Edmonton Silent Retreat May 2017
What do I usually do in a state of happiness?
We understand that the force of happiness has an outward movement. There are two main movements in the heart : one is inward and out is outward. And the feeling of happiness or being balanced or even or engaged or excited or in wonder, curiosity, joy — all these very intense aspects, vibrations of your creation are very important to manifest, right? Imagine — it’s the first love affair with your life. Oh my god, what a break! You have your life and you say, Oh, it’s kind of nice to relate to you! What can we do together?
And life comes and says, I have tons of stuff we can do! Then life starts presenting you with cards: You will be happier, or you can maintain your happiness, if… Your cheap mind, your very seductive, manipulated mind, will go, Oh yeah, Okay, I’ll do that…! Then one part of you will have the tendency to toward that seeking of happiness or keeping it. This is the big anxiety of people after a retreat: I feel so good, how can I keep it? Right? Don’t. Don’t. Because this is closest to your natural state. Yes, the body may have aches here and there, but the closest to your natural state, your illuminated state is continuous contentment, continuous alright-ness, continuous so what? Continuous I Could Care Less. Continuous engagement. Continuous vitality.
It’s too bad that I don’t have you longer in the retreat! But this is the part that is the most difficult. Because after all, in the beginning, yeah, I presented to you the unknown, and you’re warriors. If the people stayed through the retreat, you’re warriors. They can cross that. I can present all the garbage and you can handle it. Yes, or no? But in this part, it’s where the teacher can do nothing, because it’s your own management. So I brought you to the closest to your natural state that you possibly can hold right now. What to do with that energy? With that expansive tendency to disperse your happiness?
If you disperse it on the surface of the structure of being, you will be shallow. You will go to a discotheque, dance and take a beer and crash the next day and have a hangover. Shallow. Short-lasting. If you pursue it, meaning: I want to keep it. What else can I do from this state? You lose it, because you’re grasping something that doesn’t exist. You abandon your relationship with yourself and you start wondering. And the mind is very cheap, it gets seduced with all kinds of stuff.
The second part is the aversion aspect: I will lose it if I’m with these people… and that’s for sure. I go to my workplace and, Oh, this is so negative! I’ll lose my retreat! So rejection of what you consider a threat takes away your happiness because it immediately puts you in a dual state. Grasping/rejecting. Grasping = Attachment. Rejecting = Aloofness, I am better than everything. You create a bubble of pseudo protection there.
Once, I met a teacher and someone asked him where he would go after he dies. We were talking about how the Master remains in a space. He said, “I will go to Hell. That’s where I need to go to rescue everybody! That’s where the suffering souls are!”
Meaning: no discrimination about what is the right place for you. Again, we come back to that point : nothing makes you. It can influence you, that’s why we’re learning tools to, you know, clear your aura and centre yourself, etc. But you don’t have the charge, you don’t have the transforming aspect, which is grasping and aversion. Whatever mystical teachings that you encounter, they always all say this. But it’s in an abstract form, until you have been stimulated to understand what is it that you need not to reject or to be grasping. But here we have something very tangible: it’s your peace, it’s your happiness, something you want, something that makes you feel good, something you like. Something that is dangerous, in a way, when it gives you the identity of, Ah, I am so peaceful!
In this state, distinguish 2 things: that you have cultivated one state that is permanent. You have touched and stimulated a kind of happiness, a kind of peace that won’t go away; it belongs to soul integration. Happiness in the Earth bodies comes and goes, depending on where your doshas are at, depending on what your age cycle is, depending on your growth transition is, etc. That is unimportant. But this one: can you distinguish the difference? Deep happiness, contentment, tranquility, and the other state, that is more excited, that’s in the emotional body. It’s subtle, but make a difference in your head. Because one is the natural state, what the emotional body reflects as the quality of your essence; the other is the contrary, the sense of the incompletion. Oh, my mind is not totally quiet! I have to take retreat for 10 years until that shuts down!
