Essay Edition
Self-Abnegation and Enlightenment
I would like to go into the most rigorous depths of enlightened practice and talk about what enlightenment really is. What is the essence of it? It is a little hard to find out what the essence of enlightenment is and why one would seek it. Why is it relevant to most, if not everybody?
One key phrase comes to mind: the abnegation of the self. The abnegation of the self means to live life without self-seeking. Most human beings, almost everybody we know, are engaged in a form of self-seeking. Usually, we think of some fanatical yogis on mountaintops who deny the self. They deny a big meal. They deny all kinds of things. Most fundamentally, they deny the personality as a whole.
But there are a lot of nuances here. You have to do it right, otherwise it can actually hurt you. Abnegation means to deny, essentially, to hold away. When I am talking about the self, I am talking about the self that wants things, that wants to be respected, that has needs that are not really needs, like food and shelter, but needs beyond that.
The prophet-like individual has this sense of freedom from any center of self that is clamoring for attention, a center of self that is resulting in a sort of separate nature. This is where this benevolence comes from. It is almost like they are so whole, they do not care. They are so confident, they do not care what you think. They are so whole, they do not care what you give them. There is a sense that they have uprooted some aspect of personality, and they stand naked in freedom, one with their true being, whatever that is.
This is very much the center of enlightenment: to deny the sense of self-importance, to be anonymous to yourself, to be nothing, to remove the self-reflection. You cannot be nothing. This attitude adjustment, this reorientation, makes you what you are.
When there is the abnegation of the self, you act with spontaneity, without personal agenda. Your actions are based on necessity and love instead of being weighed down by this personality. There is an absolute ecstatic bliss that comes when you are just over it, over being a small person with all these attachments that ultimately cause pain and suffering.
What is amazing is that this abnegation of the self makes you a great artist. It makes you very lovable. It makes you empowered because you are not wasting all your energy in neurotic self-thought. It actually brings you the highest, most beautiful life, but it takes a kind of courage to say, I am not worthy. I do not matter. I have no worth.
Think about what that means, to say, I have no worth. Obviously, that means there is no qualified worth. We all are infinitely worthy or infinitely worthless. There is no differentiator. It is like one person has worth because he has cool headphones, and another has worth because she has a warm sweater. Who is warmer? Who is better? The sweater is more worthy. This is all not love. Love is unconditional, essentially, which means there is no element of worthiness, no spectrum of qualification.
What makes the Buddha the Buddha? One way of looking at it is that it is an individual who has very completely denied the self. This is an art, but you have to understand what that means. It does not mean that you jump in front of a train. It means that you act from a place of self-transcendence, that there is no separativity.
This is what makes Muhammad Muhammad, Jesus Jesus, and the great rabbi the great rabbi. They have come to know something inside that makes them so completely free. This very much connects to devotion because, when you do this, you are giving everything away. You are saying, God, make me as you like. I trust you. I accept myself. There are really profound implications in the abnegation of the self.
There comes a point where one experiences enough suffering induced by the personality that one wants this. You could wait until you suffer enough to make that choice, or perhaps you can make it based on an understanding, which is probably better. You could just do it without understanding or suffering. That is the trust path.
That is what a lot of the great prophets and teachers do for us. They show us an example, and we try it. We do not have to get it, because it could take a lifetime. We do not have to suffer, because that is just unnecessary suffering. I have experienced it through suffering quite a bit. It came through longing to be free and abide in the cosmic source, to be free of the chains of selfhood.
Egoic Attachment and Spontaneous Being
You might feel that you have to have something, that you just have to have it. Most people try to fulfill their attachments. What if you do not fulfill your attachments? Most people try to get away from pain. What if you do not try to get away from pain? It denies the center of self, and you can become absorbed in a state of being unknown to yourself.
A great machine has many parts. A beautiful airplane has parts, and each part still acts accordingly. Those parts can be anonymous to themselves in the sense that they are just being what they are, but they also know that they are part of a greater whole. You are like a drop in the ocean, and you become aware as the entire ocean.
What I am referencing here is a technique, the technique of denying egoic attachments to erase the part of the self that causes suffering. We do not need so many of the things we think we need. Some things you do need, but drawing a line between the need and the imagined need is important. Stop acting on behalf of the self. Stop seeking and planning and living in that realm of agenda.
