How is it possible to let go? If we’re always moving forward; always going somewhere; how can we let go? And what are we letting go of?

Often when you stop for these forty minutes, if out in your life you’ve really been going relentlessly, you just fall asleep. You just kind of go under. The body needs to go under; it’s just been going, going. So we learn to stop, we learn to actually stop the forward movement. That’s what meditation is a useful tool for, just basically stopping; consciously stopping.

When we’re always moving forward, we can't be aware of what's unconsciously being held on to. Because we’re thinking, and planning, and doing… Being somebody… Taking care of business… I’m always amazed what a relief it is to stop. Even in the midst of unbelievable demands and activity and responsibility, an ever-lengthening to-do list. The only way to let go is to bring into consciousness that which is unconscious. It's very dirty work!

So when we stop, of course what is unconscious begins to emerge into consciousness. And often it’s not very pleasant, particularly when it’s physical—the tensions that we build up through our coping mechanisms, the ways we get through the day. So historically a lot of physical culture has been developed in spiritual circles. Yoga, tai chi, aikido, the various martial arts; healing practices, breathing practices, qigong. They’re all based on meditation, really; they’re all based on stillness. Stillness that’s conscious, that’s held not rigidly, but soft, open, balanced.

I think in the West we’ve mainly contributed the psychological, the psychodynamic. The individual, psychodynamic psychology—that’s the area that’s most unconscious. The belief structures, the mental conditioning. That’s probably the most dangerous landscape that we eventually must traverse, must encounter. Of course the emotional is really the gateway to the heart, to the big heart, to the unnamable; the infinite consciousness that we are.

Usually we stop feeling by thinking. We separate from feeling by analyzing or compartmentalizing, by the ways we define things. The mental realm is very often mostly a defense mechanism. So of course in so many traditions, wisdom is basically equated with not knowing.

Of course here in our culture, in the information age, knowing is King, it’s God; it’s what’s rewarded. Not knowing is unthinkable. It’s radical, it’s subversive. And of course, ironically, it can’t be understood intellectually. Not knowing isn't like dumbing down, or being stupid; that’s not what it is. It’s really more like the wonder of a child, or a tourist in San Francisco on the cable car for the first time. Ever seen what people look like on those things? Like a dog with its head out of the window and its tongue blowing in the wind. Everything’s new!

Actually, I’ve lived here most of my life, and I’m always amazed, driving around the city, at how I always see something new. Always! I mean just in terms of buildings, architecture, it's like, "Oh, I never saw that before!" Happens all the time, it’s just amazing to me. There is a sense of appreciation of beauty, because there’s nothing compared to it; perception is right now, it’s not related to something else. That can only happen to a mental process.

Not knowing is really seeing directly what is. It doesn’t mean understanding it or intellectualizing it. It doesn't mean comparing it or analyzing it. It means perception, direct perception of what is. That’s all that’s really required, completely. Whether it’s physical awareness, mental awareness, emotional awareness—that’s all that’s required. Seeing things directly as they are, feeling them directly as they are, hearing them directly as they are. So you could come here and listen and not understand a single word of it, that’s fine. Just hear it, just as it is, and let it be. Try it out!

We assume we understand when we’re listening and talking to somebody, when in fact we’re reacting, making assumptions, projecting, and we don’t even know we’re doing that. People often end relationships with false assumptions—have you ever done that? It’s much more interesting to try on not knowing. Of course that doesn’t mean we’re not going to react, as long as reactivity is still present. But we can be available to the contraction of the reaction.

What does that mean, be available to the contraction of the reaction? I mean, you’re talking to someone that you know, and all of a sudden they say something or they do something, and all of a sudden your body clamps, your stomach gets tight, or you have a headache, or you’re angry, or afraid, or sad, or something. Some physical reaction, maybe a combo. Right? You know what I’m talking about. There’s a reaction.

So then what? That’s what’s important: then what? Where do you put your attention then? Do you just move further into unconscious contraction, the wanting to get away from it, to distract from it? Become more unconscious, in other words? That’s usually what happens. And we don’t even realize it until we’re very tired. It takes a lot of energy to cultivate unconsciousness, it’s a very heavy, very exhausting condition. And maybe for awhile, you think you're holding on, holding on to something. And maybe you’re at work, and you can’t really break down and cry, or whatever. Because you’ve got to deal with your responsibilities, and they expect you to be professional, and so on.

So you go home and say maybe I’ll sit a little bit, I’ll just tune in. Or you come here, and want to tune in a little bit, maybe amplify the conscious channel. That’s what we do here, or on retreat, we amplify the conscious channel. Or in meditation, that’s what we're doing, we're turning up the volume of consciousness. Of course, it can be a little difficult until you get the hang of it. People think "well, I meditated five minutes this week, meditated one minute last month. That’s about all the consciousness I can take right now! Too much on television I need to catch up on, too much news; there’s a lot to keep track of!"

There is a lot to keep track of, no question about it. But consciousness creates space; it creates time and space, actually. It's really kind of miraculous to discover that, to find that out. How is that possible? I don’t know. But it does, you should try it. Cultivating consciousness actually creates time and space, and reduces stress. I think we’ve all had experiences of it, you probably know what I’m talking about, though I may not be saying it in the way you language things.

