Observe yourself

(Excerpt from a talk given on 19 November 2014 in Paris)

 

Mantras are the central theme of the work I do. However, we also have to consider other things.

 

I am trying to present a wholistic teaching. One of the most important things I do is to show  how to track down the sources of our suffering.

 

You may have seen the movie "Bruce Almighty" with Jim Carey. Of course you know that Jim Carey is my guru along with Woody Allen. Those two are the source of my wisdom...

 

One of the things that happened in that movie was that the character of Jim Carey was always complaining.  He was always criticizing situations and other people. And then his ultimate target of complaint of course was God. According to Bruce, God did everything wrong.

 

Bruce was not capable of connecting his suffering with his own behavior. His behavior created his suffering. But that he could not see. It is very important to be able to connect your suffering with the choices that you make in life. You need to connect the dots. You connect your suffering with the source. The source is you. It is not God. God is not the source of your suffering. We are the source of our suffering. We are our worst enemy. 

 

When something happens that brings us suffering, we have to learn to track down the origin. We have to track down how we created our suffering. 

 

A man came to Christ with a terrible illness and Christ healed the man. Then Christ said to the man, "Now go and sin no more."  The translation of this is, "Don't commit the same mistakes again which brought the suffering to you."

 

That means you have to practice something extremely important. You, I, we all, without exception, have to practice intense self-observation. Every moment reflect: How do I behave? What are the thoughts in my head? What are my choices?

 

We all say, I want happiness and joy. Then 5 minutes later we totally sabotage our commitment to find joy in life.  We take a hammer and hit ourselves over the head and then we wonder why we have a headache. But we cannot see the connection. Then we search a guru who is supposed to show us why we have a headache. This is why people need gurus. And the guru may just say, stop hitting yourself over the head. And we say, “oh, thank you, GuruJi. I needed your wisdom. Thank you. You are so wise. You are magic.” (People in the audience are laughing)

 

What we need is a good mirror. That is all. Self-observation will give us that mirror to allow us recognize which thoughts and choices create our suffering. Once we know our methods, we can stop them.