Essay Edition
Foundations of Dispassion
Dispassion is a very central principle in yoga, and in all spirituality, not just yoga. Dispassion is centered on a very basic premise: happiness does not come from things, but is our intrinsic nature.
Happiness is the nature of our consciousness, and it is obscured or eclipsed by attachments and ideas, which can be cleared through dispassion. To connect with dispassion, you have to find your way to it. It may not be something you can make contact with right away. Then you will recognize it. It comes with a kind of aloofness toward the world. You do not really care what anybody thinks. You do not care about things. But there is a nuance there.
Dispassion comes from the knowledge that what you seek only comes from within you. It cannot come from outside of you. What we really want, this absolute blissfulness and happiness, is a feeling inside of us. It cannot come from sensorial pleasure, egoic recognition, or worldly circumstances.
At their best, worldly circumstances can facilitate one to connect with dispassion. If you are an ascetic living on the street and you do not have any food, that can be very distracting because the body is screaming for food, shelter, and basic needs. If you spend too much time alone, your body might want a hug or some touch. Your nervous system wants these things. Worldly circumstances can create the conditions through which you find dispassion.
There is a Pali word that goes very close to this. It is one of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism: nirodha. Nirodha means cessation, but in a sense, it means the cessation through dispassion that causes this effortless clarity, this effortless freedom.
Essentially, it is freedom. We seek freedom to abide in that uncaused happiness that is the nature of the self.
Most people do not do this, and we are not trained to do this. We are trained completely in the opposite direction. We inherit the cultural mentality. To be different and walk our own path takes vigilance. It takes work. To become dispassionate is something worthwhile, something worth seeking.
The central premise, and this is a profound thing, is that happiness is uncaused. How is happiness uncaused? You felt happy when you were with your family, or you felt happy when you got this thing. True, but that happiness was inside of you all along. Those things trigger a release of it. It is a capacity of consciousness. It is a capacity for happiness that is within us. Otherwise, we could never make contact with it.
In meditation, we get to enter into the dispassion of uncaused happiness. Some people ask how I could sit and meditate for that long. What do you mean? I am getting a massage from God. I am getting to be in the most blissful state. I love it.
Sometimes, in the beginning, it is a little difficult because you have to move through the attachments on the way to dispassion. You do not fulfill the attachments. You do not get Instagram out and scroll. Instagram completely conditions us to be very attached and gets the mind going. It is not nirodha. It is the opposite of nirodha.
It is a very nuanced topic because there are a lot of traps. You might decide that you are going to be dispassionate, and then where is the happiness? Maybe it does not come to you.
One phrase is very important: the heart of passion is dispassion.
A new passion arises in dispassion. It is the passion of the moment, the passion of existence. There is an uncaused passion, an undirected passion, that happens within you when there is no attachment.
We seek happiness not in things, but in the formless. The formless is the part of us that is beyond time. It is not circumstantial. There is the formlessness, the eternality of the self. Anything that is changing or evolving is transient. If we try to find our happiness in transient things, they are always veiled with the pain of transience.
There is a kind of happiness inside of us that is completely untethered to circumstances.
One thing that happens in dispassion, the mechanism of transformation, is that by not seeking and not being attached, we stop creating conflict. When we are seeking something or becoming something, there is a sense of conflict within. Conflict does not feel good. That is not happiness. Conflict is the chasm between what is and what should be, and there is a lack of acceptance in that.
In dispassion, we enter into a state where there is no conflict. It is a very practical thing. If you walk around and decide that you do not need to concern yourself with anything, that you are turning inward, you will notice how conditioned the mind is. You are looking for opportunities for this or that. But you can live in the constancy of being and freedom.
Another part is integrity, to always live by a set of principles. It is all written. It is set. I am going to live by these principles, and my destiny will unfold organically. That is integrity.
Integrity and dispassion go together because integrity can only happen when somebody is quite dispassionate. If somebody has a lot of integrity, they are not going to be bent away from their principles. They live in the freedom of dispassion and integrity, which are very closely related.
Integrity and Creative Freedom
This is one of the paradoxes of dispassion. In dispassion, you are overflowing with contentment and completeness. I recognize that I am something, and I can give endlessly of what I am. I cannot give endlessly of what I am not.
I am not this black obsidian crystal. If I give it to you, I do not have it. But I can give endlessly of what I am, bliss, my nature. In a way, it strengthens what I am. It makes me more of what I am.
In dispassion, we come to know the self. It is a form of self-knowledge. The etymology of the word passion is profound. The word passion actually means suffering.
When there is dispassion, you live dharma. You live your integrity. You do what you love. You play music because you love music. You do not play music for the wrong reason, and then you can actually experience it. Dispassion leads to this artistic freedom.
Every time I make a reel and start to get pulled into caring, it hurts. I am becoming less dispassionate. But when I sit, play, and create from freedom, that is why I say dispassion is the heart of passion. It is a different order of consciousness.
What you do in dispassion is integrity, love, and freedom. Dispassion means I am not in conflict. I am not striving. I am not becoming. It means I am unfolding. I am flowering in the moment.
To distill our work, to really take it and purify it, we clear any attachments, motives, or seeking. This is what we can all do. I always try to do this with my work. Distill my work of any attachment, any motive, any seeking, as if this is a means to an end.
Work with an awareness of where it is going because you have to live in time, but not in the sense of fulfillment. Fulfillment grows in time, and it has different stages. I am creating now, and then now it is a business, and I am liking that too. But I am living in this thing that is a revelation. It is reveling in the joy of myself unfolding through time.
But who is unfolding through time? The eternal self. We are eternal and formless, but we have form, and that form can express itself without resistance. It is more of a state of acceptance instead of becoming.
