September 18, 2024

So here we are and we’re always looking at different things but in a spontaneous way. So the experiment is also, is there something that comes up? Is there nothing that comes up? Last time we talked about the diagram.

As a reminder, what we’re talking about in general, is how not needing to be someone or not needing to be a someone, not needing to be a self with an identity, to be a specific person, an ego, to be free of that, of needing to be that, (not that it’s not there but just the freedom of not needing to be a someone) how that is joy.

And we can talk about these words forever and ever, right? What does joy mean? What does being a someone mean? What does not needing to be a someone mean? We can chop it up as we did up to now into thoughts and thinking and the joy of not needing to think or not needing to believe particular thoughts, the freedom from thought, but also different aspects of that as they come up for you.

So I want to keep this one really open and see what comes up. We have quite a small group today, so maybe the flow will be more intense. What comes up when we now discuss what it means for you, what was required of you, to find the joy of not needing to be a someone.

The biggest thing which comes up after you discard the need to be anyone is the big relief. Then life looks very easy, becomes easy, and it is like unburdening whole thing. It becomes very easy.

Do you have an example of that? Something from your own life, maybe?

Yes. For many years I was trying to see what they call self realization partly also because of the many struggles which came up in my life. So I was trying to find something permanent, something which I can hold on something which never leaves me, I was trying to get that or become that if that was becoming. But then after reading so many books, so many, even doing the exercises or whatever in India they call it meditation.

There are so many words. And the ultimate purpose was to get something permanent, so that took many years. But then even if I was succeeding in the meditations, which were there prescribed in the books even then I was always finding something missing. Something, which was not coming through as a permanent thing, you went for a long time and it was a very big burden, of course, not visible outside, but inside it was a big burden.

So I was getting through, but then the slowly it came to realization that actually, there was nothing which was permanent, except the one who was actually trying to get something permanent. So that was not able to come forward or come up, but that maybe it was a thought or it was a realization but then, then I gave up and I then thought that what actually I want.

Because whatever I am wanting is always away from me. So that me, that awareness, the one who was trying to become something was itself always there, which I wanted that something must be always available, already available. So that went for a long time.

But then luckily or fortunately, I got through a couple of books, which were on the this Advait thing, non duality, which reinforced my conclusion that actually there was nothing to become, nothing to get. The one who was trying to get was already there, but not coming up into the screen. Then I will admit here also that I came across you and you also helped me reinforce the same thing which the other books were saying that what we are looking for that permanence kind of thing is already there.

It is only that we are going other way around. So that means that there was no need to become anything enlightened or spiritually advanced or meditation or good meditation. And any objective was actually deceptive. Forget about the outside achievement, even the inside achievement that you are good in awareness, you are good in stillness of mind and so many things, but nothing was really above the one who was looking for it, which was already there.

You, when I met you, you also reinforce the same thing that it is already, always available. It is only we are going away from it. We means our body, mind, education aims or wishes for the permanent thing, for enlightenment, for more awareness. It ended the search. With this realization that actually what we are looking is always available. We are only going away from it. I think that was unburdening.

That sounds like the joy of not needing to be a seeker.

Yes. The seeker must end actually. When the seeker goes, the seeking also goes. And what is left was already available. That is the big revelation or realization that the seeking was also a problem, whether it was outside seeking or even inner seeking is also a blockage to what is already available to us. That is, for me, the joy. Now it is very relaxed.

Thank you so for sharing that because that’s something that I have my story of as well, but I’m assuming most of us here have some version of that story that might be interesting also to share with each other. The story of the seeker and then the end of the seeker and the joy of not needing to be a seeker or of not needing to speak.

Anyone else feel like they’d like to share some of that?

I would say I was in a similar seeking state, but not for enlightenment or something like that, but for delivering a great career in a corporate environment. But the mechanism behind that was quite similar. And so that means I always tried very hard to be someone. These people wearing a tie and taking great decisions, having big teams, having a good income and so on. So this endless seeking which brought me to a point where I had the impression this doesn’t come to an end, never.

And then suddenly this. Seeking stopped, the seeker disappeared, and I was just about to jump into the next trap and start the same game with different labels. So seeking for enlightenment. So they are saying that now, quite funny, but I can really identify with what you said, you said something really wonderful. The one who was trying to get someone was always there. It was always available and this recognition or realization is still there. No matter what comes up, seeking starts, but directly ends again because I somehow understand, it just doesn’t make sense. But in case it feels fine, this seeking process, I can just play it. But knowing that it is just, that above this thing, what is always there? Beyond and above. And now it’s like a game. So I’m still playing this corporate game. But it’s a game. And I’m sometimes playing with a non-duality game.