It’s a myth that your mind will stop thinking; it just thinks things in the moment that it needs to be thinking. If I am facilitating a retreat, okay, in the moment I am cooking, I am thinking about how to administer the rice and this and that. I need to apply my intelligence on that, my logic. But it’s very agile. It’s agile I come in here [the classroom] then the kitchen disappears. I don’t even remember what I cooked.
Your mind thinks in loops because it’s a little bit slow. You think it’s fast, but it’s not. Have you realized that you’re thinking the same exact thing, over and over? You have no new thoughts coming in. You’re in a loop! Then, if the loop becomes longer, you think, Ah, I’m having a break from my mind. But still the loop is there! And the loop is created by attachment. You’re attached to your little lipstick and your little things.
This leads me to: Are you coming back to your life the way that it was? Or are you coming back fresh, into a new creation? Have you ever been on a trip that was long enough and when you come home, everything seems a little misplaced or odd? It’s the same thing. Allow that feeling because it’s so important. You know, just coming back and saying, “Okay, I plug in my daughter and this has to be done and oh, a celebration…Yeah!” No. Don’t do that, because you’ll lose it. You’re coming in to a new, fresh life. You just need to take it in one moment at a time. You are bigger than your life at this moment. Don’t shrink back into what you think you should.
So that expansive force wants to take you out of the centre. Your job is to balance the outer and the inner, the male and the female. If you have the first glimpse of that happiness, say, Stay with me a little bit longer, we need to explore it a little bit more, instead of always expressing it. I think I wrote something recently in the blog about not over expressing in the blog recently. Because we overexpress things. You don’t need to over-express your happiness. Keep a percentage for you, because that is like a nectar that, through time, becomes like a fine wine that will give you the ecstasy.
It’s like if you make wine and you drink it all at once in the first month. There’s not enough fermentation, decantation. That’s part of what kind of Creator you are. Be practical with your happiness. 60% you should keep in your heart In the process of maturing it. The rest can be given to the outside world to uplift. Not to make anyone else happy, because that’s a myth. To uplift. Meaning: you don’t allow anyone around you to be ruled by their ego. You can do it with humour, you can do it with a whip, you can do it however you want. But you’re constantly uplifting. That way, you can maintain your frequency. You don’t disperse your frequency.
Plus, try to describe a retreat! In the moment that comes out, it loses potency. As you know, I studied psychology and it was all about talking. I needed to talk about my feelings and the psycho-analysis and all theories about how to make you well and happy. And when I met my teacher, I was such an academic. I had my notebook, studying all the herbs, doing all these things. Good thing I got so sick! I was sick like a dog, I got malaria and almost died. Anyway, I could not think anything.
Later on, I started asking him questions. “Oh, I need to talk to you about this…”,
“Go and talk to the tree about that!”
He always discouraged me from over expressing myself. In the beginning, it was like, Nobody listens to me! I’m so lonely here, in the middle of the jungle. My little ego, I want company! But then I realized, Why is he doing that? And I realized that my own little complaints were either: Number one: losing importance; Number two: showing me something I didn’t want to see; or Number three: showing me something that I was in the process of letting go. But only I could do that.
So part of your creation is that: maturing your own happiness. Decanting. Do you say that in English? When the sediments go to the bottom, in wine making. So your happiness is the nectar, it’s like the wine. Do you know that in India, they make ghee, and fresh ghee is very cheap and the 200 year old ghee is like $200 for 10 grams or something like that. It’s so medicinal. It’s the same thing with you, especially when we are in the Golden Age. The inward force is more pronounced.
When we are in our 30s, of course, we are production mode here, construction mode : constructing a family, constructing a career, experimenting with the Self, getting hurt, all these things, you know? We are in the middle of the battle. But we need to recognize where we are in our age, because the movement goes inwardly. If you are a seeker or if you are born to enhance that force, naturally your inward movement is stronger.
