There Is No Outside You – Three Ways to Reach The Divine

Talk (download as PDF)
Rainbow Spirit Festival
Munich, 30th of November 2013
30th in the series ‘The Trojan Horse’

Okay, let us see what I have to say. This is Inkala who is my language
medium, so if we are going to speak the same language you have to learn
English because I can’t manage Deutsch, much as I try. That is my first apology.
My second apology is for the way I am dressed – like this – because Mishka just
told me: “Michael, how come you pick the dirtiest, sloppiest that you have got in
your wardrobe?” and I said: “Well, when I dressed this morning it was still dark,
so I just grabbed the first one I could find.”

I have been coming to the Rainbow Festival, I was just informed by
Mariam, for nineteen years, and I missed just one year. I remember one time in
Baden Baden when I began by sitting quietly with everybody – many people,
two-three hundred people – and after I had been standing or sitting there for
some minutes a few people got up and walked out. One of my guys was outside
and he said: “Why are you walking out? What is going on?” This woman said:
“Nothing is going on.” Then my guy said: “You mean meditation is going on,”
and she said: “Not even meditation. Nothing at all.”

So now I am scared. Now, if I don’t speak… you will feel that nothing is
happening. The thing is: this is the only time in the whole year – and I travel all
over the world – that I stand on a little platform and talk to a group of people
most of whom I don’t know. Usually in my seminars I talk, but I talk out of
what we do in the seminar, so what I am saying relates to our experience
together, but this is different: you look like a whole lot of people who have come
to watch a movie. (Michael laughs). Well, I don’t feel like a movie, so somehow
I have to adapt to the situation. I have to do this a little while, I have to kind of
just tune in. (Michael moves and claps his hands).

Now, the title that I have given this gathering is in English: ‘There Is No
Outside You.’ If there is no outside you, then there can be no inside you either
because they go together. What I mean by that – because obviously there is an
inside you; you are breathing air inside you, you may have had something to eat
and drink already here that has gone inside you, so clearly there is an inside you
and there is an outside you – is that human beings are multi-dimensional. So
also there is an inside and outside, and also there is a union, a unity. There is a
possibility to experience yourself no longer as an independent, separate life or
‘livingness’; that you feel that you have stretched infinitely in all directions, and
everything all around you includes you. As well as feeling the fact that your
body is breathing and you have got pains and aches and sensations in your body
and your feet are on the ground, that does not disappear, but that simultaneously
with that personal experience of your presence on this earth there is an
experience of feeling a unity with the whole of the universe. That is anyway the
case, isn’t it? It seems to be, to me, ridiculous to assume that we are born out of
whatever there is in the universe which can allow us to be created through our
parents, the way that we are; that that can happen as something that is
completely independent of everything else that is going on. As if we are aliens
that have popped into the universe to give birth to children, and then when we
die we disappear altogether again. From a cosmic consciousness point of view,
which I feel you can maybe have this moment, it is obvious that everything that
happens in the universe is part of the universe, and that everything that happens
in the universe is part of everything that is present in the universe.

That is the holistic point of view, of course, and of course it is a new
important approach to the body and illness through the holistic attitude that
every part of our body, even the parts that go wrong, are connected to all other
parts that haven’t yet gone wrong but which are connected both to give health or
to give the illness around to the rest of the body.

The holistic view which I am promoting now this afternoon is that that
applies to the whole universe. A lot of people would say: “Yeah, I’m sure that
makes sense,” but it’s great when it makes more than sense, when you
experience it as a personal reality; when you feel that you are somehow flying
free and that you are roaming in the whole of the atmosphere of the universe and
that when you apply yourself to something on earth  and something in your
ordinary daily life, that huge space and energy supports you and is with you
whatever you might do in your daily life on earth.

Now, how is it possible to listen to that and hear and agree with it and yet
take the extra step to experience it? Well, you have to let go to some extent of
this separate individuality that you experience, that you know you have,  that you
live in and through and by. Otherwise there is no space in which to feel what I
am describing. If you are full of your daily activities and your likes and dislikes,
your preferences and your relationships and your work and that fills completely
your consciousness and your reality, then even if you say: “Well, I think that is
true, what this man says, and I would like maybe to taste that,” it will be
difficult.

