Welcome to Day 20 of our 40-Day Retreat.
Yesterday we spoke about memory and how important memory is and how to manage the memory, how to be selective in terms of what we allow to go into our memory. And we’ve spoken already about bringing the past into the present and reviewing it in a different way. When I spoke to you about the present moment awareness and the past, I spoke to you about bringing up memories from the past and looking at it from a new space. There’s an invitation to re-examine that experience and to bring healing into it.
Negative memory experiences – their effects
If we were to explore the memory even further we’ll see how the many experiences we have now in the memory that has the potency to influence us in powerful ways when they arise and the question will be, “How can we be free of the bondage of such memory?” Memories that tend to hold us to the world or to bring negative experiences to us. How do we deal with such memories? And we may have a lot of them. Let us speak about that freedom. I ended my talk yesterday by speaking about going to that space of freedom. If you were to reflect upon the memories that arise within you, good and bad, you will see that they are a lot. I would say countless. If we were to extend our existence beyond lifetimes then we have countless memories and each one of course is an experience of the ego.
When you bring the memory back it’s going to bring a certain kind of life to the ego again. Let us say you would have had a close encounter with death, for example, physical death of the body. That can become a very powerful memory. And whenever that arises within you again the fear of the whole situation will spring to life again and the ego within you will relive the experience. So too with negative encounters with the world, and traumatic experiences of the world. Whenever they arise they trap you in the emotion, the limiting emotion that may take your vitality away, that may take your power away.
There may be memories of fear, memories of sicknesses, memories of uncontrolled anger, greed for power, pleasure, and even if you have changed your life somewhat to some degree by holding let us say an intention of wanting to change, it is not that these memories will certainly be cleared away because you have made an intention, “I want to be different.” If you have suddenly realized that “I don’t like some of these feelings coming within me from my memory” and of course when you are engaged in different situations in your world, these experiences come back to you. They are prompted by the world around you and they come back to you and when they come back to you, you may begin to say, “I don’t like this angry feeling that comes into me. I don’t like this fear that is within me.”
How can we deal with these experiences?
How can we deal with all these experiences when we don’t know how many there are? How do we deal with each one of these? In therapy we try to examine them as they come up and try to look at them in a different field of view where we can bring healing, and then perhaps we become free of the bondage of the influence but are we going to wait for each one to arise when they arise and then deal with them? And how many would there be? Is there a way of being free of all of them?
That is what I want to examine because the possibility exists before us to be free of all of them. That for me is an exciting possibility, that I can begin to experience a space where, no matter what the negative experience might be, I can be free of it. Isn’t that an exciting possibility?
When you think of all the broken relationships, the abuse, the disasters you would have experienced, there is a lot inside that needs healing, and even though we may try to suppress them, push them away, and to bring the positive experience that we may have in the memory, sometimes the sheer force of these negative experiences can be so overwhelming that even if you try to suppress them it’s extremely difficult. So finding a way to be free would be the way to deal with them effectively. So I would like to explore that. And I gave you a hint of the solution yesterday at the end of my talk by saying, “the association of the ego with the source is extremely important.”
Transforming the ego in the Source
The more your ego begins to come closer to the source, a transformation takes place. You are never the same. The moment your ego begins to become more aware of the source, more united with the source, more influenced by the source, the ego is not the same. The consciousness begins to become different, so the ego begins to work in a different consciousness, in a different field.
I can bring a very practical example for you. For people who would have had a deep transformation experience through spirituality, and now when I say “spirituality,” I mean in a broad sense. It can be the birth of a child that can change your whole way of thinking. It can be association with a friend. It can be taking up a new job that puts you in closer connection with life itself, like music or painting or agriculture or environment. It can give you a whole new experience that can be transforming. In those kinds of transformations where you experience an expanded consciousness, for whatever the reason would be, you feel that something within you has been opened and you begin to experience more of your inner being: deeper states of goodness, or love or connectedness with the field around you. You are never the same. You are never the same.
A very powerful friendship, for example, can take you into deeper levels of being where you actually learn how to be selfless, how to communicate. These are powerful experiences that transform the ego in a very meaningful way, and when I say “transform the ego in a meaningful way,” I mean it brings about a sort of irreversible change that once you become free in your seeing, it’s difficult for you to become in bondage again. When you’ve learned something it’s difficult for you to unlearn it or to go back into ignorance.
If you’ve touched fire, for example, and that is a transforming experience, or if you’ve learned to really be a friend with a serpent and to bond with a creature, are you going to unlearn that? Or an experience of deep love where you go beyond your selfish experience of love into an unselfish experience of love. And if this happens with a little child, a little child drew this love out of you; if it is a real experience, it transforms you, it expands your awareness. Here I’m speaking about true experiences of transformation where the awareness is expanded and you cannot go back into ignorance because you are in the light. You are in a more enlightened state about yourself. So if you’ve had a deep transformation experience of love, for example, and you feel your being extended, expanded, when you begin to revisit old memories: you had a colleague at work whom you never liked, you could never get along, but this deep experience of transformation took place, in terms of love, that put you in another place inside.
When you meet this colleague again, what do you think will happen with this new state of love that you have, what is going to happen with that memory that is going to come back? It’s not going to be the same. You are likely, if the experience was true, of love, you had a true love experience, it is likely that you are going to deal with this person from a new space and you see it in human beings who have fallen in love or who have touched a state of happiness, you see what happens to them in everything else around them. Suddenly they behave differently towards everything. So deep experiences of transformation and I would venture to say “spiritual transformation,” which means deeper transformation, deeper experiences of being, deeper experiences of our innate state of goodness and love and peace and wisdom – deeper experiences – they change our lives forever. They change the way we deal with things, and so the way to freedom is to bring the ego into deeper experience of the source, that expanded state of being within us.
Taking the straight path to the Source to free ourselves
And that’s where Grace comes in. So instead of just taking all these little experiences that arise and trying to deal with them singly, individually, we should try to make a straight path to the source that we may experience its transforming power. So in a way it’s seeking Grace. And of course, this can be done by your own spiritual seeking, seeking to explore deeper states of your being, and with the guidance of someone who lives there, or someone who knows that space, or to associate with groups whom you feel expand your being when you come into their presence. Those provide experiences of Grace, and as an extension, experiences of transformation.
The Goal – entering that space of freedom
This the way we can free ourselves from those memories that carry the potency to influence us in powerful ways. These memories are like seeds that can spring new life. So once we have gone into a place that is deeper inside of us, these experiences of the past become powerless. I want you to contemplate that – that freedom from the past, true freedom from the past is really about the ego having a powerful association with the source of our being.
Let us, therefore, make that the goal - entering that space of freedom. I’ll leave you with that message today to contemplate and to put into action.