In our integrity, we accept and revel in the destiny of what we become.
There is emotion, but the emotion is an emotion of detachment. It is dispassionate. Everybody is so concerned about so many things. There is a quality of acceptance and grace in it. One of the words I feel is very important is freedom.
Without this, how can we love? Love comes from completeness. If I am whole, I am not asking anything of you. Perhaps we are in each other's lives in this moment for a reason, and it is complementary. It is a complementary expression of our intrinsic natures. But I am not asking anything. I am in a state of acceptance.
That freedom is a prerequisite for love because love does not ask anything of the other. Love wants the best for the other and accepts the other as they are, not as exploitation, but as mutual collaboration, which is very different.
It is not an idea. If we stop at the idea and think about dispassion and have some phrases, that is not the point. The point is to step into it.
We do not need to resist things. We can meet things. There is no need to worry. I still worry, but I recognize when I worry that it is an issue. You have to become conscious of it. Do I need to be worrying? Do I need to be striving, or can I just be unfolding?
I am suggesting a quality of aloofness as well. Aloofness means to be disinterested. Imagine somebody who is meditating a lot. They are very much disinterested in all the things everybody is running around striving for. There is a kind of dignified disinterest. They know that what they want is inside themselves.
That is the kind of dispassion I am talking about. I could have used the word freedom, but dispassion has a kind of power that has really served my practice personally. In yoga and other languages, they have words that mean this specifically because it is a part of the practice.
Detachment and acceptance are two ways to go beyond aversions and attractions. We want to find detachment from our aversions and our attractions, from the feeling that we just have to have this thing, whatever it is.
At first, we are encrusted in aversions and attachments. If somebody has not done any of the work and is just living in society, we are conditioned in such a way that there are all these attachments. Those attachments will wither in silence if we do not feed them. Here is an attachment. Do I really need it? Maybe you need it for a time, but ultimately you want to be free of it.
It is about freedom. Completely free. The ultimate freedom. Freedom from a body, even. Can you go to the point where you know that you are awareness beyond incarnation? You can take this very far. But you start with more mundane things.
I am free in all these ways. I am accepting the noisy neighbors. I am accepting this. I am accepting whatever. You learn to be detached, accept things, and work with them.
Things always change. That is the central premise of transience. Things are constantly changing. We work through that evolution while rooted in the part of us that does not change.
When you are very dispassionate, there is that aloof quality. I do not want all of this. I do not care. I do not need these things. I just want to be free. I just want to live in inner freedom. I want to bask in the silence. I want to feel the radiant, effulgent light within me. I want to feel my heart radiate with love. I want to be free in my expressions when I create mathematics and animation. I do not want to care what anybody thinks. I want to do it for myself. If they like it, that is okay. If they do not, that is okay.
I will accept what happens to me as life evolves. Some things will be blessings. Some things will be challenging. But I am looking inward, man. I want to be free. I want to meditate because I know that is where the greatest happiness is.
The most beautiful things I have ever experienced were in meditation. People really pedestalize sex. They think sex is the best. But when you get on the spiritual path, you realize that it is nice and all. It can be nice. It can be not nice. But it is sensorial, man.
There is something deeper. Then you can go into the emotional states, into beautiful connection and love with somebody, but that is opening something spiritual, usually.
When you go into the silence, into the absolute freedom from any sense of self, there is no one meditating anymore. You have entered into something that is so blissful and ecstatic. It cannot be matched by an idea, an egoic orientation, or anything.
You have to push back on the world a little bit. Am I supposed to be doing all these things? No. I know that happiness and ecstasy are uncaused. They are inside consciousness.
From there, you may be a great entrepreneur and a billionaire. That does not mean you became attached. That might have been an expression of your freedom, your genuine integrity, your dispassion.
Emotional Richness and Detachment
I personally weave a deep romance into this. There is a dispassion in consecration, but there is a deep romance.
The enlightened poet Rumi is very romantic. I really connect with Rumi. I feel we have a complementary resonance in our soul path. That is why I say dispassion is the heart of passion. It opens the heart. There is a sort of freedom in it.
As a man, I feel like in a relationship there is that man who feels in service in a very beautiful way that is evocative of a romantic feeling. They sacrifice. They love. I see almost the farmer guy. It is an archetype that I have in myself too. There is the guy who lives for his family. There is a sort of sacrifice in it, but you feel the love at the same time.
Ultimately, in dispassion, we allow our heart to decide. We just follow the heart. How can you let your heart decide if you do not have a degree of dispassion? The heart decides. You do not decide because of your attachments. The heart sings its subtle intimations into existence.
Compassion means that you enter into the suffering together. Co-suffering is what that means. But there is a wonderful thing if you just know everything is good. Everything is good.
You deal with life's disasters in a calm, dispassionate way, probably with a smile, a sense of gratitude, and a sense of faith that things are evolving as they should.
There is no suppression in this. Suppression is definitely not dispassion. Suppression is a kind of passion. You push it away. But you can allow emotions not to control your mind.
The goal is not to feel an urge and ignore it or push it away. The goal is to actually not have that urge at all. How does that happen? You have to observe yourself as you are, dispassionately. You might feel so attached, and you are observing yourself.
You have to let the clouds move on their own, and then there is the sun. It is not suppression, pretending there are no clouds there. They may be there. What eventually happens is this opening happens organically, and it is real and deep. That is what we want. We want to find a freedom that is actual freedom.
If there is an emotion, attend to it. That is an evolution of what you are becoming free. It is not wrong. It is just where you are.
It is not wrong to be at the bottom of the mountain or in the middle of the mountain, as long as you are walking up the mountain. Most people go in the wrong direction, walking down. The whole thing is to turn around and go in the right direction.
