Day Two continued (Section 14)

Barbara: I'd like to hear your questions.

Question to Aaron: (In Spanish) (About evil and sin.)

Aaron: Good morning and my love to you all. I am Aaron. I hear your question, my sister. I can only give you my perception of it. I do not see a division of the universe into good and evil, light and darkness. By that I do not mean that darkness and evil do not exist, only I do not experience them as dual with good and with light, but as distortions of good and light.

That which expresses itself as evil may be very much in darkness and may offer much harm to other beings as it manifests its distortions, but everything, and I mean everything, is in a process of moving into the light. It may take it many tens of thousands of years to do so. There is nothing in the universe that is inherently evil.

Question: Could you speak more about life after death? As a matter of fact, I would like to ask Aaron, if it's not too impertinent, how is life after death?

Barbara: I am going to speak to this very briefly. There is so much we could talk about here, so many different kinds of questions you all have. Maybe we should do two or three different workshops, one focused on meditation, one focused on spiritual inquiry, one focused more on just abstract metaphysics, things like simultaneous time and life after death. Our purpose here as described in our flyer is to focus more on meditation and what we learn in meditation. We spent some time on these metaphysical questions yesterday, so today I don't want to go too far afield. Can we learn about what happens after death in meditation? Yes and no.

The experience of death is the experience of death and in meditation we can only have related experiences. It's clearly not the same as death. In meditation there is a very clearly described progression of insights that we move through. I see the movement through this progression in many students, although not always in the same precise order.

People begin to understand the mind/body connection, how the mind works, how thoughts arise as conditioned phenomena and how the body responds to those thoughts. Then, they begin to see how the whole conditioned realm arises out of the Unconditioned, a very wonderful experience. Then comes insight into the impermanence and dissolution of everything, how everything that has arisen will dissolve. We really can't hold onto anything. Everything is in a constant state of change. Everything that we love and hold dear is dying, literally. I don't mean to be morbid as I say that. It's simply a fact of life. From the moment we're born, we start dying.

So, we begin to see how everything is in a constant state of change, and that we can't hold onto this. We literally begin to see everything begin to dissolve. Sometimes there's a lot of terror in that experience, and a lot of sadness. Then, we come to a place of equanimity with arising and dissolution, a very centered spaciousness which sees how things arise and dissolve without grabbing hold or pushing away.

At that point we allow the whole sense of body to dissolve and of ego to dissolve, and we move into an experience that is called dissolution of self. From what Aaron tells me, this experience of dissolution of self is very much parallel to the death experience. So, yes, to that extent, meditation can take you to a place where there is no longer a central self, or where at least we experience that self basically as a tool, as something which has come together to live the incarnation and then passes on, rather than something that is constant and ongoing.

We come here to the Judeo-Christian concept of soul. When Aaron talks of soul, he talks of the pure spirit body without the mental, emotional, or physical bodies. That pure spirit body has no concept of self and yet, it clearly exists. We're not talking, then, about a negation of being. We're not talking about voidness and saying, 'Nothing exists,' or 'I don't exist.' Only the 'I' that exists is not the self as the conscious mind knows it. It is what we experience at that deepest level of meditation.

What happens when self 'dies' as it does in meditation? There is a tremendous sense of freedom, interconnection and spaciousness.

Aaron does talk at some length in the book, Aaron, about the whole experience of what happens after death; you can read about it there. He declines to talk about it here with the group as he does not wish to take us too far off the base of our work. He says simply that there is some degree of consciousness, as I defined it yesterday, in the being that has just died, and slowly its perspective shifts from that consciousness into pure awareness.

So, more directly in answer to your question, simply, yes, we can experience something akin to what we would experience after death in meditation, and it can be very helpful in having some idea what to expect.

There's something else I want to talk about very briefly here, which is that in meditation we learn a spaciousness with mind states that come up that are heavy and uncomfortable. We really develop a pattern of doing that, a habit of doing that. We've become very skilled at doing that. I said yesterday that we begin to do it even in dreams.

At night, when I dream, if I have a bad dream and something is chasing me, I've learned instead of letting terror arise to simply do that same labeling I do in meditation. I do it in my dreams, 'feeling fear, feeling fear,' and I find myself able to turn into this nightmare in my sleep and just look at it. The experience of fear in a dream state becomes no different than that experience while awake.

Aaron says when we die, what we meet after death is really the statement of our own mind, the outgrowth of our own mind. With practice then, mind is less fearful, less rigid and hard. Also, if in our meditation practice we come to the point where we really can offer love to fear, then when the fear-based expressions of our mind emerge after death we can offer those love, so that we move with this transition process much more smoothly and without getting caught up in the various hell realms that all of our religions describe. Other questions?

