Day Two continued (Section 13)

Barbara: There's more. Above I'm still talking about fear versus love. I've explained it as if they're different and said that we can choose love. However, as long as we think in these dualistic terms, preference, aversion and attachment will appear. There will be clinging and getting rid of. But fear is an expression of love, of God Itself. There is nothing that is not expression of the dharmakaya, expression of God. Nothing! Thus, to choose love does not mean to enter a battle and conquer fear as if it were a mortal enemy. To choose love means to find that heart of love of which fear is expression, to draw the fear into that loving heart and allow the heart to transform fear. From the center of Awakened Heart, we observe fear without engaging in a battle with it, without getting into any kind of relationship with it. Fear is not an enemy but a reminder to find the core of which it is expression and rest there again.

Yet, in truth, battling our fear and negativity is old habit for most of us. We have come to believe that if we are to be the 'good' people we aspire to be, then we must get rid of the 'bad' or shadow in ourselves. How do we begin to understand it differently? I'd like to offer a new metaphor. First I'd like you to think of the brilliant sun. We can't get into the sun ourselves or we'd burn up, but we have some notion of what it might be like to be right in the middle of that sun, the intense heat, the intense light. When you see sunlight on the ground, that's not the sun itself. And yet, when you see the sunlight on the ground, there's nothing there that's not the sun. Can you see that? It's the sun. If you turn your back to it and you feel its heat on your back, that's also the sun.

We'll use 'sun' as a metaphor for God or Unconditioned. The sun itself is dharmakaya; the sun on the ground is the nirmanakaya, form body level. The heat, radiance and energy, they are all sambhogakaya, en route to becoming nirmanakaya. The final light or heat is the form body of this moment.

When we experience this heat and light, when we look at the sun on the ground, we have absolutely no doubt but that the sun exists. It takes us directly back into the sun. In the same way, a loving act like the act of giving takes us right back into God. Now, here's where our dual minds get caught. What about the shadow? What about the fear, for example, that grasps and hoards? Is that an expression of the sun? Yes. Shadow needs an object to cast the shadow, but without the sun, the shadow can't exist. The shadow is also an expression of the sun. Delusion of separate self is the object that casts the shadow. The sun is still there, is always there! Seeing the shadow, we can come home!

We erroneously believe that the love-based mind states are God, but the fear-based mind states are evil, and antithetical to God. Based on that belief we move into the distortion that we must conquer these states, abolish or destroy them. Certainly we must work so as not to act them out in the world, but that's very different from hating and fearing them.

If you start to look very deep in meditation, you start to understand fear. What makes me start to give and then grab back? Fear. Fear is basically a distortion of love. There's some kind of self-love, some kind of distortion happening. The grabbing back is not a skillful or loving thing to do, but as in the book that I read at the beginning of today's session, there is nothing that's not God. I don't have to hate my fear, don't have to hate myself because fear is present in me. To do so only empowers the fear and solidifies it.

We really start to see it simply as, 'Here is the voice of fear.' Instead of judging that fear and hating ourselves because we have enacted the fear, we begin to offer kindness to ourselves.

When we can say, 'I am feeling fear,' and, like in the loving kindness meditation we did last night, simply say to ourselves, 'May I be happy. May I move past my fear,' we can start to offer kindness to ourselves rather than judgment. Often kindness dissolves, or at least softens, fear and then the giving becomes possible again.

This, to me, has been one of the greatest misunderstandings through many lives. The clarifying of it is one of the greatest fruits of meditation, to really come to understand what non-duality means, that there's nothing that's not God.

You can take this into your life and apply it in many ways. It's not a statement of freedom from responsibility for our heavy mind states. But we don't have to hate those states. Aaron says, 'we draw them into the heart of love.'

Probably most of you in this room, including myself, at some time have felt inadequate or unworthy. It may not be a way you feel constantly so that you have to hide from the world. You may be basically a very happy person who likes yourself. But, sometimes we feel unworthy or inadequate. Maybe you walk into a room where you see several friends. They're busy talking and they ignore you. Anger comes up and a feeling, 'Why are they ignoring me?' and then, perhaps, the thought comes, 'What's wrong with me?' My guess is that most of you have felt that sometime.

We get into so many kinds of judgments about ourselves. We are so uncomfortable with our anger, with our heavy emotions. We think, 'This is good; this is acceptable; this is God. That is not good; that is not acceptable; that is not God.'