The right direction is knowing that happiness is uncaused. I want to be free. I want to find that freedom. I want to let it evolve. I am not going to suppress. I am going to let it happen naturally and find a way.
Meditation on Timeless Freedom
Let us meditate on dispassion. Let us see if we can experience that. Let us just let everything go.
Turn your attention to a paradox of time, noticing right now that there is an eternal moment. There is an unchanging background in which all these birds, sounds, and feelings occur.
By turning the attention to the unchanging background, we are shifting our identity from form to formless, from the time-bound to the timeless. In time, we are burdened by the activities of time. But in the timeless, there is nowhere to go. There is nothing to change because we do not have form.
Shift the identity by focusing your attention on the timeless. Simultaneously bring your attention to the heart center. The heart means the center.
We move to the center of the wheel. If we are on the outside of the wheel of time, we are moving around, whirling around the circumference. But when we move to the axis, to the heart, our velocity slows. We step out of that peripheral motion.
You may feel the burden lifting as we enter into freedom. Lift the burden of responsibility, the burden of interest and attachment.
You are a newborn baby, a perfect jewel rising out of the universe.
Lift that burden and feel it. It can be emotional. You feel that burden moving away.
Very gently say to yourself, “My happiness is uncaused. It is my intrinsic nature, and it is merely eclipsed by attachments and thoughts. I no longer need to become. I can be completely free.”
As we evolve into this freedom, you may sense a quality of dignity, of integrity, abiding in the sun. We wait for that blissful nature to reveal itself of its own accord.
In our dispassion, there is an organic distillation process. You have to allow it. Otherwise, we act too much, perpetuating attachment. We enter into a state of dispassion. It is centered. Steady.
Just for a moment, feel the dignity of needing nothing.
You are a sovereign being, complete, overflowing with the love of your own consciousness. It is a sense of being in command of your own mind, of your own attention field, beyond the reach of manipulation through attachment and aversion.
Allow yourself to feel a degree of austerity. There is something greater inside, in the fabric of existence.
Bring your attention to the navel center, one inch below the belly button. Combined with the heart, these two chakras produce a quality of dispassion, the centeredness of the heart.
Feel that spot. You can place your finger there. Begin by directing your attention there. Generate qi in your navel center through intentionality. Feel the surrounding areas, the pelvis and the center of the abdomen.
Notice there is a generation of energy, and yet it is not being used. It is just sitting there. Sit with the energy.
Go to the heart center now. It is good to recenter in the heart when we access power, which is what we do in the navel. The heart is right in the center of the chest. Feel that place with an austere dispassion, with the energy we cultivated.
Let dispassion end with a sense of ecstatic divinity building in your own being. You are able to invoke the Shakti light.
Take a deep breath, and let the heart release as you exhale.
You can make everything you do a means of increasing dispassion. What are we getting out of this? We are getting the facilitation of freedom, uncaused happiness, happiness untethered to causal factors.
Spiritual Community and Integration
It is so important to have sangha. The goal is to have a group of people who have common values.
Satsanga means association with truth. The truth is that happiness is uncaused, there is a true self, there is maya, there is illusion, and all the esoteric religions and spiritual paths talk about these things in their various ways.
In sangha, or satsanga, we hold the wavelength. We do not get pulled off our center into forms of attachment and other concerns. We are able to stay centered in something more strongly because we are a group.
If each one of us were to really give more of ourselves to it, we would all feel that. Imagine that everybody meditates three hours a day, practices dispassion, does all these things, and reads the Bhagavad Gita five times. We would feel that because we would be surrounded by more of it. It would normalize this.
It is the normalization of spirituality in a real, genuine sense.
Spiritual friends can be difficult to find, genuine spiritual friends. Spirituality does not mean this is my style, this is how I dress, this is how I go on dates, or whatever. There are so many reasons people do spirituality that are not self-abnegation. They are the opposite of self-abnegation.
Practice, meditate, find joy and happiness, and give that to the world. It is beautiful.
Full Transcript
Foundations of Dispassion
Adam Wes Namaste, everybody. Welcome!
I'm guessing there will be a few more people showing up that I was anticipating being here, but we can start with a review of last week. Did anybody try any of the conscious elements that we discussed? Just for people who weren't here last week, we went over all the different things you can do to curate your space, to help support the energy and the spiritual feeling, and step into that feeling of spirituality and consecration.
Did you do anything, Daniel? You were here, right?
Daniel V Yes. Well, I haven't done anything yet. I have had them in mind all week. I would need to purchase some stuff.
What I have been doing, we didn't talk much about this, but I used to carry a stone. It's an obsidian stone.
Adam Wes Oh, beautiful.
Daniel V A teacher, a colleague, once saw that I looked physically tired. She told me that sometimes, while we are teaching class, students can take our energy, or we can absorb their negative energy.
Adam Wes Yeah.
Daniel V So she told me to carry one of these. I started doing it, and I felt completely different. It had been a while since I had it with me, but this week I started doing it again, and it has felt different. It has been nice.
Adam Wes Yeah, it's good to have a black crystal with you. I personally like black tourmaline. I just grabbed it off the table. It has a similar effect. It's a little bit different from obsidian.
Well, thank you, Daniel. I have a document with the whole outline from last week, if anybody wants it or doesn't have access to it for some reason. I can send that to you if you'd like. Oh yeah, Kara, I'll send it to you.
I don't know where Ariella, Colin, or David is, but that's okay. Small group. Leah and Karen, welcome.
Today we'll be talking about dispassion. Dispassion is a very central principle in yoga, and in all spirituality, not just yoga. Dispassion is centered on a very basic premise: happiness doesn't come from things, but is our intrinsic nature.
