Even though most of you came here to do a yoga retreat and therefore probably are interested in hearing about yoga, today I am going to talk about a subject which probably most of you are not really at all interested in, which is sex. In particular, because I know that most of you are not that interested in sex, I´m going to focus on kissing. Maybe you can´t remember your first kiss, but I am going to be talking about a particular kind of kissing which when I was young was called French kissing. I don´t know if it still is, although the French are known to be rather more daring and disgusting than the English. So I´m not talking about social “hello and how” are you kissing. But even if you can´t remember your very first French kiss, which some of you might well, you might be able to remember the first one that you had with the person that you are currently interested in doing it with, or the last one if there sadly isn´t a current one.

Perhaps before this first kiss happened there was a little bit of a build up; you wanted it to happen. Let´s just assume that you were really in love with this person and that this person was really in love with you even if they were pretending not to be and even if you were pretending not to be. So there was probably quite a strong momentum for this first kiss to happen. And not only would there have been an energetic momentum for it to happen but the mind would have been going there, the mind would have been talking to you about kissing this person. Probably no matter how much the mind might have been making up stories about how you were going to make it happen and what it was going to be like, it actually wasn´t like that at all. First of all hopefully it just happened and it wasn´t really engineered, but of course it may have been. But even if it was engineered the chances are pretty high that all of your thinking, all of your anticipation, all of your expectation about what it would be like were totally absent and irrelevent actually during the kiss. Even though possibly afterwards you might have said, “wow, that was great”, to yourself or to them.

Let´s just assume that it was really great, that the doing of the kissing was really fantastic which kissing the right person tends to be. Chances are pretty high that certain things would have happened in the mind afterwards at least. First of all “good kiss”: the kiss label comes: the deed label. Second one, another label, is probably “good kisser”, the person label: not the deed but the doer, or one of them. Now imagine this very same kind of kissing happened with somebody a thousand times over a year. Maybe it´s already happened. It doesnt stay the same. Finally it gets to the very last kiss and you say “crap kiss: crap kisser”. This has happened right? The “great kiss, great kisser “ has become “crap kiss, crap kisser”.

You can of course substitute this for any kind of experience. Kissing, fucking, listening to mozart, eating an ice cream. Yoga is an invitation to find out how this happens. How it is that a “great kiss, great kisser” becomes a “crap kisser, crap kiss”. Or how does a great life become a crap life? Even if only temporarily. In finding that out we are discovering the nature of kissing as representative of all activity: not kissing as a particular kind of activity but as an expression of activity itself. The nature of activity becomes evident and also what has to become evident is the nature of those elements that constitute activity, in particular the object.

And when you go “Oh, great kiss. Must kiss him or her again because is a great kisser”, you´ve made two objects: you´ve made the kiss the object and you´ve made the kisser an object. Whereas because of all of the anticipation, the desire, the love, the excitement, when you were actually kissing there was no object; there was no kiss, there were no kissers, there was just kissing and there was no labelling. Hopefully. You could say the same about eating an ice cream. It very often happens on the first mouthful there is just tasting and especially if somebody is asking you for some of it, the last one also. But the ones in the middle you often don`t really notice. Well, i speak for myself of course, and thats why im starting a desert company called ‘Twobites’.

First of all though before going into objectness and actionness, I would like to look at what is really happening, what is really going on when you have a fantastic anything you like: insight, kiss, yoga posture, yoga practice, day, conversation, year, life. But looking at them all through the lense of kissing. When you have that kiss, that amazing first kiss that blows you away and so you tell yourself, “yeah, I really am in love”, or whatever, or, “I´ve really got her”, or whatever the way your particular mind happens to work.
You can have a kiss with the same person that is technically exactly the same but doesn´t have the same effect a year later or two years later, or a week later if you are really impatient and really fast. So the delight that you took in that first kiss is not even in the technique. It´s not in the person because you know you can kiss that person without it two years later, ten years later, and it´s not even in the technique. But there is delight and that delight is an expression of something and it´s not that you are a great kisser because you are the same as them. Pretty soon you too are going to be the other half of a crap kiss.

What it makes it so delightfully juicy is that you are totally and utterly fascinated and that through that total and utter fascination with what is actually happening, you are totally present. Your attention is totally there: so you feel everything without needing to label; and you drown in the feeling without having to identify and the delight is an expression of your attentiveness. The delight is an expression of the quality of your attention.