What is left? There is this sort of freedom in which you can be as spontaneity. That happens from being anonymous to yourself, not thinking of yourself dancing on the dance floor and becoming very self-conscious. What if you were nobody dancing on the dance floor? You are just dancing. You are just there.
This ending of self-seeking is the ending of the need to understand anything. People feel that they have to understand the universe. But the real understanding of the universe is to go beyond all questions and be the universe, and there are no questions anymore. You can think about all these fractals and the things you saw in the galaxies and in the cells, but you can also become completely absorbed in the unknown. That means there is no thought. There is no thought of no thought. There is nobody there.
You can do this in your daily life. There is this sense of moving through life untethered to personality, and we can cultivate that. You might feel that you have to have this much money, this respect, these designer jeans, or whatever it is, to feel good. But to deny those things is to give away the things that form a bondage.
This is not to say that you might not be the head of a Fortune 500 company, but you will not be you. You will be a conduit of the universe running the company, and you will do it with love. It will not be self-serving. You will be an instrument of God, an instrument of truth, an instrument of service, being a true expression of what you are.
You do not really get to choose if you are going to be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. He had to be Steve Jobs. That is what he was designed to be. That humility, that freedom, comes from turning around and saying, no, I am not going to stay on this rat race, this hamster wheel of fulfilling myself, gratifying myself, and getting what I think I need. You end it. Then you can abide in freedom, and there is a sort of relief that it is over. You get to be what you are.
It is good to look and see what those things are that are looming over you that do not need to be there. They are usually self-imposed, subtle attitudes, just a sense of self-importance.
Meditation is a very powerful way to do this because, in a way, meditation is the abnegation of the self. You sit there and you listen. If you listen, there is no self. You are listening because you are not thinking. You are observing. If I am really listening to someone, I am not constantly filtering it through my thoughts, wondering whether he is respecting me, whether I am getting what I want, whether I am saying the right thing, or whether I understand what he is saying. I am just listening with an open conduit of listening.
Meditation is like that. It is listening. It is being. You are being what you are without the imposition, the superimposition, of selfhood, which is an idea. People seem to have to have personalities, but trees are not like that. Your separate organs are not like that. They just do their job. You can be in the world and beyond the agency, beyond the sense of self-importance.
There is a type of benevolent maturity and freedom in enlightenment. It feels like the end of self-seeking. That is the bold choice. If you really want enlightenment, what is the boldest choice? What is the thing that you can do? Start denying the self.
That is not to say you are not true to yourself. It means you actually will be true to yourself. This is where the paradox is a little dangerous, because you have to be true to yourself. But what actually prevents us from being true to ourselves is our self-concern.
If you are on that dance floor, you can be true to yourself, but that is because you do not care what everybody thinks. You do not care if your dancing gets you the girl, or whatever it is. You just dance because you are not thinking of yourself. You are just being true to yourself.
There has to be a paradigmatic orientation. You have to know what it means to be true to yourself and understand who you are. But there is a subtle distinction. Do you have to know that you are the one dancing? Do you have to think of yourself to dance, and dance your way? Does it mean there is no self if you are dancing in your unique style? Not at all.
You are abnegating the reward mechanism, the sense that you are important and need this or that, and just being what you are. We cannot really control what comes to us. The most efficient thing we can do is be what we are and set our life up in such a way that we respect the freedom of others.
We are like a flower that gives off perfume and pollen, and the bees come. But the flower does not have a little leash on the bees. That would be wrong. It would not be nice to the bees. In order to respect the freedom of others, the most optimal thing is to be without the ego, but be true to yourself, and let others come to you in a sort of intrinsic mutual collaboration.
The Created Self and Universal Love
There is a very important word in yoga, ahamkara. This essentially means the created self, but it is different from the ego. Ahamkara is important because we need to understand life. If you do not understand life, there is a sort of pathological mental quality. You have to know that you are so-and-so in this place, that you are part of this world, and that there is time and space. It has to make sense to you.
Otherwise, there are people who have a problem with their mind and start not to make sense of reality. You have to have your ahamkara, but the humility can be there. The ego is saying, I need these things. I want these things. I need people to recognize me. I need this. I need that. Those are not helpful. That is not the created self.
You might feel that you need to have something you cannot have right now. You need that car, or you need this much money in your bank account for savings. But maybe you just cannot have that. What are you going to do, kick against it or accept it? Kicking against it will not help because it is not there.