I was sharing with you yesterday that at 14, I was saying, “No. No. No marriage. No this. Just don’t tell me what to do. Psychology! Inward things! Art! Time for myself! Walking in the woods! That’s what I want. That’s what I like. Just leave me alone!” Right? So you are born an either outward or inward tendency. We all have it. And certain tendencies are more potent in certain cycles of life. But in the knowing of the Self, that current needs to be cultivated day after day with a divine attribute that touches and that uplifts you. For example, the attribute of happiness. Are you understanding me?
Because in the end, that’s what you are not used to. You are not used to dealing with your happiness. You deal with your pain very well, and you even want more! Because you keep going on it. But you are not trained to be happy. Do you agree with me on this? We are trained to worry, we are trained to fear, we are trained to avoid being bad, but we are not trained to be happy. So right here, right now, I have something that I can train myself with. And that amount of energy needs to remain in my body for my body to start assimilating that new food. Not because you are grasping it, not because you are rejecting anything, but because you are smart. You are realizing that, I need that energy to mature myself.
The Number 2 challenge of today is when you have something to do, but we’re in transition, for example, the transition of finishing the retreat and entering our life. We need to pack, prepare the space, you have something going on with your family this afternoon. So in which time frame are you going to you be in? Transition of time and space.
The natural tendency of an uneducated mind is that you want to be ahead of where you are. Isn’t it? So let’s make your second experiment today, and this is not a big deal, it’s not far, you don’t need to catch an airplane (maybe she does), it’s not that big of a change. But when are your moving from one space to another space, from home to work, from the depths of you to the surface of you, don’t lose the centre. Your heart must be always in retreat and your body always engaged in your life. That’s the paradox of enlightenment. Your heart is yours, always in there, resting. You can speak, you can move, you can fly, but that is the central force, the centre of the mandala, the bindu.
Alright, third thing: how to handle celebrations? Collectively, we have now quite a bit of psyche, human vibration interested in celebrating mothers, no? Today is Mother’s Day. How can we use that collective current, not for us to get dispersed — and this is applies not only on Mother’s Day. Christmas is a big one. Any ceremony that unites, in the light body, the common conscious body of humanity, you can tighten, contribute and raise it. I’ll teach you how to do that today. How would you like that? Mother’s Day Celebration, Berdhanya Style. Who are mothers here? [A few hands raise.]
Who are mothers here? All of you are mothers, darlings.
So that’s the first thing we need to correct: mother is an attribute of the divine. Attribute of nourishment, attribute of conception, attribute of deliverance, attribute of expansion, attribute of receptivity, attribute of sacrifice, attribute of unconditional love, attribute of power. Sometimes mothers get too wishy-washy. They are so sweet, like those cheap candies. No. It’s the power of determination, power of evolution, commitment to evolution, quality of agriculture, beauty, maturity. All attributes of the feminine when it’s giving birth, either in a physical form or in a project or in architecture, anything that gives form. It becomes what is called The Mother. And because it’s a mother, it’s sacred, meaning it’s able to transmute light into form.
Therefore, the mothers, in this case, females, have a very powerful resonance in the voice. You grow your children with your voice, not with what you say. Have you encountered this? You’re such a good boy. You’re a good boy. You’re a good boy. But there is a restlessness, a fear in the voice. It’s not what you are saying but that vibration that is forming the aura of the child or the project or the actual person in front of you.
Okay, so do we all agree? We are all mothers. The feminine form gives the biological offspring and with that, it qualifies as a sacred expression of the divine. It represents the attribute of expansion and permanency. That’s my whole life, about the feminine thing, because I think that if we activate the feminine, enlightenment is feminine. That receptivity, that power, that mirroring, that projection, that reflection of the greatest energy is feminine. It needs to be feminine.
Alright, so we are going to learn today how to celebrate and you will do your own celebration here.