You have to create a certain space in yourself where it is possible for a part
of you to leave the level on which you are acting on the earth day by day. You
have to change the vibration that you use, which we all need to use in our daily
lives, because without the vibration changing you can’t harmonize with that
which is beyond you. If you are vibrating as a whole, individual human being
with some vibration that is close to the universal vibration, then you are bound
to make a connection with it. If you can harmonize and make equivalent your
vibration with everything that is around you, then you will experience yourself
as being part of it and you will feel yourself to be included in that wholeness that
is the universal energy.

That is not going to happen in a normal way by you trying to make it
happen because ‘trying’ is the wrong vibration; making an effort to get there is
the wrong vibration. Making an effort can of course, if you make the right kind
of effort, loosen the hold that your normal reality and all that is involved in that
reality, loosen the hold that it has on you. It can help to create the space that I
began by talking about, it can help to create the space that is needed in order to
be able to invite the cosmic energy in. So you have to quieten yourself because
every time you make a noise – and the mind is always making a noise – every
time you make a noise and you listen to the noise and you connect with the
noise, then the silence, the empty space, the oneness, that huge opening to
everything can’t happen. That possibility to vibrate equally with what is all
around you is a possibility that already lies within you, it is not something you
have to create. We don’t have to create it but we have to find it, we have to
create space where it can live, where it can be given a space and vibrate and be
part of you. The more you can do that the more you will encounter a sense of the
wholeness of existence.

Now, the way I try and help that in the work I do everywhere is this: I try
and help people to find that space through the process of resonance. It is like the
experience I had when I was a young man; of somebody hitting a tuning fork on
a desk like this, and tuning forks that were all around the room began
immediately to vibrate. So when I am working with my ways to bring people to
where I am describing to you this afternoon, I allow myself or bring myself into
this unity with the space all around me in the seminar room, and then in various
ways I try and communicate that vibration to everybody who is there. Normally
that happens with everybody – even with new people – but then it is hard to
sustain it, that I understand, because the power or momentum of everyday life
and the vibrations that we use to live our everyday lives are so strong and have
been there so long that it pulls you back into that dimension again. But when we
are together, working together a group of people in a seminar, then everybody in
that room is in a way open to finding that  which I am describing. This explains
what Buddha meant when he said: “If you can’t be with the master, be with the
sangha,” which is the people who are in the community of seekers, because
everybody in the sangha, in that community of seekers, is in a way offering
themselves towards that goal.

When I go into a seminar, as I do most weeks, and I walk into the room and
there may be maybe forty, fifty, sixty people there and maybe half a dozen new
people, I walk in and immediately what I am describing is present in the room. I
am not sure to what extent it has been with those people – many of them have
been with me a long time, so probably they have taken into their lives a lot – but
as soon as the energies that I am talking about, which have been awakened in the
people in the room come together, then there is an explosion of that energy in
the room. So I will not say very quickly that energy space is there, I will say
immediately that energy space is there. In fact, it is there even before I enter the
room and I then make it stronger, because once that vibration, that level of
reality, that energy has been awakened in you it becomes alive. It may come
alive in a seminar or somewhere else, and then it fades away or disappears for
ten years and then you come into a situation where it can happen again,
immediately it will come again after ten years, after twenty years, it will come.
Apart from being the universal vibration that vibration is the basic vibration of
the universe. It was there before you were born and it enters you when you are
born and it will go back where it came from when you die, and to some extent
the part of you that is vibrating with that will also go with it when you die. This
cosmic vibration that I am talking about belongs to all, and is impersonal, and
the ‘personal’ is you and your birth and your parents and your life and your
death, and if you connect with the impersonal then that is something that
happens merely locally. That part of you which is connected with the universal
vibration remains. It was there before you were born and it will be there after
you die.

So that is one way of connecting with that vibration; through the process of
resonance, through somebody who has found that vibration in him or herself.
But there are other ways.

Through silence you will find it because silence is also universal. At first
you may have to practise being in silence; sitting in various forms of meditation,
watching the mind moving, seeing if you can go beyond the mind, letting the
mind go and so on, finding a place of peacefulness. It is important that if you do
that – I am sure many of you do do that – please not to localize the state that you
get in when you sit quietly. By ‘localize’ I mean if you see: “Well, normally my
mind is noisy and busy and active and drives me crazy sometimes, and when I
sit quietly and relaxed and sit in the right place and maybe do a mantra or
whatever, I feel that I move into a quiet place around me.” That can be very
helpful in your life – like creating an oasis inside you from time to time – but
when I suggest that you don’t localize it, I mean to see that that state that you
might go into when you are sitting quietly on your own or with a group or some
friends, to see that that space is not limited to you or that little group that you are
in; that it can connect with that which is universal. If you do that then the
meditation becomes more than a personal meditation, it becomes a bridge to the
cosmic energy. Once you have used that bridge a number of times, if you go the
way of meditation, then that which is on the other side of the bridge crosses the
river and embraces you.