This is one of the great secrets of life, the great secrets of meditation: that you can be delighted about anything provided you are interested enough: passionate enough. So when you discover that delight resides in the quality of your attention or the quality of your awareness, you are half way to freedom. Because delight is so appealing it can act as an invitation for you to stop objectifying life, to stop looking for objects to satisfy and delight you as you realise that delight is always inherent in awareness of that which is actually happening. And that awareness like this, awareness which has nor roome for subjects and objects is very much a function of passion, of fascination, of interest, of desire. So just from the very self indulgent angle of loving to be in delight, loving to be delighted, you can transcend objectness and actionness. This kiss, the kissed and the kisser becomes not the point, you realise that that´s not the point. The point is what is happening within that.

And to a great extent you could see yoga practice as a process whereby your initial interest in the possibility of something good arising from the posture practice gets kidnapped. By subliminal necessity: through the fact that in order to get whatever it is you think you are going to get, you are going to have to do it right: safely, effectively And in order to do it right, in order to articulate your body safely and to use your mind effectively you have to become sensitive, ahimsa, to that which is actually happening. And through becoming sensitive to that which is actually happening you feel things that you don´t normally feel and your perception, your attentiveness is becoming more subtle and more refined. And as this process continues, just inevitably by itself, what happens to most people who do yoga, very quickly, is that as an inherent function of that internalisation of awareness, of that subtlizing of perception, delight in simple actions is discovered. Which of course really is the delight in being deeply and senitively attentive. Delight in broadening the finger bases and rotating the biceps is discovered. But this could be jogging: delight in the legs rhythmic pumping; or washing up: the floating choreography of the wrists and fingers.

And it soon becomes obvious that delight does not reside in the hand; I mean, we know that. Thats not so hard to get. That delight does not reside in the kiss is not so easy to realise. We think that delight does very often reside in the kiss, because kissing itself is so juicy. But it turms out that delight does not reside in the object, nor does delight reside in the action. Delight resides in the awareness. You could say that awareness itself is delight. But when awareness becomes awareness of an object the delight is lost: for a split second maybe only; you can oscillate back into the delight. So this could have happened on your first kiss: you probably did have the odd moment where you go, “wow, fantastic”. But when you are saying “wow, fantastic”, you are not in the delight. And if it goes, “wow, fantastic” too much you soon think, “This is a bit boring. Let´s do something else. Maybe i can get her/his nickers off now”. So you could say that the body relative to the yoga postures is a lense for focussing your attention not really on to any particular thing but more and more subtly onto the dynamic of perception itself. Which is simply the alignment of awareness.

There is an apparent paradox here because there is a sense that when you are focussing something you are gathering it in, condensing it. But really it isn´t like that in awareness. When attention deepens and subtilises you are narrowing and opening it at one and the same time. The narrowing is of the original field of objects, the opening is into the narrowed field. As you come closer it narrows, as you go deeper it opens. You are actually opening the aperture of your awareness. If it opens enough and objects are no longer imposing themselves then in that openness of awareness, delight is all that there is left and you can feel this delight when you are in balasana when you are in savasana, when you are sitting, as a very subtle, gentle humming, oscillating, pritti, is the word the Bhuddists use, rapture, physical rapture. Ananda is the word that the yogis use. You could say the inherent oscillation, the inherent vibration of awareness is delight. You could also say the inherent nature of the body is awareness and the inherent nature of the body is therefore delight and in yoga esoterics, it´s called anandamayakosha which means the bliss aspect of the body.

When, as mine are right now, your feet start to burn and to claim their objectness of your attention saying, “get me out of here” and you don´t, you just listen to what the feet are saying as deeply as you can because you are relaxed, you listen and you can hear and in that hearing you very soon hear the song of delight. And then within that listening you begin to realise that if I say that my feet are uncomfortable, or my shin bones are uncomfortable, or my ankles are uncomfortable, the pain fundamentally is the resistance of the mind to that which is actually happening. The habit of moving away from what is to talking about it to yourself. That which is actually happening is just ion exchange up the nervous system. And what the hell is that? It´s just a flipping of energetic potential from sodium to potassium to sodium to potassium; there´s nothing there! It´s just a transmission of electric potential through the nervous system. The mind says, “pain, hurt, get out, don´t like, must stop”. But no damage can possibly be done here unless I try to get away from the pain and I wriggle. And in the wriggling I might end up in a bad position where pressure does some damage. But if I´ve established myself initially in a safe position I can stay there for many hours before any damage would be done to tissues because of blood no longer flowing. But the mind finds it very difficult to accept that. The mind finds it very difficult to accept discomfort. It also finds it very difficult to accept stillness, lack of stimulation. The mind is looking for pleasure all the time. So when that first kiss becomes that last kiss three days later, you go looking for another kisser. And of course the first kiss is good again, but it´s nothing to do with the kisser. And it´s nothing to do with the kiss. Not fundamentally. Its to do with novelty, with the interest that novelty generates.