So it’s now it’s playful. And that’s the difference compared to my approach before. And then I asked myself, now it’s really hard to look back. But what is needed to come into this joy of not needing to be someone. I still have intense working days.It’s still there, but I don’t know. It’s different in terms of, I would even call it a concept, this thing called raw experience. So being aware of the information, which is coming to you. Which is being delivered through the, I call it entry gates of the body. But not believing all those concepts and so on.

So you, you understand that those are just labels. And as soon as you understand that those are labels artificially made by human beings, by wonderful minds and brains, this joy pops up because you don’t have to take it so seriously.

Wonderful. That’s a great description. Thank you. I think, again, for all of us recognizable in our own ways. Anyone else want to share the end of needing to be a someone, where it has shown up?

I’m going to share a side that I’ve never shared before. At least I don’t think I’ve ever shared it. I don’t know. I was growing up as a little girl, I fell into all these beliefs about attractiveness and how I looked and the body itself. So needing the body to be a certain shape, size, needing to be attractive, to be loved. So this was very early conditioning. And when I was in my second relationship, this really exploded in the form of major depression in the form of skin picking, obsessive compulsive disorder. So lots of really painful psychological stuff.

Which was actually the thing that propelled onto this whole search for relief. How can I find relief from this need to be better, somehow more. For me, it was mainly about being attractive enough to be loved by my partner. And this is so crazy when you talk about it because even at that time, it made no sense rationally. And I could give you a whole lecture on how that was just psychological nonsense. So how that was my conditioning, how these were limiting beliefs, how this was stuff I had learned because of my mother and school and all these other influences. And at the same time, it completely depressed me and made me very unhappy.

So there were these two levels in my life. There was the level of knowing what was going on psychologically, intellectually, and being able to explain it. And at the same time being completely caught up in it. And so my life was focused on how do I make sure that the body doesn’t deteriorate, that I lose what is keeping my partner with me.

This was a huge part of my life. And the suffering around that was what mainly propelled me into all this self help and what ended up having me discover the the non dual direct pointing. And the relief was when I found out that I am not this. I am not limited. This is an expression. This is what this body looks like and what it is is an expression of consciousness, if you want to put it in those words. Today, I’m using those words. I could use different words.

But the relief of knowing that, hey, this is just how reality is expressing itself, it’s not under my control, that was immense relief. Because the whole time my energy was focused on trying to control. This expression, this bodily expression.

So dieting, fitness, and all of that stuff but also the skin picking. And then the relief exploded even more into knowing there is no love needed from someone else. It’s always difficult to talk about this in words that make sense.

It’s more like things disappear. So the need to be loved disappeared. The need to manipulate the body disappeared. The need to be found attractive disappeared very early in the process. But the relief of that is, I don’t know if anyone has suffered under anything similar, it’s indescribable. When you lose that, the joy of that, of not needing to manipulate the appearance, so the joy and the energy and the freedom I gained back from that was indescribable. And that’s just a part of freedom of this.

Did you find that relief to be a challenge when trying to stabilize? I ask this, I came to this kind of in a very similar space as you. When I was maybe 22, though, I had a pretty intense experience with psychedelics that really feels like it pierced through the illusion of the separate self and all that.

And for about 20 years, it was just this perpetual noise of tension and kind of incoherence in my brain and the self help and also drugs and alcohol and all this were really to just try to get my brain to shut off like the noise to shut off and none of it ever worked drugs and all that temporarily but never the way going in did but it was so much relief that it was almost like chasing that dragon like it was a new drug. And I was wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like that.

I think I can speak to that. I think very early on, I realized alcohol in this body did not go well together. But all of the psychedelics, I have done multiple trips and explorations and all of that. And very early on, I realized it’s just an unending game I’m not going to get anywhere with this. There’s always going to be something that the mind will say, Oh here’s a little fold in the mind that I should explore. And for this, I need, I don’t know, the latest psychedelic to go there and do this and do that.