This abnegation of the self is not trying to be special. A lot of people seek ambition. They seek to be special. They seek to be loved. They seek to be all kinds of things. I am not saying one might not have those things, but the seeking is a burden and takes you away from the gift of what you are.
Essentially, in spirituality, we abide in the spirit of ourselves, that part of ourselves that we cannot gain or lose, that cannot be added to or taken away from. That is the freedom. You might not want this, but if you want freedom from the personality, there is benefit there. To be free of selfhood is to lift a giant burden that almost every human being has. It goes beyond life and death, in a way, because you are going above or below creation. This is where Nirvana is.
You do not lose your body. You do not lose your ahamkara either. You are still that person in the world, but you are yoking your awareness to eternity. This gives us freedom and love. Without this, I would argue, just mathematically, that love is not possible. Love is directly proportional, or mutually exclusive, to the ego. Love equals one divided by ego. Love times ego equals one.
If you think about it, love means that I am not separate from you. That only happens when there is no sense of self, when there is no sense of self-importance, and when one feels that we are all infinitely valuable.
When we deny the self, we become what we are. That is why it has a sort of ontological alignment. What we think we are is not what we are. What we are is awareness, and thoughts can happen inside of it. The ocean is not made of wave patterns. It is made of water. The waves are on the water. They are formations in the water.
One thing to contemplate is this: What can I give away? In what ways can I deny the self and find a greater degree of freedom? Is that healthy? Would that be right?
It does not mean that you do not do your writing. That is the opposite of what it means. It means you do not care what anybody thinks. You continue to be yourself and do your writing anyway. You do not have to think about what you are to be what you are.
Full Transcript
Self-Abnegation and Enlightenment
Adam Wes That's my way of saying thank you for being on time. All right, we should start. Namaste. Welcome, everybody. I'd love to see your face, Jacob, if you can.
I'd like to go into the most rigorous depths of enlightened practice today and talk a little bit about what enlightenment really is. What's the essence of it? I think it's a little hard to find out what the essence of enlightenment is and why one would seek it. Why is it relevant, I think, to most, if not everybody? Maybe we'll explore that and see if that's true.
One key phrase comes to mind, or coupling of words: the abnegation of the self.
The abnegation of the self means to live life, and I would say that's perhaps the title today, without self-seeking.
What is it? Most human beings, almost everybody we know, are engaged in a form of self-seeking. Usually, we think of some fanatical yogis out there on mountaintops who deny the self, right? They go in the other direction for some reason. They deny a big meal. They deny all kinds of things, right? Most fundamentally, they deny the personality as a whole.
But there are a lot of nuances here. You have to do it right, otherwise it can actually hurt you. So let's talk about this and maybe even discuss it a little bit more. I'd love more dialogue. It would be fun.
Let's discuss it because it takes it deeper for me too. I start to pull out the things that I've realized over the years, and they come to the surface in the session here together.
The abnegation of the self, that's perhaps an unusual word. Abnegation means to deny, essentially, to hold away. When I'm talking about the self, I'm talking about the self that wants things, that wants to be respected, that has needs that aren't really needs, like food and shelter, but needs beyond that.
The enlightened being, the saint, the prophet-like individual is... No yawning, Ariella. You can't yawn while I'm saying that sentence. Let me say it again.
The prophet-like individual has this sense of freedom from any center of self that is clamoring for attention, a center of self that is resulting in a sort of separate nature.
This is where this benevolence comes from. It's almost like they're so whole, they don't care. They're so confident, they don't care what you think. They're so whole, they don't care what you give them, right? There's a sense that they have uprooted some aspect of personality, and they stand naked in freedom, one with their true being, whatever that is.
In enlightenment, this is very much the center of enlightenment: to deny the sense of self-importance.
Give me a second. My window is closed. I've got a noisy neighbor.
To be anonymous to themselves. To be nothing. It's to remove the self-reflection, because you can't be nothing. This attitude adjustment, this reorientation, makes you what you are.
When we're free, when there's the abnegation of the self, you act with spontaneity, without personal agenda. Your actions are based on necessity and love, right, instead of being weighed down by this personality.
There's an absolute ecstatic bliss that comes with this when you say, "I'm just over it. I'm over being a small person with all these attachments that ultimately cause pain and suffering."