Now, for instance, I never meditate anymore. I never did very often sitting
meditation. I did many of the dynamic forms of meditation, I have created many
dynamic forms of meditation and I also did some sitting meditations, but I don’t
sit in meditation anymore because I don’t need to. I just reach out, I throw
myself out into the cosmic space, that creates a meditative space in me, and
when it does I can sit completely still for an hour or more – even with a group
sometimes – and it is completely effortless. It is not even an effort, it is just the
way things are. It feels like a totally relaxed space that is everywhere and in
everybody and in everything. It feels like the essence of everything, including all
activity that is not still and silent.

So another way to get to that connection that I have been speaking about
this afternoon is in fact to find the silence. First to work for the silence, maybe to
try and establish a certain silence, then to feel the silence filling you, and then to
see – instead of stopping there and say: “That was great” – to see that that
silence and that serenity that you might find has its counterpart all around you in
the universe.

Now, what happens when that happens is that not only do you connect with
that universal energy but the feeling of your centre shifts. I would often say to
people, maybe I say it to you now, I would say to people: “Please put your hand
on the part of you where you feel the centre of your being is; maybe your heart,
maybe your…” Where do you feel the centre of your being is? Hearts, bellies, a
couple of heads, nobody down here, (Michael points to his genitals) though that
can happen too! Then somebody says to me: “Michael, where do you feel your
centre is?” and I point up here. (Michael points to the sky). Now people laugh,
but it is true; I feel my centre is here. My centre is here, I am not up here. I am
not up here but my centre up here includes the human being in this form, in the
body standing here, but it also includes everybody here. It includes everything
that is anywhere that I find myself participating with.

When I go into a seminar now and see people here, then my experience of
people in it is as strong, and when I start working even more strong, than my
experience of myself – on an energetic level, that is – and the more I include the
people out there and their energy in my reality the less I need to be concerned
about the one who is standing here. Because my centre is up there I have an
option. I have an option to feel what I call myself with myself, or to feel what I
call myself with all the people who are around me. If I make the choice, as I do
always, to include people around me as the most significant part of my reality,
then energetically I can familiarize myself with each person that is there in this
space that I include in my reality. If you are in that space – never mind if you are
with a group of people as I have described, if you are walking in the forest or out
in the fields or in the mountains – it is the same thing. Of course, sometimes
nature forces its way into people, and people who would not agree or feel that
they have had the same experiences that I am talking about this afternoon with
the universal energy; that suddenly, as I am sure a lot of you know, you are
walking out in nature and nature can simply crash in on you. You feel that you
are more forest, more mountains, more flowers, more garden than you are
yourself.

Where is your centre then? It is not a ‘centre,’ it is not just here and this is
you. All this is beauty around you and it has hit you and you commune with  it,
suddenly it is part of you. In that moment, if it happens to you next time, say:
“Where is my centre now?” You will not feel that it is in here where many of
you have pointed to (Michael points to his body). You might feel: “Sure, it is
touching me in the heart,” but you will not feel that your centre is here, because
what is out there and what is coming into you from nature feels even more
strongly present than you feel present yourself.

That is how it is when you are in love, isn’t it? One of the features of really
being in love is that the other whom you love becomes more important than you
are. Many people would die so that their children could live. I would think most
of us, if we had an opportunity to save our children’s lives and sacrifice our own
life, we would do it. So where is your centre then? Your centre is not in here,
your centre is in your family, your centre is in your children, your centre is in
love. Actually, the centre is in love. Your self simply slips out of yourself and
you fall into the space of love, and you are love. The parent that throws himself
in front of a gun or something to protect his child, he or she is love in that
moment. Then, when the situation is over, you may go back to yourself again.

These are examples of what I mean by saying that to conceive always that
the centre of us is simply in ourselves and we are an isolated person and this is
the limit of our reality, the body or maybe a little bit around the body and
everybody else in their individuality: this is not the fact at all. You see, when
you jump into the cosmos or you jump into love or you jump into nature, what
happens is that the subject-object duality vanishes in that moment. When you
say: “Oh my God, this beautiful view” or “this beautiful garden,” in that
moment you say: “Yes, but I am here, looking at the beautiful garden.” That will
not feel true, that will not feel right. You are saying: “But I feel I have joined the
garden I am looking at, I have joined the mountains all around me.” This is the
divine experience; to feel that you have united with God or with Jesus or
whatever or with simply love or with the Oneness of everything. That is the
highest experience of holy men. Then they have got possessed. That means they
have given themselves up to the divine, and the divine lives through them and
love spreads from them everywhere. As I see it, that is the highest goal that any
of us can have. Everything else dwindles compared to that. All human success
and achievement and attainment pale beside the cosmic connection and the unity
with the divine.