Happiness is the nature of our consciousness, and it is obscured or eclipsed somehow, in particular by attachments and ideas, which can be cleared through dispassion.
To connect with dispassion, I highly recommend that you really find your way to it. It's not something you might be able to make contact with right away. Then you'll recognize it. It comes with a kind of aloofness toward the world. You don't really care what anybody thinks. You don't care about things. But there's a nuance there that we'll go into today.
It comes from the knowledge that what you seek only comes from within you. It can't come from outside of you. What we really want, this absolute blissfulness and happiness, is a feeling inside of us. It can't come from sensorial pleasure, egoic recognition, or worldly circumstances.
At its best, worldly circumstances can facilitate one to connect with dispassion. If you're an ascetic, living on the street, and you don't have any food, that can be very distracting because the body is really screaming for food, shelter, and basic needs. If you spend too much time alone, your body might want a hug or some touch. Your nervous system wants these things. There are certain ways that you can be distracted. Really, worldly circumstances can create the conditions through which you find dispassion.
In yoga, there are Sanskrit words, but there's a Pali word that I really like that goes very close to this. It's one of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. It's nirodha. Nirodha means cessation, but in a sense, it means the cessation through dispassion that causes this effortless clarity, this effortless freedom.
Essentially, it's freedom. We seek freedom to abide in that uncaused happiness that is the nature of the self.
Most people don't do this, and we're not trained to do this. We're trained completely in the opposite direction. We very much inherit the cultural mentality. To be different and walk our own path takes vigilance. Really, it takes work to do that. To become dispassionate is something worthwhile, something worth seeking.
The central premise, and this is a profound thing, is that happiness is uncaused. Feel into that.
How is happiness uncaused? You're like, "Well, I felt happy when I was with my family," or, "I felt happy when I got this thing." True, but that happiness was inside of you all along. Those things trigger a release of it. It's a capacity of consciousness. It's a capacity for happiness that is within us. Otherwise, we could never make contact with it.
In meditation, we get to enter into the dispassion of uncaused happiness. Some people say, "How could you sit and meditate for that long?" I'm like, "What do you mean? I'm getting a massage from God. I'm getting to be in the most blissful state. I love it."
Sometimes, in the beginning, it's a little difficult because you have to move through the attachments on the way to dispassion. You don't fulfill the attachments. You don't get Instagram out and scroll. Instagram completely conditions us to be very attached and gets the mind going. It's not nirodha. It's the opposite of nirodha, which is why I wish somebody could just check Instagram for me. I would never have to go on there. I could just post and never look.
It's a very nuanced topic. There's a lot to it because there are a lot of traps. You might say, "Okay, I'm going to be dispassionate," and then where's the happiness? Maybe it doesn't come to you.
One thing that's very important is this phrase that I've been saying for a long time: the heart of passion is dispassion.
A new passion arises in dispassion. It's the passion of the moment, the passion of existence. There's an uncaused passion, an undirected passion, that happens within you when there is no attachment.
We seek happiness not in things, but in the formless. The formless is the part of us that is beyond time. It's not circumstantial. There's the formlessness, the eternality of the self. Anything that's changing or evolving is transient. If we try to find our happiness in transient things, they're always veiled with the pain of transience.
There's a kind of happiness inside of us that is completely untethered to circumstances.
One thing that happens in dispassion, the mechanism of transformation, is that by not seeking and not being attached, we stop creating conflict. When we are seeking something or becoming something, there's a sense of conflict within. Conflict doesn't feel good. That's not happiness. Conflict is the chasm between what is and what should be, and there's a lack of acceptance in that.
In dispassion, we enter into a state where there's no conflict. It's a very practical thing. If you walk around and say, "Okay, I don't need to concern myself with anything. I'm turning inward," you'll notice how conditioned the mind is. You're looking for opportunities for this or that. But you can live in the constancy of being and freedom.
One other part is integrity, to always live by a set of principles. It's all written. It's set. "I'm going to live by these principles, and my destiny will unfold organically." That's integrity.
These go together because integrity can only happen when somebody is quite dispassionate. If somebody has a lot of integrity, they're not going to be bent away from their principles because they live in the freedom of dispassion and integrity, which are very closely related.
I'd love to hear what anybody thinks. Kara, Sam, Colleen?
Integrity and Creative Freedom
Colleen I was just looking up the word because I like to do that. I don't know about this word, and I'm a little confused because it says, "Characterized by a lack of emotional involvement." But the way you're describing how it makes you feel, it seems like you are emotionally moved.
Adam Wes I like that you looked up the English word. I assumed you were talking about a different word because the English word is very good.
The English word is taken from a Western perspective. Usually, dispassion does mean that because it doesn't imply that somebody is going to become dissolved in the bliss of existence. That's not as much of a possibility in the history of English, right? In a way, there are some Greek words. I think it's apatheia. It's a Greek word that's in the Western philosophical traditions.
This is one of the paradoxes of dispassion. In dispassion, you're overflowing with contentment and completeness. I recognize that I am something, and I can give endlessly of what I am. I can't give endlessly of what I'm not.
I'm not this black obsidian crystal. If I give it to you, I don't have it, right? But I can give endlessly of what I am, bliss, my nature. In a way, it strengthens what I am. It makes me more of what I am.
In dispassion, we come to know the self. It's a form of self-knowledge.
I have to give you the etymology of the word passion. The word passion actually means suffering. I don't know if you saw that when you looked it up. It's profound, right? The word passion means suffering. Boom, right? Thanks, Sam.
Go ahead, Sam.
Eslam O I was just thinking, what's the difference between passion and obsession? Obsession can be borderline suffering if you do it too much.
