This essay is a near-verbatim adaptation of the live spoken teaching, edited only for continuity and readability.
There is a certain power in beginning together, in feeling the gravity and clarity that arises when we all arrive on time and contribute to the field at the outset of an experience. Each of us is truly contributing to the field, and that contribution is needed from the very beginning. It is essential for curating our state of mind to minimize exposure and embrace solitude.
It is difficult to sit down and have an ecstatic meditation when we are so tethered to the conditions of humanity. Thousands of years ago, there were so few people on the planet compared to now. There was no telecommunications, and you could feel the ocean, the sky, the stars. It was cosmic romance. One of the absolutely indispensable techniques in meditation is to create a buffer around yourself that allows you to drop in without having to process and unhook yourself from so many ideas and thought patterns—the momentum of human concern.
We can get pulled into that momentum, especially in this day and age with technology. The leaders of technology are not particularly interested in enlightenment. They are interested in your attention, manipulating and using it. More users, more time, more value to them. They are not saying, “We’ll see you once a day for just a little bit of time, then you can go back to nature.” They do not want that. I am talking about social media leadership, but really all of it—YouTube, all of it.
Creating a buffer around us allows us to sit in and go into a deep cosmic state of meditation. You have to try it, you have to explore these things. Each of us has to work out the equation of liberation in ourselves. There is a different equation for everybody, and you are the only person who can solve it. These are all little tools and ideas. If you create a large buffer around yourself, what would that be like? You can do it in various ways. You might be living in a city, or in the Amazon rainforest—it could be either—but you can still create a buffer around yourself, even in the biggest cities in the world.
Minimizing exposure and solitude is the topic for today. We have talked about selective exposure before. Selective exposure helps us attune to the sentiments of enlightenment—something beyond gross material. Personal achievement is of value to us. That, all of a sudden, really flips the equation in our experience as to what we are doing with our time, with our effort. Selective exposure is important, but minimizing exposure is also important.
If you have very little exposure, and then, say, 80% of what you are exposed to is Krishnamurti, or Ramana Maharshi, or some wonderful classical composer who was enlightened, then you are being exposed in a large percentage to that—but there is also the stillness. We want to create a wake of stillness.
I remember one time, a good friend of mine—he and I used to meditate a lot together—and I said to him, “Between meditations, this is what I do.” He looked at me with appreciation, adoration of some kind. He was noticing how I had oriented myself: I am in meditation, but then between meditations, what am I doing? As opposed to, “I meditate as a break from myself,” right? If you think about it that way, when you are meditating, between meditations you are still setting yourself up for a good meditation, or a wanting meditation.
If you go between meditations and you expose yourself to tons of information, and you get your mind going, you watch the news, you are so concerned, you are thinking other people's thoughts—you are essentially imbuing yourself with thoughts and evaluation patterns that are ambient in humanity at this moment. Do we really want to just inherit all the ambient thought patterns of what is important at this moment? Probably not.
What is in our hearts? What is our Dharma? What matters to us? Not very many people are obsessing over the Goldberg Polyhedra today, but I was. It is not on the news. The news does not really talk about what we love. We need a wake of space to even hear the subtle intimations of our own hearts and our own reason for being here, and what we bring to the universe.
Digging to find and fully express your magic—this is a way to do that. Create a buffer, very strategically and intelligently. Everything we are exposed to, we have to process. It is running in our dreams, it is running in our minds. If you do this well, your dreams will change substantially. They will become much more spacious.
The experience of busy dreaming all night is not necessarily a problem in itself. It is simply your mind trying to catch up, to process everything you have been exposed to. When you encounter one thing after another, your dreams become busy—almost like watching ten Mission Impossible movies in a row.
This is a suggestion: work out your own equation of liberation—liberation from your own selfhood, your own unique selfhood. You will notice this in your meditations. When you sit down, meditation will not feel as much like a struggle. It will become more enjoyable, more of a natural continuation of how you have been living your life.
You might think, “Okay, I have been doing things, but I have also been still.” And then, when you sit down, you find yourself truly reveling in that stillness, simply for its own sake.
This has been very relevant to my own practice. I appreciate being able to bring up these topics. I tend to flow with the topics, because there are so many, and I choose the ones that feel particularly inspiring to me.
So, minimize exposure. Be very selective about what you expose yourself to. It is similar to not going to a candy store and eating all the candy at once. If you go to the candy store, buy just one piece. The same principle applies to information.
Expose yourself to a few things, and expose yourself to nature as much as you wish, because nature is pure. More nature, more silence. I would say that is not exposure at all—that is the antithesis of exposure. Minimizing exposure creates silence, it brings nature, it creates a spaciousness that allows you to sit and have a deep meditation.
Do not divide your experience. If you find that when you meditate, it is not going well or it does not feel blissful—explore these things. If you cannot quite hear my words or connect with them—even if I have had an experience, it will not be exactly the same as yours. So, we each have to find out what we can do with this condition of consciousness.
Play with it, explore it, experiment—be a bit of a mad scientist with yourself. Work out your liberation, moving into the freedom and ecstatic bliss of being. That is available when you can sit down for two hours and do not want to stop meditating because it feels so good. You are simply flowing, and it keeps getting better.