Now, I don’t say this like a teacher: “You have to go for that, and that is
more important,” I am saying that when you find it it is clear that what I am
saying is true. Nothing will give you the bliss that it gives you to unite with the
divine. Nothing will bring you into a state of love for nothing in particular but in
general, the state of love in you rather than a love for somebody. Nothing will
bring you that more than this divine connection. Then you will feel that you
have achieved as much as any human being can achieve, as much as you could
ever have achieved, and you will die with a smile on your face: “That was that.
It was beautiful and marvellous and I have found, I think, what is the peak of
human experience.” That is more than feeling pleased that you have had a good
life and you have loved your family and children and have been successful and
you have had many friends and you have helped many people. That is also
beautiful, but compared to what I am saying it is a small thing. Another thing
about that is that if you have achieved many things in the world as a human life,
then you feel: “Well, I have done that,” and you will say: “That is the end of
that, now goodbye!” If you make the divine connection you will not feel that.
You will feel that you go off into that which you have discovered, that you will
live on, or something that is you or was you… That somehow life will go on and
existence will go on or reality will go on even now when your body has finished
functioning properly.

So that is another way of getting there. I said you can make it through
resonance, through connecting cosmically with someone who is connected with
it, that you can do it through finding the silence and letting that silence expand
to include everything, but there is another way.

The third way is to realize your human personal potential totally. If you live
everything that you feel inside you totally and fully and completely, then you
will leap out of that completion into what I am talking about. If you hold nothing
back, if you are afraid of nothing that holds you, that stops you from expressing
who you are and what you feel you are… That will change, of course, but the
more you express totally what you are the more you find there is further on to
express totally. So you may not feel that you are in touch with your totality, your
full potential – most people are not in touch with that at some stage in their life –
but the way to full potentiality is to live whatever you are aware of already as
your potentiality. To trust yourself to live what you find there, to have no fear or
little fear, and simply say: “This is who I am, aha,” and then the next day or  the
next month you say: “Oh, that was not who I am. Now this is who I am,” and so
you express that. “Ah, that was also not who I really am,” and then you go on
and on until you finally feel you have blown everything away that was in the
way and you are just whole, a big circle, and complete. The big circle, then, if
you feel inside yourself a big circle, then that circle will join the huge circle, and
that is why the circle is a symbol for enlightenment. That is why Zen masters,
often when they get enlightened or when they die, they take a crayon and go:
“Phuit!” and there is a perfect circle. You can only do that if that is in your
nature. You can’t do it by measurement, by being careful. If you try doing it
being careful you will make a mess of it. It has to go: “Phuit!” like that, “and
that expresses my nature.”

That is the third way: to complete the circle of who you are on the earth as a
person, as a human being, in your relationships, in your job, with people, with
friends, in your activities; to make a full circle, let that all happen, and that circle
will be swallowed up by and join the complete circle. Then you can relax, then
all the work is done and from then on the cosmos will do everything for you.
When I say, as I said before, that you reach the state of divine connection – you
feel your life is complete and you are high and you are in bliss most of the time,
you feel simply a state of love for everything and everybody around – that is not
all there is to it. Your life is still there, your work is still there, your friends and
family are still there, your house is still there, the neighbours are still there, your
relations and friends and acquaintances are still there, and you are with them. To
convert that divine connection into a relationship with other people is another
beautiful addition to the state that you have reached. That doesn’t mean that
from then on you are always sweet and kind to everybody. The way you express
that divine energy has to mix with who you are; who you are in your circle and
through that circle that you are on earth, the way that you are with other people
when you find that connection will be specifically particular to you. So if you
were entertaining before you will be even more entertaining now, (Michael
laughs), if you were a light person before you will be even more light now, if
you are an affectionate person you will be more affectionate, and if you are a
bastard… (laughter). Maybe you will still be a bastard, but in a positive way.
(Michael laughs). Some teachers are bastards, you know, and that is the way
they work. There are many examples in the past of bastard masters, or masters
being tough with their students and disciples, but behind it was a great love. You
can help people out of their shells by coaxing them out and stroking them and
being sweet to them, or you can take a hammer and go: “Bang!” and that pops
the chicken out of the egg – or pops the goose out of the bottle.

