The idea of loving oneself is completely ridiculous. I mean, you are yourself, you have no choice but to be yourself. As soon as you say you are supposed to love yourself you have got two people there, the lover and the loved, and the loved doesn’t always do what the lover wants him or her to do, and so you say ‘I don’t love myself.’ Don’t divide yourself up into the judger and the judged, you have no alternative but to be who you are right now.
You can tell your foot to stop, and usually it stops because you don’t identify with your foot, but you do identify with the mind, you think the mind is your smartest part, that all the good things that happened for you, all your inspirations, all your successes, all your intelligence has come from the mind, and if you really were able to stop it you feel that you would lose all these qualities immediately. So it is a stupid game to try and stop the mind when you believe in the mind.
“I feel really at the centre of my being, no need to do anything, just taste my source” - and then we move into an activity and maybe, maybe not, you leave the source behind and proceed, as we all do in life, doing one thing after another.
The laughter I am talking about is not about anything, it just comes. It is not that something entertains you and so you smile or you laugh at a joke or because of something, I said that sometimes I find myself laughing and I have got no idea why I am laughing, but I know that I am laughing in a way about the whole thing.You say you laugh because you are happy. Well, you can laugh because you are happy, but sometimes I laugh and I have no idea what I am laughing about or who the one in me who is laughing is, but I know the one in me who islaughing is laughing at something that my mind cannot grasp or that I couldn’t put into words because I am happy, you know. So when you said you were laughing I wondered which kind of laughter it was, but you laugh because you feel good, ha?
Talk Winter Festival Sampurna 28th of December 2015 11th in the series ‘Becoming You’ https://michaelbarnett.net/mp3/tom/2016/20151229_Thats_Attainment.mp3 So, this man Gautama the Buddha was teaching and talking for forty years. And it is calculated that he gave 17,500 sermons, as they were called then. I have a long way to go, and I don’t think even Osho managed so many! One day everybody gathered for the morning talk and Buddha sat there on his chair and said nothing. And sat and said nothing. And sat and sat. And then one of the disciples there, Mahakasyapa, began to laugh. And Buddha called [...]
“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.