What's amazing about this is that this abnegation of the self makes you a great artist. It makes you very lovable. It makes you empowered because you're not wasting all your energy in neurotic self-thought. It actually brings you the highest, most beautiful life, but it takes a kind of courage to say, "Okay, I'm not worthy. I don't matter. I have no worth," right?
Think about what that means, to say, "I have no worth." Obviously, that means there's no qualified worth. We all are infinitely worthy or infinitely worthless. There's no differentiator.
It's like Sam has worth because he's got cool headphones, and Ariella has worth because she's got a warm sweater, right? No, there's no difference. Who's warmer? Who's better? Well, Ariella's sweater is more worthy. This is all not love. Love is unconditional, essentially, which means there's no element of worthiness, no spectrum of qualification.
This is a very deep topic to go into. One of the things I was contemplating myself this week was, what is the essence of enlightenment? What makes the Buddha the Buddha?
I feel that one perspective, or one way of looking at it at least, is that it's an individual who has very completely denied the self. This is an art, but you have to understand what that means. It doesn't mean that you just jump in front of a train. Nobody's jumping in front of a train. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that you act from a place of self-transcendence, perhaps, is the right word, that there is no separativity.
Any questions? Let's make this a little more of a dialogue today. If you're really considering what I'm saying, there should be a lot of things inside pushing back, right? Because this is like, "Wait, what about my dreams? What about if nobody likes me?" We're so conditioned around this.
Don't think of this as, "Adam talked for 20 minutes, and that was it." This is a very deep contemplation. You have to discover it for yourself, not just intellectually, but feel the truth of it.
I think that's what makes the Muhammad the Muhammad, the Jesus the Jesus, and the great rabbi the great rabbi. They've come to know something inside that makes them so completely free.
Let me say one more thing. This very much connects to devotion because, when you do this, you're giving everything away. You're saying, "God, make me as you like. I trust you. I accept myself." There are really profound implications in the abnegation of the self.
There comes a point where one experiences enough suffering induced by the personality that they want this. You could wait until you suffer enough to make that choice, or perhaps you can make it based on an understanding, which is probably better. Or you could just do it without understanding or suffering. That's just the trust path.
I think that's what a lot of the great prophets and teachers do for us. They show us an example, and we're like, "Okay, well, I'll try that." I don't have to get it, because it could take a lifetime. I don't have to suffer because that's just unnecessary suffering, right?
I've experienced it through suffering quite a bit. It came through longing to be free and abide in the cosmic source, to be free of the chains of selfhood.
Like I said, this is a deep conversation today. Come on, somebody. Do I have to call on people? Anyone? Okay, Andrea. Hi! I knew it.
Andrea P Yeah, I have a thing that if someone asks and no one answers, I need to jump in.
Actually, I have been listening to someone, and she was talking a little bit about this, also in my Buddhist conversations.
What I want to understand is, if you let go of your ego, I'm Andrea, right? I'm this person, and this person has all of these dreams and ideas. But when you understand you're more than that, you lose that part of yourself. You let it go. You're not just Andrea. You are something. You're part of a bigger entity. You're part of the light. You're part of the cosmos.
Then you stop thinking about those small things, like, "Oh, I want a car, and I want a new phone." You start not longing, but understanding that what you're needing is too small because your purpose is bigger, because you're part of something bigger.
That's a little bit of how I understand it, or I'm trying to. I don't know. It is complex, like you said. But it's just like, it's not you. It's not your ego.
Egoic Attachment and Spontaneous Being
Adam Wes You might say, "Oh, I have to have something. I just have to have it."
Most people try to fulfill their attachments. What if you don't fulfill your attachments? Most people try to get away from pain. What if you don't try to get away from pain? It denies the center of self, and you can become absorbed in a state of being unknown to yourself.
A great machine has many parts. Each part still acts accordingly, right? We've got a beautiful airplane. It's got parts, right? Those parts can be anonymous to themselves in the sense that they're just being what they are, but they also know that they're a part of a greater whole.
I'm trying not to quote my teacher here and to use my own metaphors. He says you're like a drop in the ocean, and you become aware as the entire ocean.
But I think what I'm referencing most here today is a technique, the technique of denying egoic attachments to erase the part of the self that causes suffering. We don't need so many of the things we think we need. Some things you do need, but drawing a line between the need and the imagined need is important.