So when you relax out of the specific content of your consciousness: when you are no longer having to process, recognise, label, understand, identify everything, the background delight becomes apparent even when perceptions are occuring, even when perceptions are arising. Delight is another aspect, another word for emptiness. Delight is the tone, the quality, the face of emptiness. And if one tries to understand all this stuff about objects and actions, form and emptiness, just from the mind, it doesn´t matter how well you can understand. It doesn´t matter how much you agree. That´s not enough. You have to know from experience what objectlessness is like. And you all know what it´s like: it´s there when you have that first kiss. You all know exactly what it´s like. This is emptiness. And its not a void. Its a fullness, a fullness of delight.

You could say, you know, well why not learn about yoga by kissing? You could say, yeah, more chance of you finding out what it really means to go beyond actions and objects. But the rpoblem is the tendency that we all have, that we are all in, to identify the kissing with the kisser or the kissers very strongly because we want it again, simply because it is so juciy. Whereas yoga is more subtle. It doesn´t give such overt pleasure. In fact very often it doesn´t give pleasure at all for a long time so you don´t have that same kind of manic or compulsive attachment. The attachment that we have to yoga is very often based on assumptions of the benefits it brings: wether immediate or long term. That it´s good for the quality of life rather than it´s really fantastic fun. It´s not really fantastic fun to do yoga for most people most of the time.

But the voice of delight is not so hard to hear. It´s a subtle voice and we recognise it deeply if not overtly: and this is, to a great extent, what brings us back to the mat, back to the cushion. So when we´re doing yoga postures we are not as we are when we´re going for a kiss. When we´re going for a kiss we are overtly looking for some kind of pleasure, some kind of satisfaction, something juicy right now; but when we are doing a yoga posture we are not. It´s pretty hard to say what we are doing really! But we are doing it anyway, we are here. And when we are not so much any more caught up with either trying to make the body open, or trying to make the body more flexible, or even trying to make the body more perfectly aligned, or even trying to make the body be more stable and relaxed, but when we´re more just enquiring, when we´re more just using the postures to enquire into whatever interests us: maybe we´re enquiring into the possibilities of the body, maybe we´re enquiring into the possibility of stability, maybe we´re enquiring into the possibility of movement, or maybe we´re enquiring into the possibility of going deeper than that. Then other unasked for possibilities begin to naturally arise.
Of course there is always an oscillation, there is always a fluctuation: sometimes you just do something to get more flexible, but two seconds later you do something to enquire into the possibility of breathing freely and then you do something to get strong.

So this kind of fluctuation is happening all the time inevitably. But within the deepening or the subtling of the enquiry you start to notice in particular the presence of aggression. You start to eventually notice that you just pushed for more turn or whatever the equivalent might be: pulled for more movement in the hamstring, or whatever it is. Eventually you even notice these things arising as they happen. Sooner or later what happens is you go, “shitt! I shouldn´t do that.” And then you stop because you shouldn´t and then it happens again. And if it happens a lot you start to get pissed off with yourself or with the teacher, or with the mat, or with your leotard, or with something, the music in the next room or whatever it is; if you keep judging yourself for the presence of aggression. But after a while you just notice its arising all by itself and in that arising it just fades away, all by itself. Without either the coming or the goling resulting from your intent. This is what ahimsa is there for as the basic principle of yoga, so that you are always involved in enquiry through that particular lense: the presence or absence of sensitivity or aggression. Of course this enquiry is not going on consciously, not intellectually. It exist in terms of orientation and in terms of awareness; and it takes place through action: through being sensitive to the nature of your actions.

Within this focussing of your internal enquiry through the principle of ahimsa, honesty also starts to manifest itself in a very particular way which is the recognition that the aggression just happened. Sometimes it doesn´t. Sometimes the thought comes, “I think I maybe can go further” and you push. But after a while you start to notice that very often aggression just happens. And when you start to notice that aggression just happened over a while you start to notice within that noticing that it seems to happen less, and even if it´s not less in terms of less often, its happening is less of a big deal in that you are no longer saying, “that shouldn´t happen”. You are no longer getting your knickers twisted about something that happened. So it does happen less in that way, in that sense. And eventually actually the less you get your knickers in a twist, the more you see what actually happens when you push. The more you see that when you push harm comes and the more you see that, the less you push without having to stay in control of that. Without having to constantly tell yourself not to push, this just happens, as a result of what? As a result of honesty or satya, as a result of openness or asteya. Which all arise within awareness. So yamaniyama , as the lenses through which your enquiry is being focussed, deepen as a result of awareness. As a result of awareness being invited to be more present by enquiring into that which is actually happening. Enquiry that is focussed through the lenses of yamaniyama.

