and you can experience it. But I always take it with a grain of salt. Does this person know what they are talking about? Is it really true? I have to be my own authority, always. And everyone should be their own authority in what they do, which means I know the truth because I saw it and I experienced it. But it is also an invitation.
You are a little speck; you are the Earth. You just rose up out of the clay and were made into a person. We are still part of the Earth, right?
Thank you for being here. Namaste.