Aaron talks about something that he calls old soul syndrome. He says that those of us who are older souls-not better, just more mature and have experienced more lifetimes and accumulated a bit more wisdom-we reach a point where we want so deeply to live our lives with love and to really be worthy of the divine. When negative emotions arise in us we feel we are not worthy, that we have to be perfect to be worthy of God. We're never going to be perfect, so we put ourselves into a trap. We want so much to express our energy with love and we want so much to feel worthy of this unity with God that the more we want that, the more we condemn ourselves.

When we walk into this room and we see two friends busy in conversation and they ignore us for whatever reasons, anger arises. This is a very natural response. Here is a group of conditions that give rise to an emotion. Anger arises. Then, often we judge the anger. We say, 'I'm bad. I shouldn't be feeling this. I should understand that they want to talk, therefore if I were good enough or understood clearly enough I wouldn't be angry, so I'm bad.' Do you get stuck in that? Yes?

With attention and practice we begin to see that anger is just an energy. Pride is just an energy. Jealousy, impatience, any emotion that you can think of is just an energy. It's not good. It's not bad. We might say it's a distorted expression of God. It comes from a place of love and some misunderstanding. It comes from a place that loves the self and wants to protect the self.

We start to give ourselves permission to feel these emotions. Each time it comes up we can check it out. 'Is this an expression of God?' Aaron uses a shortcut question. He says, 'Is it other than?' by which he means, 'Anything here that is other than God in one of His expressions?' There was a period of time when he had me asking that question two hundred times a day. Whenever a thought came up and a judgment of that thought, I would feel Aaron behind me saying, 'Is it other than? Check it out.'

After a while it becomes so clear it's just energy moving through. It arose because of certain conditions. It's like stubbing your toe on a rock. Pain arises. You don't say, 'I shouldn't be feeling pain.' But, if you stub your emotional toe on those two people ignoring you across the room, and anger arises instead of pain, then you say, 'I shouldn't be feeling anger.'

Nothing is 'other than.' This is a core teaching of so many religions, and it has become so misunderstood, largely because we so much want to express our energy lovingly, want to feel worthy of union with God. And so, we have trained ourselves and been trained since childhood to pounce on these negative emotions, to try to suppress them, to get rid of them. Where are they going to go? How deep can we bury them? They're still going to come up.

So, what Aaron has taught me, which is very primary to his teaching, is that we draw everything into the heart of love. We can't express it by flinging out the anger. We don't want to do that. We don't want to act out the negative emotions. We also can't bury them. We draw them into the loving heart. We allow them to be transformed in the loving heart.

We begin just by sitting in meditation and watching different negative thoughts come up, watching our judgments of them, learning very carefully, step by step, to make more spaciousness around them, to watch the whole process around our reaction to them, our fear of negative thoughts. We learn, 'I really don't need to do it that way anymore,' and slowly we start to offer more kindness to ourselves. Then, we can offer that same kindness out to others.

I said before that Aaron has given this particular experience of unworthiness the name 'old soul syndrome.' He says that the more we aspire to union with God, the more we condemn ourselves, so that many people who are far advanced on a spiritual path experience a lot of unworthiness because we're asking such perfection of ourselves.

Working in meditation we can look at unworthiness itself and see that it's just a concept. The anger came up. I didn't want to express the anger. It felt bad to express the anger. So, I attacked myself and said, 'I'm unworthy.' We've all experienced that movement in so many different ways.

That unworthiness is just a thought. That's all it is. Has anyone ever really been unworthy? What could it possibly mean to be unworthy? At the same time, has anyone ever been worthy? If we're not unworthy, then we're trying to be worthy. But, that's just another concept. It's meaningless. We can be loving. We can be generous. We can be patient. But, we can't possibly be worthy or unworthy. These are dualistic concepts of our western culture.

As you begin to watch in your practice how concepts such as unworthy come up, they start to shatter. There's no substance to them anymore. It's part of this whole process of bringing kindness to yourself.

We're going to sit in meditation now for about twenty minutes and then open the floor to questions and answers. Aaron and I both will answer questions. Continuing with the silence, and with much mindfulness, I would ask you to stand up in place and stretch. Be as present in your body as you can. Feel the muscles. As you reach your arms up, feel the breath come in. Then, put your arms down and let the breath go out. And now, reaching up, really fill your chest with air. Release it and sit.

(Meditation. Bell rings three times.)