Adam Wes This is a very important factor and one of the nuances that I spoke of. When there's dispassion, you live dharma. You live your integrity. You do what you love.
You play music because you love music. You don't play music for the wrong reason, and then you can actually experience it. Dispassion leads to this artistic freedom.
Every time I make a reel and start to get pulled into caring, it hurts. I'm becoming less dispassionate. But when I sit, play, and create from freedom, that's why I say dispassion is the heart of passion. It's a different order of consciousness that we're talking about.
Eslam O So we're using them like dial buttons to adjust the level of passion that we dedicate to something, right? If we're doing art, we increase the passion. If we notice that we're catering to the algorithm or the masses, then we can be dispassionate and polarized.
Adam Wes I would say it's still dispassion because what you do in dispassion is integrity, love, and freedom. Dispassion means I'm not in conflict. I'm not striving. I'm not becoming. It means I'm unfolding. I'm flowering in the moment.
See the difference?
I know you do AI and computer programming. Sam is a super-smart guy, by the way. He does really interesting things with AI, very mathematical and technical. I get the sense that you really love what you do.
To distill it, to really take it and purify it, let's try to clear any attachments, motives, or seeking. This is what we can all do. I always try to do this with my work. Distill my work of any attachment, any motive, any seeking as if this is a means to an end.
Work with an awareness of where it's going because you have to live in time, but not in the sense of fulfillment. Fulfillment grows in time, and it has different stages. I'm creating now, and then now it's a business, and I'm liking that too. But I'm living in this thing that is a revelation. It's reveling in the joy of myself unfolding through time.
But who's unfolding through time? The eternal self, right? We are eternal and formless, but we have form, and that form can express itself without resistance. It's more of a state of acceptance instead of becoming.
In our integrity, we accept and revel in the destiny of what we become.
Please challenge me on it.
Daniel V It sounds a bit like, I don't know if you have seen the movie Soul? It's about this guy who plays the piano, and then he dies or something. He starts seeing how people get into what I think they call "the zone" whenever they're doing something.
Someone is playing basketball, and he's unaware of everything else besides the fact that he's playing basketball.
Adam Wes Or even himself, like when he's playing piano.
Daniel V The only thing he's aware of is that he's lost in the movement of playing piano.
With that in mind, what Colleen said about being emotionally detached makes sense to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even though you are feeling something and might be lost in this emotion, at that particular moment you are not even aware of that emotion.
Even though you could be truly happy, you are just lost in whatever you're doing. Maybe when you think about it afterward, you realize that you actually were really, really happy in that particular moment.
Adam Wes Beautiful. Thank you.
Yeah, there's emotion, but the emotion is an emotion of detachment. It's dispassionate. Everybody is so concerned about so many things. There's a quality of acceptance and grace in it.
One of the words I feel is very important is freedom.
Without this, how can we love? Love comes from completeness. If I'm whole, I'm not asking anything of you. Perhaps we are in each other's lives in this moment for a reason, and it's complementary. It's just a complementary expression of our intrinsic natures. But I'm not asking anything. I'm in a state of acceptance.
That freedom is a prerequisite for love because love doesn't ask anything of the other. Love wants the best for the other and accepts the other as they are, not as exploitation, but as mutual collaboration, which is very different.
What do you think, Colleen?
Colleen Well said. It's very philosophical. It's going over my head.
Adam Wes Oh, sorry. Let's bring it down to earth and make it less philosophical.
Colleen No, don't. It's lovely to hear all of you, so keep going. I'll just absorb what I'm able to.
Adam Wes Okay. I think what it comes down to is that it's not an idea. If we stop at the idea and we're like, "Okay, I talked about dispassion. I think about things. I have some phrases," that's not the point. The point is to step into it.
Actually, I think you have quite a degree of dispassion. You might not think of it that way, but you went to the food bank this morning, right? You were in a state of abundance and giving. There's an element of dispassion there when you were doing that.
Sometimes I notice you not as much in dispassion, and I see how it causes a quality of suffering. Then I want you to just chill and let go because I care about you. I know we don't need to resist things. We can meet things. There's no need to worry.
I still worry, but I recognize when I worry that that's an issue. You have to become conscious of it. Wait, do I need to be worrying? Do I need to be striving, or can I just be unfolding?
I am suggesting a quality of aloofness as well. Aloofness means to kind of be disinterested.
Let's take it into a more extreme spiritual focus. Imagine somebody who's meditating a lot. They're very much disinterested in all the things everybody is running around striving for. There's a kind of dignified disinterest. They know that what they want is inside themselves.
That's the kind of dispassion I'm also talking about. That's part of why I like this word for it. I could have used the word freedom, but dispassion has a kind of power that has really served my practice personally. In yoga and other languages, they have words that mean this specifically because it's a part of the practice.
Hi, Sam.
Eslam O Is dispassion a means of detachment?
Adam Wes Yes.
Eslam O But not in a vacant kind of mindset. More like, "I'm open to potential," or, "I'm creating space for accumulations that are no longer serving me."
If I keep thinking I don't have something, and I'm reinforcing that I don't have it, my system is going to keep me in this loop of wanting, wanting, wanting, and attachment.
Adam Wes Right. Detachment and acceptance are two ways to go beyond aversions and attractions. We want to find detachment from our aversions and our attractions, like, "Oh, I just have to have this thing," whatever it is.
At first, we're encrusted in aversions and attachments. If somebody hasn't done any of the work and is just living in society, we're conditioned in such a way that there are all these attachments.
Those attachments will wither in silence if we don't feed them. "Okay, here's an attachment. Do I really need it?" Maybe you need it for a time, but ultimately you want to be free of it.