Question: I am participating in many activities, such as tai chi, yoga, reiki, and meditation. How can I pick one of these to use, or more precisely, how can I integrate the above into my meditation practice?

Barbara: Not only are these all forms of meditation, but everything in your life is meditation. It's not just yoga as meditation or tai chi as meditation, it's eating as meditation, using the toilet as meditation; everything is meditation. If you begin to approach everything in your life as meditation, then the problem of integration stops. The real issue is learning how to relate to everything in your life as meditation.

If you think of yoga as something separate, simply a way of moving my body, attending to my body and then when you've finished yoga you go out and play tennis and you treat it as something different again, you're not going to be able to integrate it. Yoga is one kind of movement. Tai chi is one kind of movement. Tennis is one kind of movement. They all come together.

Sometimes we want so much to evolve spiritually. We want so much to grow and learn. We start grabbing at everything in a vast spiritual market place. A famous Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, wrote a book about what he called spiritual materialism. We need to be very careful about this. We can start grabbing at too much and not deepen anything.

The question, then, isn't 'What do I choose?' but 'Why am I choosing it?' If your choosing it is coming from a place of love that really sees, 'Ahh, here is something that speaks to my heart and that I feel I can learn from,' then, go into it. If it's coming from a place of fear that says, 'Oh, here's one I missed. I've got to get this one. I might be missing something,' you don't need it.

So, the question isn't 'What shall I do?' but 'Is my desire to do it coming from a place of love or fear?' This isn't just true of spiritual disciplines. It's true of everything in your life. Work with whatever you're doing as part of your practice and it will integrate naturally, or it will fall away if it was just something you grasped out of fear and don't really need.

I would also strongly recommend that you take just one practice and work with it in depth and let the others be supporting practices. For some of you meditation may be the focal practice. For some of you yoga may be the focal practice and meditation may support that. Any of these practices can take you very deep if you work with them and allow them to deepen.

Aaron has said to me that after the break he wants to talk about resistance. This fits in very well with what I'm saying about why we choose to work at a shallow level in many areas rather than at a deeper level in one area. What are our resistances about?

Question: (In Spanish) What to do about boredom? She is bored with some of the questions, intensely interested in others.

Barbara: What is boredom? It's a mind state. There are sixty or seventy different people in the room with many different interests and degrees of experience. The instruction and discussion are not constantly relevant for everybody. People come with an agenda and when the program doesn't fit perfectly, some aversion may arise. Might 'boredom' be an expression of aversion, of irritation at not hearing what you hoped to hear? How about lethargy, a kind of tiredness or laziness of mind. If mind is asked to attend closely and feels lazy, doesn't want to attend, is boredom an expression of lethargy? What if I say something that threatens you and your mind hardens and doesn't really want to hear it? Might that armoring lead to boredom?

Can one just be bored? Watch the anger coming up. Maybe anger is too strong a word. Watch the irritation. 'I don't want this. I want something interesting, or comfortable or something that makes me feel good about myself.' Sometimes in our lives we're going to be bored. It's a wonderful place to practice.

It's okay to feel bored. Watch the tension around boredom. There's a lot of boredom in our lives. How many hours a day do you spend waiting, sitting at a traffic light, waiting in a line? What is boredom?

We have time for one more question.

Question: I've been reading some books and many of them tell you that meditation can be harmful, that you can get negative karma. They also say you should have a teacher.

Barbara: Anything can be misused. There can be negative karma in giving if I give for the wrong reasons, if I give to enhance my ego, for example. There's nothing inherent in meditation that will create negative karma. You can misuse meditation, though, especially without the guidance of a teacher.

It can become a hiding place from real life, for example, and then there's unwholesome karma. Or it can be used for self-inflation, to create a notion of the self as 'meditator,' as someone special. If a teacher is available, that's wonderful. A teacher will help you see where you're getting stuck. But, if a teacher is not available, then, by all means, don't let that stop you from meditating. Being without a teacher forces you to be more self-reliant. You have to be more honest with yourself. Instead of having a teacher point out to you where you're getting stuck, where your ego is grasping on being a meditator, for example, or misusing labeling to control an object rather than just to be present with it, you've got to be honest with yourself and see that for yourself. So, you've got to work harder, but there's nothing to be afraid of.

Enough words. Now we are going to sit.

(Thirty minute meditation. Bell. Break.)