I'm going to meditate for a second and get really clear. I didn't actually prepare a sermon today. I've been a little busy, but I was thinking about this, so I thought we'd talk about it. I do have some notes I'd like to reference.
What I said in my notes was to stop acting on behalf of the self, to stop seeking and planning and living in that realm of agenda.
What is left? Well, there's this sort of freedom that you can be as spontaneity. That happens from being anonymous to yourself, not thinking, "Oh, I'm so-and-so dancing on the dance floor," right? You're very self-conscious. What if you were nobody dancing on the dance floor? You're just dancing. You're just there, right?
This ending of self-seeking is the ending of the need to understand anything. People message me all the time. They're like, "I have to understand the universe!" That's because I'm in the science, mathematics, spiritual intersection. But the real understanding of the universe is to go beyond all questions and be the universe, and there are no questions anymore.
You're like, "Oh yeah, but all these fractals, and I saw this thing in the galaxies and in the cells." No, no. You just become completely absorbed in the unknown. That means there's no thought. There's no thought of no thought. There's nobody there.
Yes, and you can do this in your daily lives. Thank you, Mandy. In your daily lives, there's this sense of moving through life untethered to personality, and we can cultivate that.
You're like, "Oh, I have to have this much money," or, "I have to have this respect," or, "I have to have these designer jeans," or whatever it is, right, to feel good. But really, to deny those things is to give away the things that form a bondage.
It's very Buddhist, actually, what I'm talking about here. Right, Andrea? Andrea's into Buddhism. I love Buddhism. I love yoga and Buddhism. They're closely related, and Zen.
This is not to say that you might not be the head of a Fortune 500 company, but you won't be you. You'll just be a conduit of the universe running the company, and you'll do it with love, right? It won't be self-serving. You'll be an instrument of God, an instrument of truth, an instrument of service, being a true expression of what you are.
You don't really get to choose if you're going to be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. He had to be Steve Jobs. That's what he was designed to be. I actually think he was very much in his path.
That humility, that freedom, comes a lot from turning around and saying, "No, I'm not going to stay on this rat race, hamster wheel of fulfilling myself and gratifying myself and getting what I think I need." You end it.
Then you can abide in freedom, and there's a sort of, "Oh, thank goodness, it's over. I get to just be what I am."
It's good to look and see what those things are that are looming over you that don't need to be there. They're usually self-imposed, subtle attitudes, just a sense of self-importance.
Meditation is a very powerful way to do this because, in a way, meditation is the abnegation of the self. You sit there and you listen. If you listen, there's no self. You're listening because you're not thinking. You're observing.
If Sam says something to me, if I'm really listening to Sam, I'm not constantly filtering it through my thoughts: "Is he respecting me? Is it getting what I want? Am I saying the right thing? Did I respond? Did I get what he's saying?" I'm just listening with an open conduit of listening.
Meditation is like that. It's listening. It's being. You're being what you are without the imposition, the superimposition, of selfhood, which is an idea.
This is the funny thing. It's like, "Okay, well, there are people. They have to have personalities." No, they don't. Trees aren't like that, right? Your separate organs aren't like that. They just do their job. You can be in the world and beyond the agency, beyond the sense of self-importance.
This denial is very much... Let's see if I can connect with the feeling here.
There's a type of benevolent maturity and freedom in enlightenment. It feels like, and I'm going to try to connect with the feeling and speak from it, the end of self-seeking. That's very much what it feels like. That's the bold choice.
If you really want enlightenment, what's the boldest choice? What's the thing that you can do? Start denying the self.
That's not to say you aren't true to yourself. It absolutely means you actually will be true to yourself. This is where the paradox is a little dangerous, because you have to be true to yourself. But what actually prevents us from being true to ourselves is our self-concern.
Maybe that's not very clear. If you're on that dance floor, you can be true to yourself, but that's because you don't care what everybody thinks. You don't care if your dancing gets you the girl, or whatever it is, right? You just dance because you're not thinking of yourself. You're just being true to yourself.
Yeah, I think that's a good explanation. Does that make sense? The dance floor one works because I think most of us have experienced not being able to dance on the dance floor.
I want to see what Mandy said. Mandy, I'm so glad you're here. Happy birthday!
Mandy W Thanks, Ed!
Adam Wes You're welcome, man.