It's about freedom, guys. Completely free. The ultimate freedom. Freedom from a body, even.
Can you go to the point where, "I am awareness beyond incarnation"? You can take this very far. I'm just saying that's the furthest part. But you start with more mundane things.
"I'm free in all these ways. I'm accepting the noisy neighbors. I'm accepting this. I'm accepting whatever." You learn to be detached, accept things, and work with them.
Obviously, things always change. That's the central premise of transience. Things are constantly changing. We work through that evolution while rooted in the part of us that doesn't change.
When you're very dispassionate, there's that aloof quality. It's like, "I don't want all of this."
Let me try to say it from myself. I don't care. I don't need these things. I just want to be free. I just want to live in inner freedom. I want to bask in the silence. I want to feel the radiant, effulgent light within me. I want to feel my heart radiate with love. I want to be free in my expressions when I create mathematics and animation. I don't want to care what anybody thinks. I want to do it for myself. If they like it, that's okay. If they don't, that's okay.
I will accept what happens to me as life evolves. Some things will be blessings. Some things will be challenging. But I'm looking inward, man. I want to be free. I want to meditate because I know that's where the greatest happiness is.
The most beautiful things I've ever experienced were in meditation.
People really pedestalize sex, right? They're like, "Oh my God, sex, that's the best." But when you get on the spiritual path, you're like, "Okay, well, that's nice and all. It can be nice. It can be not nice." But it's sensorial, man.
There's something deeper. Then you can go into the emotional states. It's like beautiful connection and love with somebody, but that's opening something spiritual, usually.
When you go into the silence, into the absolute freedom from any sense of self, there's no one meditating anymore. You've entered into something that is so blissful and ecstatic. It can't be matched by an idea, an egoic orientation, or anything.
Somebody said something I didn't see yet.
Exactly, Sam. Sam said, "I'm extremely passionate about dispassion." Exactly. That's probably what you're seeing in me right now. I'm very passionate about dispassion myself.
You kind of have to push back on the world a little bit. "Wait, I'm supposed to be doing all these things? No. I know that happiness and ecstasy are uncaused. They're inside consciousness."
From there, you may be a great entrepreneur and a billionaire. That doesn't mean you became all attached and stuff. That might have been an expression of your freedom, your genuine integrity, your dispassion.
When I look at certain people, like Steve Jobs, for example, I saw dispassion in him. He was so focused. He didn't really care about other things. Is it about the product, yes or no? He's very dispassionate in a sense, and very focused.
At the same time, I don't think he did it in the complete way that we're discussing. I'm just talking about an element of that because you're not going to get angry and do all those things that happen if you're dispassionate. There's a sort of grace to it that I don't think he always had, unless he was completely acting, which I doubt.
Hi, Kara. Then we'll start meditating in a moment.
Emotional Richness and Detachment
Kara M I see a lot of parallels between this concept and Stoicism.
Adam Wes Yes.
Kara M You know my husband, and you've probably never talked to him about Stoicism, but he's super into it, which is probably not a surprise to you. But as his partner, I find it to be very annoying.
I get a lot of enjoyment out of a more intense emotional experience, I think. I'm curious about your thoughts on finding a balance between that more stoic, detached, dispassionate approach to life, and also a sense that you're experiencing the richness of the emotional side of life.
Adam Wes I love that you brought this up. It's funny because somebody gave me a hard time in the reel I did last night. I don't know if you guys saw my hyperbolic reel. They said, "It's so melodramatic," or something like that.
I personally weave a deep romance into this. There's a dispassion in consecration, but there's a deep romance.
I don't know if you know the enlightened poet Rumi. He's very romantic, right? I really connect with Rumi. I feel we have a complementary resonance in our soul path.
That's why I said dispassion is the heart of passion. It opens the heart. There's a sort of freedom in it.
As a man, I feel like in a relationship there's that man who feels in service in a very beautiful way that is evocative of a romantic feeling. They sacrifice. They love. I'm seeing almost the farmer guy, right? It's an archetype that I have in myself too. There's the guy who lives for his family. There's a sort of sacrifice in it, but you feel the love at the same time.
Do you see that paradox I'm talking about?
Ultimately, in dispassion, we allow our heart to decide. We just follow the heart.
It's like what Aladdin said: "When last did you let your heart decide?" He said that to Jasmine on the carpet. My favorite moment in movie history because it's my favorite, guys. You know, "A Whole New World" and all of that.
He said that beautiful thing to Jasmine: "When last did you let your heart decide?" How can you let your heart decide if you don't have a degree of dispassion? The heart decides. You don't decide because of your attachments. The heart sings its subtle intimations into existence.
Sam, thank you. I don't know, Kara, if that helped.
When I post a reel, I feel all this energy psychically, and I'm not in my stillness right now. So I don't feel I've delivered this sermon from as much dispassion as I would like because I'm checking too many blah, blah, blahs.
Colleen No, it's good, Adam, because now I'm getting it. Thank you for that.
Adam Wes Good, good.
For you, I would say dispassion would be really interesting. Compassion. You have a lot of compassion, and you enter into the suffering together, right? Co-suffering is what that means.
But there's a wonderful thing if you just know everything is good. Everything's good.
Colleen There's an example here which I just want to read: "She dealt with life's disasters in a calm, dispassionate way."
Adam Wes Yes, that's more like it. Probably with a smile, a sense of gratitude, and a sense of faith that things are evolving as they should. All of that.
Colleen Thank you. I learned something. Thank you.
Adam Wes You're welcome. All right, let's meditate because I'm a little over.
Hi, new people. Welcome. We've got quite a few regulars who haven't shown up today for various reasons, including Sukkot.