So after a while you start to notice that aggression, dishonesty, endgaining or exploitation, judgement of what´s happening in terms of good and bad, when you start to notice that interest and disinterest, passion, (tapas), commitment or lack of of commitment, (sauca), seem to have a life of their own. It begins to become clear that they all just come and go despite the fact that you are neither inviting them to come they come; even though you are not telling them to go they just stop in the light of your awareness. When you really notice this you also begin to realise that the actions that are the result of these tendencies are therefor not attributable to your intent. They cannot honestly be said to be yours. They just happen. You haven´t asked them to happen, you haven´t told them to happen. You haven´t got a background agenda that you want them to happen, but they are happening.

The pushing that´s an expression of the breaking of ahimsa in himsa, is an action that´s happening by itself. The by itself means independent of your specific intent, independent of your invitation but obviously it´s not happening out of the blue. Obviously there has to be a cause. A part of that causation is habit: it´s a habit, it´s a push for more; it´s a habit to reach for more; it´s a habit to want more. But there are all kinds of other factors that actually contribute to the conditions that together cause that action to arise: the heat, you were distracted by the crickets, I said the wrong thing, or you heard me wrong, or you saw somebody next to you who never before looked more flexible than you looking more flexible than you. You don´t even have to think it. You don´t even have to think it. But this is going to have an impact on your expectations, on your self image, on your desires, on all of that, it´s going to be impacted on by seeing somebody all of a sudden more free in their body.

So eventually the recognition of this is deepening, clarifying, becoming more familiar, not as an intellectual process but in action; it´s happening day after day on your mat. It´s not an intellectual debate trying to figure out the truth. It´s just seeing what´s actually happening within the lense of your body in your practice. So when you are starting to see that all of these actions that happen as a result of all of these tendencies arising without so much as a ‘by your leave’, that all of these actions are not arising through your intent; you might even ask yourself, “where did that come from?”, or “I didn´t do that”. In that kind of response the habit of personalising, of claiming actions is being undermined. And at the same time as that´s going on in your yoga practice, it can go on in any situation, even in a conversation with somebody you can notice the presence of aggression or insensitivity. You say something. You don´t mean to be aggressive, but somehow something somewhere has triggered you so you are feeling just for a moment without realising it a little nervous. And so you say something a little aggressive without at all meaning to be aggressive to the person that you are talking to. You might not even realise that it´s aggression until you see the look in their eye and then you don´t know why they are looking like that. Maybe you don´t even know it´s because you just said something. So this is happening not just in yoga, this is happening all of the time and this seeing, this recognition of the coming and going of whatever you like: greed, fear, anger, it doesn´t have to just be the ten principles that Patanjali gives. In the recognition of that coming and going, the impersonal nature of at least some actions is becoming clear. That so many actions happen despite your personal intent and despite your personal agenda and despite your personal preferences.

The beauty about yoga practice is that at the same time as giving you this insight into the impersonal nature of at least some actions, it´s giving you an insight into the objectless nature of the body. So at the same time as actions are being challenged in the way that they are normally understood, so also are objects. And in your yoga practice and also in your life, the inherent oscillation that pertains to everthing becomes apparent: your attention, your awareness, your breathing, your heart; whatever it is, it doesn´t matter. It becomes clear that everything has oscillation in its expression. Within the oscillation of your attention and with the oscillation of your awareness objectness and actionness is coming and going in your life but when we take stock of our lives, we take stock of it only in terms of actions and objects. But when you are in that first kiss, or when you are in the flow of your yoga practice or whatever it is that allows you to flow you are not in objects and actions, you are in the flow of delight. And for some people this is happening actually more than objects and actions, but even when that´s the case it´s the objects and actions that are used to define the life. My life is these actions linking these objects.

After a while the recognition of the impersonal nature of at least some actions broadens and starts to include more and more actions until it´s very hard for you to actually really honestly say for sure that any action is personal, that any action truly originates in a person, whether it´s yourself or another. It becomes impossible to say it originates purely and exclusively in that person: and impossible to say that they could have not done it, they should have not done it. In other words “they could have not”, “they should have not”, can no longer be said, can no longer happen. Or when there´s a space, a period when it´s not happening then you are being invited to recognize the impersonal nature of a particular kind of object, the person.

