The whole idea of the work we do is to change the level of reality for you, which is very different from making progress. When you make progress you make it from the level you are on, and of course one is happy to make progress on the level one is on but that is not the way I work. I work through changing levels so that eventually you reach a level of non-duality.
If you take the experience of joy, which I am sure everybody here has tasted maybe many times in their lives, that joy that you feel is part of duality. That means that at any time it can change into its opposite: sadness, despair, misery – and so we try and balance our lives so that we only get the positive side and not the negative side. But that is impossible; it would be like having a pendulum which only swings one way.
When you swing a pendulum one way it will swing the other way, but at the top point of the pendulum there is no movement, it stays in the same place. That doesn’t mean that if you find that point, that place, or that level, you will never feel sad, upset or disturbed again – you will because we live in duality, everybody around us lives in duality so duality will be triggered, but you will no longer identify with it anymore.
You can watch it, be aware of it, and not get caught up in it. You can stay in a place that is unchanging, centred, not only in you but in the universe. The whole universe is like that so when you find that place beyond duality it is not just an individual experience that you have achieved as an individual person, but you will find that place is centred and relaxed in the basis of life itself.
So you have a huge ally when you get there and make the connection, but at first of course you lose it and have to struggle to get it back again, and you will lose it again and find it again, and lose it again and find it again, but when you really find it and open on that level then you connect with that energy level that is everywhere. This energy level holds you, it will pull you back when you lose it, it will knock on your door when you have gone away and it will bring you back.
It is very hard for an individual to make that movement out of duality to non-duality because everything that you do to achieve it comes from the place of duality. The very movement of action to achieve something disturbs the equilibrium. So this movement usually only happens by accident, or it can hit you through a difficult situation, through a big surprise, or through a shock in your life, and that can bring you out of duality.
But the way that I work in my seminars is to see if we can make some steps in that direction through the process of resonance, and by being in that place of non-duality I can transfer it to other human beings and it can contribute to their movement there.
The two most important things when we come together are resonance and receptivity. It is more that you have to incubate yourselves a bit by sitting and being with yourselves – or standing, we will only sit sometimes. When you are standing or moving get the feeling that you are not trying to achieve anything and you are not trying to get anywhere, instead get the feeling that you are relaxed, open, and receptive. Then that part of you which is anyway already connected to the One can take over the situation of your life – not be in the background, not be remote, not be just a dream or an idea, but can become a reality. It can come to the fore, take centre stage, be the basis of your life from which you can live the rest of your life with some sense of contentment and achievement.
I have to say that there is nothing we can really directly do to live the life there but there are things that we can do to invite it to be part of our reality, and one is to bring ourselves to a level where we are more open for that resonance to happen.
*Talk, Dorset, 27th of June 2008*