You know the feeling you have when you’re on vacation, and you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t have to do anything? That’s a good feeling, isn’t it? The pressure’s off, no one’s going to bug you or want something. There’s a feeling of no pressure. That’s a good feeling. And that’s what I mean! Developing consciousness creates that feeling of no pressure—even when there’s so much to do. That’s the weird part. In some ways nothing has changed, and in another way everything is different.

So you begin to live as spaciousness. You begin to live in the timeless. And the timeless has a sense of lots of time; I mean all the time you need. And the mind, the mental activity, becomes a very compassionate, friendly ally. I think most people would settle for that. Forget enlightenment; just to have a mind that you get along with, that would be…not bad, you know? I’ll tell you how to do that first. First things first, as my mother used to say:

When in doubt, feel. That’s all.

Mental torture happens because something hasn’t been felt. It’s the surface siren, the car alarm. That annoying thing that goes off when you're trying to sleep (if you live in San Francisco, you know exactly what I’m talking about!). So instead of going out and smashing that car with the alarm, go in and feel. Because the torture is a mental alarm; the obsessed, unhappy mind is the result of emotional energy that has not moved, like a weather system that’s been trapped. It's dangerous; it can cause physical illness, can cause all kinds of destruction. So, when in doubt, feel.

Then, once the feelings have been felt—not analyzed, not understood, but felt—then the energy has moved, and the mind usually becomes calm, becomes quiet. And after a while the mind really likes it. Because it doesn’t have the job anymore, it doesn’t have the inappropriate job description, which is “figure out the feeling”. That’s not the mind’s job. The mind can't do that job. When the mind tries to do that job, it doesn’t work, it just creates more torture. You know what I mean?

Feelings can’t be understood, actually, not if they're to be really, fully felt. Because they’re just feeling, they’re just energy. We try to understand them, and that clamps and stops the flow. This is really important. Remember we talked about living and not knowing? For the mind to be happy it has to be unburdened of what it cannot deal with, what it cannot control, what it cannot understand. And it cannot control and it cannot understand feelings, period. Now, after feelings have been truly felt and the energy field is clear, then the mind can do whatever it wants to do. It can do all its little analyses, draw its conclusions, and so on. But now there’s no energy in it, there’s no charge anymore; so it’s fine, it’s not a problem. But when that charge is there—it doesn’t work.

So after a while, once you've begun to feel rather than think, the mind becomes much more comfortable, becomes much happier. It actually begins to enjoy itself! And then it can work in its realm, which is thinking and planning and all the things it likes to do. It figures out things it can figure out. It likes doing that. It likes making lists, playing with computers, and, you know, fun stuff. It’s playful. It creates things, invents things, discovers things. Fun! The mind is wonderful, absolutely fabulous.

We’ve been trained to not feel. We’ve been conditioned to repress and judge and deny feeling. So we have to learn how to feel again. And when we’ve awakened to consciousness, to our true nature, to that which we truly are; when we’ve awakened to that, then we have a great deal of support for feeling, for transforming the mind and the body and the heart. And then we have a deeper refuge, you might say.

And what you’ll find is that when you’re really feeling, when the feeling has cleared, you will be more in freedom, more in the presence of true self. That’s how you know! That’s the feedback mechanism, the biofeedback loop, if you will, that will let you know. If not, then you’ve probably gone back into your head, and have been trying to control, and figure it out, which is really a very tricky little defense mechanism against feeling. But when you have access to the so-called spiritual, the presence—when that’s present, it’s like the difference between DSL and dial-up. Much faster! Like a direct line. When you learn how to use that, it’s like rocket fuel.

But you still can’t bypass your own stuff. Often people have awakenings and they think, phew! I’m done! I don’t have to meditate anymore, don't have to keep looking at all this painful stuff. The mind then comes up with all kinds of conclusions, which are usually wrong, and you find that out eventually. But if you stay conscious this very process can be really useful. You might say it’s the ultimate cooker. We’re an amazing ecosystem, you know, this whole psychospiritual, bodymind-complex, infinite unknowable mystery that we are. Pretty far out stuff. Pretty far out to explore. And I like that.

I often say that I find the useful attitudes to have are those of explorer and scientist. Explorer: like you’re in unknown territory, you’ve never been there before, don’t know where you are. And scientist: simply observing things as they are. Being very attentive, watching very carefully, and not with a preconceived idea. All the great scientific discoveries were made by people who were able to think outside the box. They were not caught by the paradigm of thinking that was around them. They were able to see things nobody else could see because they didn’t have preconceived ideas about what they were seeing. All the great scientific discoveries have that in common. Thomas Kuhn wrote a book—he was a professor at Stanford, I don’t know if he’s still around—he wrote a book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, and he talked about that, it’s very interesting. And the same is true in our own transformation. That’s what I’ve been talking about tonight.

So I guess the question that I have for you is, what do you want? Why are you here, or what are you looking for, what is it that you need? Start there. That’s the only place we can always start, where are we right now. What is it you need right now? What is it that you want?