And I got pretty disenchanted by the psychedelic exploration very fast that it was an intense phase that lasted three years. And when this realization, like weight, just like lifting, I don’t need it for me. The root thing that I discovered underneath that was fear. Like I was afraid I wouldn’t be loved if I didn’t present myself in a certain way. I was afraid I wouldn’t fit in. I was afraid there’s so much fear that came into the picture and whenever I was faced with that fear, I would just, I was reading A Course in Miracles quite deeply at the time.

And there’s one of the phrases in A Course in Miracles, which is only love is real. The opposite of love is fear. But if only love is real, then fear isn’t real. It doesn’t exist. It’s just a misinterpretation of love, so to speak. So I’ll keep reminding myself of that. And yeah when this thing that you described of this weight, just lifting and you feeling like I don’t need to perform anymore, I don’t need to actively perform for an audience Through my appearance and how I look and in order to perform and so that I’m given love when the fear of not being loved and the fear of not being accepted when I wouldn’t perform, when that left.

I think even this psychedelic exploration need also just evaporated and it was almost overnight. It scared a lot of my friends because they were just like, this is very extreme. Like, how did you just do that? I can’t explain it. It’s yeah there was a time during the pandemic where I would smoke a lot of marijuana, like almost a couple of joints a day cause I was so stressed. And yeah, after this, whatever this is happened, I can’t even explain why, like it’s just, I feel that the person who needed to do that is no longer there. Left the building. So the needing to chase the next high, needing to chase the next psychedelic trip, the next exploration, that also left because all that there is this here, this is now. I don’t need anything else.

The fact that I’m here means that I’m loved by something, someone, I don’t know, I can’t describe it, but I’m here. So I don’t need to continue proving that to myself. It’s good.

Thank you. So we were exploring what experiences we’ve had that made us see or realize the joy of not needing to be a someone or to be someone in particular. So yours fits very well in that exploration. Anyone else want to share their experience?

I am curious about something, which is the disappearance of needs and wanting to do things and needing to do certain things or feel certain ways and experiencing that is gone. But I’m excited. I’m curious to know about the opposite. Like I would really like to, I’m feeling aches and pains in my body. And I would really like to start an exercise routine or some sort of a physical activity routine, which I’ve always struggled with. And this is one of those things that I’m still struggling with. It’s still one of my sticky points. What’s everybody else’s experience of creating a routine or a need or a habit after, there’s no one to do that habit anymore?

That’s an interesting question.

I’d like to share my point of view here. I think what works for me is what I call a spiritual mental hygiene routine. So that is a kind of a process which you may also call it conscious waking up and conscious sleeping. So that, it’s something like, before you’re getting up, you meditate. And before you sleep, you meditate. So you tied it up with the practice which you’re already doing, like sleeping is the practice that we are doing. With the habit that I’m already following, then it comes into a natural rhythm. I don’t have to say that, okay, I have to meditate on such and such time or whether I missed it. It’s just become if I don’t do it, I don’t feel fresh in the morning.

And if I don’t meditate before sleeping, I don’t have a good sleep. So now it becomes like a mandatory thing. You just do it. It’s become a natural part of yourself. Just that’s why I call it a mental hygiene because it’s not the physical hygiene, we do it every day, has gone into our habit, so similarly this, that’s why I call it a mental hygiene routine. And then once you do that, you become really more mindful during the day. Because you know that the part of conditioning that, we keep observing as a part of meditation, which I do mostly a Vipassana meditation, so it’s more of a watching sensation and breathe breath and all that.

So it’s a natural process and it finishes and then, you feel fresh and then you get up. So I don’t fix time also. It might sometimes take 20 minutes, sometimes take 40 minutes like that. That is one part of it. And the second part about proving the identity, let’s say, I was an IT professional earlier. At that time, you have to prove yourself, right? And if you don’t prove yourself, you’re gone, right? Similarly, when I became a life coach, again, finding a client and serving them was a challenge. So now is the point here, which, now I’ve created this mental hygiene framework, which I want to offer to students and young professionals. But despite my trying so much marketing, I’m not getting much. So I’m just letting it go. I’m just saying, okay, who’s this person who wants to offer this service to somebody, however pure it is, right? Earlier IT service, now it is offering a spiritual mental hygiene framework.

So I just let it be and then I go to that pure self part of it, which simply exists. It doesn’t need any client or anyone to, to offer something. It just, it’s unconditionally satisfied. So I think I’m in that space and it feels so good and so liberating. Yeah. Absolutely. That you’re not changing for a client.