Even your muscles stop getting tired, because you have become accustomed to it. That is the mundane part—you are able to sit like this, your muscles are strong enough to sit up straight for three or four hours, and you are fine.
So, explore. As part of your practice this week, if you have been having trouble meditating deeply—if you have not wanted to meditate—it probably has to do with being in too much momentum. Spaciousness will make you want to sit down and connect with the ecstasy of the cosmic state.
There is a beautiful bliss in simply being. Just being is blissful. And if you value love, this is where love originates, because love is an expression of wholeness. Being in the bliss of your own being is a state of wholeness. It is the wholeness state, I would say.
To be content with what you are. To know what you are. All of this has been discussed in various religions and by spiritual teachers throughout the ages, using different words and different approaches.
Solitude is an archetypal spiritual principle. To live in solitude—not complete solitude, but to have ample solitude to renew the spirit. If you do not have enough solitude—if you constantly have your children, your spouse, or your work around you all the time—you do not need complete solitude, but perhaps more efficiency, so that you can take that time for yourself. You will be a better spouse, a better worker, a better parent, when you have the clarity that comes from being in stillness. We are more powerful that way. We can accomplish more.
Solitude and minimizing exposure—not just selective exposure.
Limit exposure to too much information, too much noise. It comes from so many sources. Even a neighbor on their phone walking by is a kind of noise. Most people are quite addicted to the noise. One thing to do is to confront: can I be without the movie, without the show, without checking social media, without getting an update about everybody's day? Without all of those things, and simply confront silence. Anything that is—ideas. Confront silence.
When we minimize exposure, we can listen more. Listening—what does it mean to listen? To be empty is to listen, to look at the leaf. If you are looking at the leaf, or the droplets on the water, and really observing it with your whole being—not comparing it, not contrasting it, not judging it—just being with it, observing the what, the suchness, the what is, you are empty. Empty of ideas. Listening means there is no contrasting self. There is only the other.
Listening is a very powerful thing to do. In fact, it is very much what we do when we meditate. We erase ourselves, and then there is just listening.
Practice that. Explore it. Solitude is… I have to. I just have to.
I will read a little James Allen just for a moment. This is a beautiful, spiritual man from 120 years ago. This essay is called Solitude.
"Man's essential being is inward, indivisible, spiritual, and as such, it derives its life, its strength from within, not from without. Outward things are channels through which its energies are expanded, but for renewal, it must fall back on the inward silence. Insofar as man strives to drown the silence in the noisy pleasures of the senses, he endeavors to live in the conflicts of outward things. Just so much does he reap the experiences of pain and sorrow which, becoming at last intolerable, drive him back to the feet of the inward comforter, to the shrine of the peaceful solitude within.
As the body cannot thrive on empty husks, neither can the spirit be sustained on empty pleasures. If not regularly fed, the body loses its vitality, and, pained with hunger and thirst, cries out for food and drink. It is the same with the spirit. It must be regularly nourished in solitude on pure and holy thoughts, or it will lose its freshness and strength, and will at last cry out in its painful and utter starvation. The yearning of an anguish-stricken soul for light and consolation is the cry of the spirit that is perishing of hunger and thirst."
I like that line: "Be regularly nourished in solitude and pure and holy thoughts." This left a great impression on me when I first heard that.
When we meditate, allow the inertia, the momentum of thoughts, to slow down so we can hear the silences, the roots. Try to stop your thoughts. Instead, feel: I am slowing down as a result of ceasing to put effort in. Every time you feel yourself following a train of thought, once you become conscious, just let it go. Be absorption, and let your thoughts follow. Distilling.
When meditating like this, always keep a chakra activation on the heart. Generating love. Purifying the heart center. Simultaneously, bring your thoughts, your head, your heart into light. This is key. The velocity of energy renews in silence. You are a glowing being.
The music has been chosen to help you connect with the unending fields of the earth, the waterfalls, trees with wet leaves, and spaciousness. Feel the eternality of sacredness. Become absorbed in timelessness. Use the light or the chakras.
If you ever sit down and do not feel still, face the discomfort. Be with it. Be with the inertia. That very presence with it can transmute it. Cessation of escaping from responding. Observation without response or reaction.
There is immense power in stillness. Once we can clear our space, we can allow that ambient power of the universe to channel through us. It is as if you simply are—a powerful oneness with the universe. My power is love.
Make sure to check in with your DNCN: heart center, the third eye, navel center—one inch below the belly button. They are all connected through a central astral tube called the Shashumina. Go into the light as yourself. Activate the chakras. It is almost as if the light purifies and clarifies the chakras in the entire astral system.
All of this is related to silence and steadiness. Anyone who wishes to open their eyes and gaze—let me do that now. One way to get the light to manifest is to melt. We assert our physicality, but when we become holographic—melt—the light emerges. It is the source.
When your eyes open, that mistiness is the beginning of the light. It starts to permeate all of space and wash through the aura. That is fantastic. Gaze very broadly at everything at once. We are free. We open our energy field by doing that.
It is always nice at the end of the meditation to bring the attention to the heart center, to what matters most. Namaste.
Practice that this week. Consider it, journal about it, put it into action, explore it.
I want to quickly share my artwork. This is an actual spherical harmonic, created with advanced mathematics. I am making some posters now. I just wanted to share that with everyone.
Thank you. Namaste.