There has to be a paradigmatic orientation. You have to know what it means to be true to yourself, understand who you are. But there's a subtle distinction. I'm talking about something very healthy.
Just to talk to Mandy, she's making a nice response. She said, "But an ego seems necessary to be healthy, to relate to society."
This is where you look and ask, "Do I have to know that I'm the one dancing? Do I have to think of myself to dance, and dance my way? Does it mean there's no self if I'm dancing in my unique style?" Not at all.
But you're abnegating the reward mechanism, the sense of, "I'm important. I need this. I need that," and just being what you are. We can't really control what comes to us.
The most efficient thing we can do is be what we are and set our life up in such a way that we respect the freedom of others, right? We can't really control. We're like a flower that gives off perfume and pollen, and the bees come. But the flower does not have a little leash on the bees. That would be wrong. It would not be nice to the bees, right?
In order to respect the freedom of others, the most optimal thing is to be without the ego, but be true to yourself, and let others come to you in a sort of intrinsic mutual collaboration.
I don't know, Andrea. What do you think? Have I said anything cohesive here?
Andrea P I'm understanding it as two different things. One is how you reflect in others. Not that you don't care, but it's a reflection of what we think of ourselves in front of others.
In the example you put, when you're dancing and you care who's seeing and what they're thinking, that involves other people and what they think of you. That's a part of the ego.
But I also think there's another part, which is what I was talking about at the beginning. When you meditate, you dissolve, and that doesn't have anything to do with other people, but with your connection with the source, or with something bigger.
I think it goes in two parts, or I understand it in two parts.
The Created Self and Universal Love
Adam Wes You're helping me remember a very important word in yoga, which is the ahamkara. This essentially means the created self, but it's different from the ego.
This ahamkara is important because we need to understand life. If you don't understand life, there's a sort of pathological mental quality. You have to know, "I'm so-and-so in this place, and I am part of this world, and there's time and space, and it makes sense to me."
Otherwise, there are people who have a problem with their mind and start to not make sense of reality. You have to have your ahamkara, but the humility can be there, right?
The ego is saying, "I need these things. I want these things. I need people to recognize me. I need this. I need that." Those are not helpful. That's not the created self.
Or, "I need to have something I can't have right now. I need that car," or, "I need this much money in my bank account for savings." But maybe you just can't have that. What are you going to do, just kick against it or accept it? Kicking against it won't help because it's not there, right?
This abnegation of the self is not trying to be special. There are other parts to it. A lot of people seek ambition. They seek to be special. They seek to be loved. They seek to be all kinds of things. I'm not saying one might not have those things, but the seeking is a burden and takes you away from the gift of what you are.
Essentially, in spirituality, we abide in the spirit of ourselves, that part of ourselves that we can't gain or lose, that can't be added to or taken away from. That's the freedom.
You might not want this, but if you want freedom from the personality, there's benefit there. To be free of selfhood is to lift a giant burden that almost every human being has. It goes beyond life and death, in a way, because you're going above or below creation. This is where Nirvana is.
You don't lose your body. You don't lose your ahamkara either. You're still that person in the world, but you're yoking your awareness to eternity.
This gives us freedom and love. Without this, I would argue, just mathematically, Sam, that love is not possible. Love is directly proportional, or mutually exclusive, to the ego.
Love equals one divided by ego. Love times ego equals one.
If you think about it, love means that I'm not separate from you. That only happens when there's no sense of self, when there's no sense of self-importance, and when one feels that we are all infinitely valuable.
Mandy, I think you bring up a really important distinction that needs to be made. This is part of the danger zone. I love that you're presenting that, just to bring extra clarity about what the difference is. Perhaps I touched on it correctly and what you meant.
I'm trying to see what Sam is writing, but it's got an icon over it. Okay, there.
I like that: "structural invariant of the universe." Nice. You could interpret it the same way. Sam says, "Love is a structural invariant of the universe," using math terminology.
When we deny the self, we become what we are. That's why it has a sort of ontological alignment. What we think we are is not what we are. What we are is awareness, and thoughts can happen inside of it.
The ocean is not made of wave patterns. It's made of water. The waves are on the water. They're formations in the water.
Essentially, today, maybe just one thing to contemplate is: What can I give away? In what ways can I deny the self and find a greater degree of freedom? Is that healthy? Would that be right?