I find this really fascinating because, um, the second part of what you said, I totally agree with. I think that’s part of what we see that the service, what we offer in the world, just simply, comes out, right? And it doesn’t need to be, we’ll see how it comes, how it works, or if it doesn’t work or what flows and what doesn’t flow. And then we follow that or not.

But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to go back to this question of practices. And this freedom and joy of not needing to be a someone now, what do we do?

Why do we think we need to do something? And we fall back into, if you look at LinkedIn or anything, or just the books out there, and I’m still a secret self help junkie and especially in the nutrition and fitness stuff, if you look at what’s out there, the amount of mind boggling stuff we can get obsessed about. It’s like recently I opened Google and the first thing it said was if you sit all day, you get dead butt syndrome. It’s oh my god, I have to do something about my potential dead butt. Now I have to do these exercises and figure out how it works … The FOMO and we should be doing this.

And have you thought about, the second part of your colon? Because there’s something there that’s not okay. Or maybe the, the back of your left lung or the thing you think just before you wake up, that’s not good. You have to, meditate about that. So it’s endless. And it’s so funny. I find it so interesting and so funny how we then immediately lose the joy of being no one and fall back into, oh, but there’s something I need to do. And this applies to the job parts. But it applies to the body and to the mind and to thinking and to all these things that we think we should do. And we can’t just be.

This is always the same crazy pattern.

But the thing you said earlier, which really resonated with how it’s experienced. We can play that as a game, right? I can observe the body or the body mind going, dead butt syndrome, oh no! And then even Googling it and trying to figure out what I need to do to prevent it. But seeing how that is what is occurring and knowing that it is the game of life.

And then the thought kicks in the business environment, Oh, am I still professional enough? So funny. If you observe those thoughts. Yeah.

So the joy of not needing to be a someone is not that you are not a someone. It’s not the joy of not being someone. It’s the joy of not needing to be a specific someone or to be a specific way or to be even a person, a self, a separate self.

So we’re not trying to get rid of desires.

We’re not trying to get rid of anything. We’re just falling out of the identification with the need to be someone.

I think that needing to be is the main word. If we drop that, then the body will still be there. Mind will still be there and it will play on. The body is there. It will wake up. It will do exercise. If it is sick, it will go to the doctor also. But the inside, that it is playing on. It’s not a something I have to do now. The one who was there for many years inside managing all these things, he’s not there, but otherwise the body as an instrument is still there. It is breathing. It is waking up, it is eating.

And I’ll just give you two example, although everybody knows it which shows that the body takes care of itself in its own ways. It has its own logic, its own patterns and conditioning. Many of us would have seen Nisargadatta. When he was speaking, even to the audience, he used to smoke. And he was smoking so lightly, so easily. And then we heard that Raman also had this cancer, but he was never talking about it. He said that his body, it has got some ailment. It will take its course but he will do his own things.

Then we had a very ancient example, and I’m just saying to talk about the body thing we spend a lot of time on body. But if we let it take its own course, it does not deceive us. Only when our mind interferes, then it is an imbalance, but otherwise it does take care of itself. There was one Ashtavalkar, he was, his body was deformed at eight places. That is why he’s called Ashtavalkar. Asht means eight in Sanskrit. He was still so well respected, he was on doing his things and he said I have got this body from nature. I can’t do anything of it. Let it move as it does.

And there are many examples, I’m just saying few, just to emphasize that the body does not need much of our training or if it is sick, it will definitely go to the doctor. Or not. But let it takes its course. It requires much less intervention from our mind.

I’m interested if anyone else wants to share their story of the release of stress or fear and the finding of the joy of not needing to be a someone.

I want to talk about playing, play, playfulness. I think that’s the other side of fear that sort of made an appearance in my life. When this thing dropped away. Um, and a lot of my friends, I am a theater actor and an improvised theater actor. A lot of the pushback that I got was, this is not the stage, you need to take these things a little more seriously. And then I just sat with that and I was like, this is the stage. This is the ultimate stage. And now I talk about what needs to be done not what I need to do, but what needs to be done in terms of what does the scene need?

So if I’m sitting in a meeting, and the meeting is going a certain way. What does the scene need right now? What role can be played right now to facilitate the outcomes, that everybody seems to think they need to do something actively to achieve? What can facilitate that? So a lot of interactions and a lot of previously professional need to be serious interactions became infused with a lot of just playful energy.