Hi, Jacob. We talked about dispassion for 40 minutes, and now we will meditate.
I'd love to see people's faces if you'd like to show your face. It helps the interaction. You also don't have to if you don't want to, especially while we're meditating, but enough to say hi to people. See? You just brightened my whole experience by showing me your pink, your smile, and your clapping.
Here's Ariella.
Is that Kali?
Leah Dancing Shiva.
Adam Wes Shiva? Oh, I like Shiva. Beautiful.
Shiva is one of my favorite energies. It's the energy of destruction, and you can connect with Shiva. It's destruction because it frees us to dance, in a sense, in life. There's a power inside that will dissolve us into freedom. It's Shiva. You can experience it. It can be a little scary.
Leah Where are you based?
Adam Wes I'm in Los Angeles.
Leah Oh, amazing.
Adam Wes Where are you?
Leah Los Angeles. Oh my gosh. Can you message me on Instagram?
Adam Wes Yes. Everybody here has messaged me, so I can also say hi, but especially you, Leah, because you're in Los Angeles too.
Leah Hi, neighbor.
Adam Wes Hi, neighbor.
All right, can people hear the music? It's quite soft. Is that louder? Can you hear?
Meditation on Timeless Freedom
Let's meditate on dispassion. Let's see if we can experience that. We'll use energy work. We'll focus on the chakras a little bit, but let's use it to get into a state of dispassion.
We are passionate about it.
Let's just let everything go.
Let's turn our attention to a paradox of time, noticing right now that there is an eternal moment. There's an unchanging background in which all these birds, sounds, and feelings occur.
By turning the attention to the unchanging background, we're shifting our identity from form to formless, from the time-bound to the timeless.
In time, we are burdened by the activities of time. But in the timeless, there's nowhere to go. There's nothing to change because we don't have form.
Shift the identity by focusing your attention on the timeless.
A good thing to do is simultaneously bring our attention to the heart center. The heart means the center.
We move to the center of the wheel. If we're on the outside of the wheel of time, we're moving around, whirling around the circumference. But when we move to the axis, to the heart, our velocity slows. We step out of that peripheral motion.
This is the energy in the music, by the way. Feel this music. It's saying eternity.
We're just warming up right now. We're going to go into dispassion soon. First, I have to clear the space and open the heart.
You may feel the burden lifting as we enter into freedom. Lift the burden of responsibility, the burden of interest and attachment.
You are a newborn baby, a perfect jewel rising out of the universe.
Lift that burden and feel it. It can be emotional. You feel that burden moving away.
Very gently say to yourself, "My happiness is uncaused. It is my intrinsic nature, and it is merely eclipsed by attachments and thoughts. I no longer need to become. I can be completely free."
As we evolve into this freedom, you may sense a quality of dignity, of integrity, abiding in the sun.
We wait for that blissful nature to reveal itself of its own accord.
We're in our dispassion. There is an organic distillation process. You have to allow it. Otherwise, we act too much, perpetuating attachment.
We enter into a state of dispassion. It's centered. Steady.
Just for a moment, feel the dignity of needing nothing.
You are a sovereign being, complete, overflowing with the love of your own consciousness.
It's a sense of being in command of your own mind, of your own attention field, beyond the reach of manipulation through attachment and aversion.
Allow yourself to feel a degree of austerity. There is something greater inside, in the fabric of existence.
Let's bring our attention to the navel center, one inch below the belly button. Combined with the heart, these two chakras produce a quality of dispassion, the centeredness of the heart.
Just feel that spot. You can place your finger there. Begin by directing your attention there.
We'll evolve into finding a way to generate kundalini. It will feel like heat in the energy center.
You can do it. It's quite metaphysical, but just generate qi in your navel center through intentionality. Feel the surrounding areas, the pelvis and the center of the abdomen.
Notice there's a generation of energy, and yet it's not being used. It's just sitting there. Sit with the energy.
Let's go to the heart center now. It's good to recenter in the heart when we access power, which is what we do in the navel.
The heart is right in the center of the chest. Let's feel that place with an austere dispassion, with the energy we cultivated.
Let dispassion end with a sense of ecstatic divinity building in our own being.
You're able to invoke the Shakti light.
Take a deep breath, and let the heart release as you exhale.
Gently come out of the meditation.
Wonderful.
You can make everything you do a means of increasing dispassion.
Why do we meet here? What are we getting out of this? We're getting the facilitation of freedom, uncaused happiness, happiness untethered to causal factors.
Does anybody want to describe your meditation? Colleen? Mom? I like it when you go first.
Colleen Can I pass today?
Adam Wes Really? Yeah, okay, sure.
Ariella, how was your meditation?
Ariella It was very good. With what I'm learning from you, I'm really having different experiences. Thank you, Adam.
Adam Wes You're welcome.
Ariella There was something when I focused on the heart center. I felt very intense energy in my right chest and my right arm. There was a bit of pain, but it did go away.
Adam Wes Sometimes, when we feel pain in the middle of energy work, what's really happening is something is moving through. It's the amount of pressure that we experience.
Every now and then, I'll get what might look to others from the outside like a very concerning bodily pain, in my liver or something. Really, it's like something was stuck there for three days, and it just got released all of a sudden. Then I feel great afterward.
The real question is, do you feel great afterward? Did it feel like something was released? You can check in and make sure.
Ariella Thank you. Yeah, that makes sense because I didn't know what it was or why it was there. Then it went away. Now that you're giving me that term, "released," it really resonates with me.
Adam Wes Released, yeah.
It's like if you eat a big piece of bread and gulp it down with some milk, vegan milk, of course. That release is like, "Ouch," and then you're like, "Okay, good. It got stuck in my throat." Not stuck, but it's that sort of thing.