It doesn't mean, Ariella, that you don't do your writing. That's the opposite of what it means, actually. It means you don't care what anybody thinks. You're already doing this very well. She doesn't care what anybody thinks. She continues to be herself and do her writing anyway. That's what it means.
All right, shall we meditate? Thank you, everybody.
Let's really bring attention to the heart. When you're ready, bring attention to the heart, to the moment, listening to the moment.
Meditation and Personal Reflections
We can come out of the meditation.
Thanks, Mom. Would you like to share? Are you there, Colleen?
All right. How about you, Ariella? Would you like to share? Did anything interesting happen in your meditation? You're muted.
Ariella There we go. Okay.
This was an amazing meditation. One of the things you had said was that we're part of the whole, and that's what this meditation felt like to me. It felt like, for me, dissolving into the whole.
Adam Wes Beautiful.
Ariella I wasn't thinking. I was just experiencing it, that we're droplets or waves, part of the ocean.
Adam Wes You don't have to think about what you are to be what you are.
Ariella Yes.
Adam Wes In The Matrix, he says, "Stop trying to hit me and hit me." There's a scene in The Matrix where he can't hit the guy because they're fighting, and then he's like, "Just do it!"
Beautiful, Ariella. Thank you. Thanks for bringing the talk into the meditation.
Ariella Yes, it really opened me to a most incredible meditation. Thank you.
Adam Wes Good, good, good, good. I'm so glad. Thanks for bringing your wonderful energy and being here. Namaste, Ariella.
Andrea, would you like to share? Then Sam and I will.
Andrea P No, I didn't have a great meditation. I couldn't dissolve, and I fell asleep at one moment. It usually doesn't happen, but I woke up very scared. It was for a second, and I was dreaming.
Adam Wes With meditation, it's consistency. You'll have good ones and you'll have bad ones, but the consistency keeps deepening the average, the moving average. It primes you to just drop right in.
The fact that you did it, the fact that you're here, matters. I'm not feeling my best today myself, so maybe it's in the energy.
Andrea P Yeah.
Adam Wes Well, namaste, Andrea. Thank you. How about you, Sam?
Eslam O The talk was with me in the meditation. There was balance, and I would guess this is the healthy way to look at enlightenment, a balance between having a healthy, functional ego and an enlightened spirit.
In the meditation, I was feeling, but at the same time I was thinking, and that was kind of funny. I had funny thoughts coming in. It was like, "You're doing a good job thinking about not thinking," in my head.
Other than that, it felt great. It felt like peace, ease, and gratitude.
Adam Wes Nice. Thank you for being here.
I created a Substack. I don't know if you know what that is. Did you see that I created it, Andrea?
Andrea P I got a notification that you posted something about humility.
Adam Wes Yeah. I'll put sermons up there as well, so you guys can see them there. It's a nice space to put all my writing.
Ariella, thank you so much. I saw that you subscribed. I appreciate that. That was really sweet. Wonderful.
Colleen Thank you, Adam. I've figured it out now. Thank you very much.
Adam Wes Colleen, would you like to share? How was your meditation?
Colleen It was nice. I also, like Andrea, went a little bit asleep and into a little bit of a dream, and then came out. But that's not totally unusual for me.
Adam Wes Okay. Well, you have your astral dreams. You don't just dream. You go and dance with elves. You do interesting things.
Wonderful, Mom. Namaste. Did you see your light?
Colleen I did, yes.
Adam Wes Good, good, good, good. Namaste.
Colleen Namaste. Thanks, Ed.
Adam Wes Ariella, you were about to say something? You were saying something, but you were muted. About the writing?
Ariella Oh, yes. I read your writing on humility, and it connected with me so deeply. I signed up.
Adam Wes Thank you. You are my first subscriber!
Ariella Oh, wow!
Adam Wes I will celebrate that.
Just for everybody, the way Substack works is there's a free section, a paid subscriber section, and then a supporters section. I'm obviously going to give a lot of it for free, but there are different tiers. It's about seven dollars a month. Hopefully, I'll be able to spend more time writing and support myself that way. I'm very excited about it.
Sam, I feel like you should take a look. I think you'll like it. I know you and I connect on the writing front. You like the words too. You're like me.
All right. Vin, nice to see you. Namaste, Vin. All right, everybody, thank you. Bye, Ariella. Bye, everybody. Andrea, thanks.
Ariella Thank you, thank you.