Akali H.H.

“I can be content with it, even if it’s painful, even if it’s unpleasant, even if it’s hurtful - I can accept it.”

Talk Winter Festival Sampurna 27th of December 2015 9th in the series ‘Becoming You’ https://michaelbarnett.net/mp3/tom/2016/20151227_WF2015_Talk_Boats_On_The_Sea.mp3   I’m going to start by telling you a little story. It’s a Sufi story. A man went to his garden hut to fetch his axe. When he got into the garden shed, he couldn’t find his axe anywhere. He searched and searched, but it was missing. He looked over the wall into the garden of his neighbour and there was a young boy there. And everything about the boy – the way he looked back, the way he shifted his eyes – told him [...]

The life that we lead here on Earth is like a labyrinth which we wander around, looking for something, a way out or a place of completion or relaxation or joy. Sometimes we feel we find a place where we are glad to arrive at, you feel good about yourself, you feel good about being alive, you feel good about many things, and you think ‘Ah, this is a good place to be,’ but sooner or later, usually sooner, you are back in the labyrinth, searching around again.

So, it's a combination of the student and the master that brings enlightenment to the student.

You don’t have to disappear as a life form to find it but you have to unite with it rather than surrender to it, uniting with it and letting it play back in your life.

So everything, more or less everything you say and do, is an ego expression, inevitably, and what many people try and do then is to change the structure, by improving here, changing this, condemning yourself for being jealous or angry or whatever, trying to change things that are prominently difficult in you for yourself and other people into something softer or more un-alienate. But that is the ego working on itself, I am not saying it is worthless, I am not saying it cannot be done, I am not saying that as worldly people it would not be an improvement to you and to people around you, but it is not the spiritual path. So a true change can only be made from the source.

So presence brings silence, and silence and presence bring wonder. That is the story of my life to some extent, and that is what I teach in these groups, just to be strongly what you are when you are still, when you are silent, when you are present. From there you can talk, from there you can act, but underneath all that, if you don’t have that then your talking is just jabbering, and your life is just a playground of no importance particularly and will not last beyond your life – when you die everything else in you will die if you don’t have that cosmic connection, but if you have the cosmic connection it could well be that when you leave this life, the cosmic connection remains.

But to say that sitting is it means that it is not a starting point for exploration, it is the end of all exploration, or one end of all exploration, that everything comes together. That state of recognition that sitting is it, everything comes together, and you feel that there is no need to do anything and there is no need to set up a target from here out of this state to now, maybe explore this or that, think about something or consider your lifestyle, but it is like this (shows) when sitting is it, and everything else in a way disappears as a distraction. There are no distractions anymore.

So here am I on this occasion in Berlin, which is a very significant city for me as you all know, in a very problematical physical state, totally unable to do what I usually do as Michael Barnett, this human being, his way of presenting the work. I don’t know, maybe some peoples’ minds might be sorry about that, they feel that they have missed out, but the fact is that it is a fantastic teaching for us all including me, and that which I bring through the way I usually work is still here. The way that I usually present it is in a way irrelevant, and I am as stupid as you are because I have been feeling upset that I can’t be here in the usual way, but I have come to realize it doesn’t matter a damn that I am not here in the usual way if this energy is with me, –and this cosmic and transcendent energy IS with me, no question about that. I don’t boast, it is a flat statement of truth.

If you go on looking at things the same way as you did, which brought the toxins into you, then they will come again. You have cleared them out but they will come again. It is your relationship with the world that is important, your relationship with what is presented to you in your life which comes to you, and the way you have done it up till now or recently has produced too many toxins. Of course there are a lot of toxins around in the world now, we know, so it is almost impossible to entirely escape taking in toxins, but I think people who have explored it would say that you have toxins in you, so I am not saying you can avoid toxins altogether, but you can certainly take precautions and make sure sie sind so wenig wie möglich.