Namaste, Ariella.
Ariella Thank you, Adam.
Adam Wes Leah, would you like to share?
Leah Thank you. It was really nice just to connect in a group meditation. I used to have a really strong practice by myself, and it went away for various reasons. Now I just feel the best when I'm able to be in a group.
That was really nice. I also felt really grateful for how wisdom speaks through everyone uniquely. I really enjoyed hearing you talk about these concepts in your way. It made me see them in a different way and learn. Thank you very much.
Spiritual Community and Integration
Adam Wes You're welcome.
It's so important to have sangha. Maybe some of us are more interested and some less interested, but the goal is to have a group of people who have common values.
Satsanga means association with truth. The truth is that happiness is uncaused, there's a true self, there's maya, there's illusion, and all the esoteric religions and spiritual paths talk about these things in their various ways.
In sangha, or satsanga, we hold the wavelength. We don't get pulled off our center into forms of attachment and other concerns. We're able to stay centered in something more strongly because we are a group.
Actually, if each one of us were to really give more of ourselves to it, we would all feel that. Imagine that next week everybody meditates three hours a day, practices dispassion, does all these things, and reads the Bhagavad Gita five times. We would feel that because we would be surrounded by more of it. It would normalize this.
It's the normalization of spirituality in a real, genuine sense.
That's part of the reason I'm doing this. I kind of want spiritual friends, which can be difficult to find, genuine spiritual friends. It doesn't mean, "This is my style. This is how I dress. This is how I go on dates," or whatever. There are so many reasons people do spirituality, and I'm like, "Wait, that's not self-abnegation. That's the opposite of self-abnegation."
Leah, join us, practice, meditate, find joy and happiness, and give that to the world. It's beautiful.
Leah Oh, yeah. Thank you.
Adam Wes Also, your shirt and your light together are so nice. Do you always wear the same color as the light?
Leah I don't plan it. It just happens.
Adam Wes It looks good. It's a nice frequency of energy. Namaste. Welcome. Thank you.
Kara, would you like to share? Then we'll be wrapping up in a moment.
Kara M Just briefly. I've said this before, but Leah said it, so I'll agree with her. It's always nice to have other people to do this kind of work with. Even if it's a small group, it still really is an amplifier, for sure.
I also felt some pain moving through me. Ariella, you were not the only one who got some little aches and pains, but it's good.
Adam Wes Yeah, we have to clear. One of the terms that's really nice metaphysically is "clearing your space."
Karen, would you like to share?
Exactly. I like what you said there. "I've learned a lot today about dispassion. It's not about ignoring emotions, but allowing them not to control your mind."
Definitely. There's no suppression in this. Suppression is definitely not dispassion. That's like a kind of passion, right? You're like, "Push it away." But you're allowing emotions not to control your mind. Very nice.
Thank you, Kara. Namaste.
Kata or Karen, would you like to share? I got such a beautiful spiritual energy from Kata, Kat on Instagram. You don't have to share if you don't want to.
How about Sam? Last share for Sam, and then we'll go.
Eslam O I love the association that I just made in the meditation.
You feel a clench when you're holding tightly to emotions, or if you're ignoring them for a long time. They crystallize and create a crust.
When you're anchored in the light of conscious awareness, basically, in meditation, I'm aware that I'm aware. What am I aware of, right? Just like Karen said, you don't allow the emotions to control your mind. Your mind is aware of your emotions, but then you're not actually controlling or doing anything. You're surrendering. You're opening the heart and letting the heart.
Here's the association: dissipation of the accumulation of emotions. You surrender to it. You surrender into the clench, and you let your heart unravel or decompress yourself. You're decompressing yourself.
This is the association I made: dissipation by dispassion, basically.
Adam Wes Yes.
The goal is not to say, "Oh, I want this thing. I have this urge, but I'm going to ignore it and push it away." The goal is to actually not have that urge at all.
How does that happen? You have to observe yourself as you are, dispassionately. You might say, "Oh, I feel so attached. I'm observing myself."
You have to let the clouds move on their own, and then there's the sun, right? It's not suppression, like, "I'm pretending there are no clouds there." They may be there.
What eventually happens is this opening happens organically, and it's real and deep. That's what we want. We want to find a freedom that is actual freedom.
If there's an emotion, attend to it. That's an evolution of what you are becoming free. It's not wrong. It's just where you are.
It's not wrong to be at the bottom of the mountain or in the middle of the mountain, as long as you're walking up the mountain. Most people go in the wrong direction, walking down. The whole thing is to turn around and go in the right direction.
The right direction is, "Oh yeah, happiness is uncaused. I want to be free. I want to find that freedom. I want to let it evolve. I'm not going to suppress. I'm going to let it happen naturally and find a way."
That's essentially what it is.
Eslam O So it's not associating with the emotions, but disassociating and having dispassion about these clouds while anchoring in what is true, what is real, the sky.
The sky exists. Existing exists. It cannot not exist. Happiness is inherent and primordial. Happiness exists, and the clouds are the existence of things that are cloudy, basically. We surrender into the clench, and we let it dissipate.
Adam Wes Exactly. Dissipation. I love it. That's what you were meaning. Dissipation and dispassion.
Love it.
Namaste, everybody. Thank you. Namaste, Sam. Thank you.
We do this every Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. If you would like to donate, there's a link on my site. The recommended amount is $3 to $33. It helps support me and this work. I'd love to do this five times a week, although once a week is nice.
I invite you to come back next week if you'd like. If you'd like the document from today, I write a sermon document that I can send you on Google Docs too.
Thank you, everybody. Namaste. Thank you, Daniel. Bye, Kat. Bye, Mom. Namaste.