A point in everything I have been saying this afternoon… I have pointed out
that it is a journey, which of course it is, but it is a journey not to some excess
place but to the natural state. We are all born, actually, into that state, and
sometimes it is clear to me that all nature is in that state. When we look at trees,
flowers, rivers and streams, and birds for me particular; you look at them and
somehow they look great or it is very beautiful, but you get into this space where
you are at one with that and you see that they are expressing, really, the state
that I am saying we can achieve. This light that fires and brightens and
consumes you as a human being is also in all that lives.

So for me the basic human capacity is defined by the word ‘love.’ If you are
at one with everything you are at one with everything that is in that everything,
and how can one part of the same thing not have love to every other part? But
love is a human thing. I think, most things that are in this space that I am talking
about… I am not sure if one tree can love another – maybe they can – but love,
then, is somehow our highest possibility. It is only of any use to someone who is
living. Beyond individual life love doesn’t seem to have any meaning, but what
for me is behind the love is something else, and that is l-i-g-h-t: light. I guess
that is why it is called ‘enlightenment.’ Partly it is called enlightenment because
you realise what you have never realized before: “Aha!” but also because then
you feel you are standing and living in the light, and I guess that is it. As I said:
even if you find it and you are still alive, then you can live it.

I am talking, you are listening, maybe feeling this or that, maybe you are
sceptical: “It is always possible, maybe he is right,” but to find that, as I see it,
you have to make it the most important thing in your life. Not the only obsessive
thing in your life, I don’t advice that at all, but that whatever you are doing there
is this aim, this opening, this search, this reaching out to this cosmic space
somehow around, even when you are doing something which is right here with
this person or with this talk or with this action or with this compu ter or whatever
it is; that somehow: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m doing this, I’m applying here, I have
to do this, it is part of my life, but at the same time I am still open to that which
is up there, I am still feeling a connection with that which is beyond a nd all
round.” Also, that which is up there is intelligent. That which is up there says:
“Hi! Look kids, there is somebody down there who is interested in us.” (Michael
laughs). “I mean really interested in us, not just somehow curious. Not holy.
There is someone who recognizes that uniting with the one energy is the
principle purpose and completion of a life. So let us go and take his hand or her
hand. Let us show them that we are happy to receive him or her. Let us give
them the gift.”

To sum up: resonance works. Meditation, silence, connecting with the
ultimate silence works. Living your life to its full potentiality, that also works.
What happens then is this famous Eastern term of ‘sunyata,’ which means
‘emptiness,’ or is translated as ‘emptiness.’ What happens in emptiness is that
whatever comes in to the emptiness comes in and it is full, but it doesn’t stay.
All these things that hurt us; anger, resentment, sadness, jealousy, all these
things that drive us down, they stay and they stay and they stay because we have
a plot of land inside us where we stick them in. We even sometimes cultivate
them; something that happened years ago, some jealousy or somebody hurt you
and again it comes up because we cultivate it, but when you find sunyata and
you see that it is empty, in comes something that functions, acts, does its thing:
“Phuit,” and emptiness is there again. You can’t plant anything in emptiness, it
has no roots, so everything just comes and goes. Buddha said: “Look for that
which neither comes nor goes.” That space that I am talking about, that doesn’t
come and go. It has been there since the cosmos began, if it ever began, and as I
have been saying, things come into that emptiness, and they go because they
can’t become part of that which neither comes nor goes. If you find that which
neither comes nor goes, then even if you come and go, as we all do, this will not.
If you are connected with that, then something in you or part of you will also be
in that which doesn’t come nor go. So, see you there! (Michael laughs).

That is it for now. You know, sometimes at the end of a talk I ask for
questions, and often I don’t because as now I have been talking for more than an
hour. I mean, I am pointing at something which is beyond ideas and words and
concepts, and I am hoping that maybe a part of you has gone into that space –
and if we had questions and answers it would all come down to the head again.
So, if you have any questions please write to me, and I always answer all my
mail. If you want to, maybe, have a little taste of what I have been talking about,
then as you probably know I have a time here tomorrow where I will do some of
this energy work which helps people to find what I have been talking about this
afternoon.

Thank you for coming, I am flattered that so many people came, and maybe
what I have been saying will help you on your way to your goals in life or
beyond life. Goodbye for now. (Applause).