If there’s no joy in it, then why are we doing it? I don’t see the need or the interest in this kind of, scrunching your eyes and your facial muscles up and seriously typing on a phone. I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not something that I’m interested in.

So the other thing that comes up because I play that I treat everything like a big play or like a piece of a drama, the divine sacred theater that we’re all playing and everybody has to play a role. This mind body has a role to play and then it exits. So there’s always a question of then what’s authentic. If you are changing your expression to suit the need of what’s happening and facilitate smoother flow, whatever, then you’re, I’ve essentially just removed my ego from, I try to remove my ego from all of it, so that the flow just keeps going and what’s supposed to happen just happens.

So what is authentic and are you truthful anymore? So that’s one of the, I call it a micro fear that comes up sometimes, like there’s this small voice that comes along, is this authentic? Are you being authentic? Are you just like saying what’s acceptable to everybody in this moment right now? I’m watching it. But I don’t have an answer to whether it’s authentic or not. I don’t think it’s a relevant question most of the time.

Yeah, not needing to be authentic could also be added to not needing to be a someone. The end of the need to be authentic, whatever that ever meant.

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So I think it’s a great segue because we’re going to be talking about the Stage and what we’re trying to model. And one of the first things which we’re hoping to try now is this chat room, which is completely anonymous and doesn’t even require a login.

So we’re going to share the link as one of those things that we’re experimenting with. So bear with us if some of the technology breaks on us, hopefully it won’t. But what we will share now after this is a chat room. There will be no names, but you will see the stream of messages broken up.

So every time someone types, you will see like the cadence of them. And the room will be open at least till the day before next Wednesday. So after. On Tuesday, it will close and whatever is there, we will capture, and then we will tie it to the transcript of the session. And the idea is to really enable a little bit more of these ad hoc conversations, or, not necessarily just in the context of today.

And especially because I think, especially today’s topic was really intimate and some cases, and Sometimes it’s easier to write these things down after as well. Language might be a barrier. We’re experimenting a little bit with, having different languages automatically translate both the transcripts, which most likely will lose some of the meaning, but we’ll do what we can and allow for like different languages to come into the conversation much more easily as much as we can I think we have a little bit, we have a lot more in store, again, we’re testing some of these things as we go.

So you will see if you go to the dialogue, the list of dialogues, which I think the link is still there. And you go to one of the transcripts, you’ll see now an icon, which is like the sparkle and what we’re trying to do there now, it will just, you cannot select, you can do anything, but the idea is, can we, spur or spin conversation based on a certain idea or something that we see written.

And see what that yields. And we might do it similarly either in an in person or a zoom for that matter, or as well in a chat room, depending on how we see those things working or not working, honestly and the last thing we’re going to try, and this is what we’re going to try with some AI stuff, we’re going to try to see if the AI can create correlations and synthesize some of what we’re talking and create diagrams around it.

So we’re going to experiment with that and you’re going to start seeing those pop up on the transcripts as well, in addition to what it’s just to add an element of visualization to it as a component since it does a great job at pattern recognition, let’s see if it’s going to fail there or if it’s gonna, help us, facilitate, we might see something, it might allow us to have, Diagrams that we can converse and then, update and work through.

So that’s a bit of the gist of it for now. When you go to the platform, you can log in for the chat room. You don’t need to log in. It’s just basically open for anyone. And the link is this one. I’m going to send it now.

I hope this will be helpful to us. And there’s no pressure, right? So if you have nothing to say in the chat room, don’t feel like you have to go there and say something, but I’ve heard from many of you that things come up afterwards. And that, going into the drive and creating a document just for three things you want to say is a bit weird.

I very much enjoyed this this sharing of more personal stories. I think it adds a different dimension to what we’re talking about. So thank you for those. Or for everyone, actually, for those who listened and those who shared.

I’m observing that I’m not saying anything. That’s what I’m observing, which is interesting. It’s not, sometimes you can’t shut me up and I’m just sitting here listening. Oh, I’m just gonna see how it plays out.

Yeah, you’re allowed to be Not be a someone.

Okay. Then because we’ve, we finished with the technical stuff, I won’t go back into any content now and hope you will hope to see you next week. And please remember that you are part of this process. So if you have ideas, if you have things to zoom in on or to zoom out on, and have a look around on the Google Drive as well because there are some interesting contributions there.