And this is really a deep way down or a long way in: this is the kernel, this is the crux of the matter. When what you´ve learned about actions, when what you´ve learned about objects in the body starts to express itself as an understanding of human interaction, of human relationships. It seems it´s a very difficult thing to recognize that all actions are impersonal and all objects are impersonal, that there isn´t really an individuated volitional entity there. Maybe we need to shy away from that for moment in case that´s too scary.

So let´s just go back to all actions are impersonal. Let´s say I´ve been in love with Lily since she first came here two years ago and she as we know is in love with me. So then finally we get to have this kiss. How can I not personalise it? How can I not attribute it to Lily and me kissing? Very hard to do. Very hard to see. And there´s no way that you can make an intellectual conviction alone that that was impersonal. So you have to have a lot of support to be able to see that. And that support is available very strongly in your yoga practice when you are not objectifying your body and you are not personalising your actions. Now if Lily and I were to kiss now, no matter what the feeling was, it would be impersonal as far as what I´m saying is concerned. But that doens´t mean it wouldn´t be specific. Of course it would be specific. It would involve her mouth and tongue and nobody else´s but mine. So it is specific. It is specific to a body or two. It is specific to a mind or two. So you could say it is specific to a person or two, if a person is a body mind.
Now you have to decide for yourself how you use language. So what in a way I´m doing is I´m clarifying what I mean by personal or person. Because there is no reason why you can´t just say Lily, the body mind, is a person. You can. Then what I´m saying about impersonal doesn´t make any sense. So I´m not meaning that that´s not a person. A person to me is an ‘autonomous entity with volition’. A person is somebody who is able to freely make a decision and freely act on it. And that´s normally how we see it don´t we? This is not a person, it´s a microphone. But what´s the difference? You could say a cat, But what´s the difference? Or a monkey, it´s not a person, it´s a monkey. What´s the difference? So you see we do make a difference. We are saying that what makes a person is something very specific. Its not life, its not motion, its not sentience, its not even consciousness: it´s autonomous, deleberated intent. Autonomous intent giving internally the impression that you are in control. Giving the impression that this body mind has a separate controller and it´s the controller that you get pissed of with when somebody does something wrong. Not the body. Somebody hits you, you are pissed off with the person, the controller. So obviously, if I´m saying everything is impersonal you have to get your head round what i mean by person and what it means but also what is the nature of that sense of there being an autonomous controller.

Making a pèrson out of consistently localised actions is an assumed habit based on an ongoing habit. It´s an assumed habit based on the ongoing habit of personalising actions. Saying, “my sweat” when you´re meditating. “My ankle aching, my distracted mind, my salacious mind, my”, whatever. This habit, the ‘my’ habit, produces the ‘me’ habit. The ‘me’ habit, produces the ‘you’ habit. Without the ‘my’ habit there can be no ‘me or you’ habit. If you recognize at all for a minute or two minutes, that mental activity and physical activity can go on in the space that has your name around it, and it be totally impersonal, not yours, then the me is dying. The me is fading away because the me depends upon the mine and the habit of mine leaves the residual habit of me; an assumption that if those were mine they must belong to something, an object. If those actions were mine they must belong to the subject which is nothing other than an object. A very special object of course, but an object nonetheless. So it´s to this level or to this relevance, or to this expression of objects, the subject, the person or the self that the impersonal nature of all phenomena is directed. Not so that you can sit in a cave with your legs crossed and tell yourself how brilliant you are, or have other people tell you how brilliant you are. But so that you can live a life in which you don´t blame anyone for anything; not yourself and not others, not your mother, not your father, not your brother, not your sister, not your husband, not your wife, not your lover, not your boss, not the guy who ran over your daughter, nobody.

Now its been said that the only understanding you need of this is intellectual. That there is no other understanding. Now I can understand that statement because understanding is an intellectual process but very often you hear people say, “well I understand it intellectually but I don´t really get it inside” and what Ramesh is saying is that you don´t really understand it actually. That your intellectual understanding is limited. That there is a gap somewhere. Or there is a little subtle conflict which allows you to say, “the bastard shouldn´t have raped my daughter”.

So the process that goes on during your yoga practice whereby you experience objectlessness and the impersonal nature of actions, has to have a fabric of understanding around it for it to perculate into your life because you don´t spend your life on your mat. For you to realise that the person whose presence is so disturbing to you is not operating out of autonomous volition. In other words the very socalled person is impersonal. That the actions that are arising through the so called person are all totally conditioned expressions of inevitability. But actually you don´t ever see a person you just see objects, many of which are human bodies. You see a body acting, you see a hand moving. This is what you see: the body and sometimes you might hear, “I´m going to hit you”, so the mind, you hear the mind, you observe the mind, but you assume a person. And into that assumption based on the past comes fear for the future, anxiety for the future; that same person might do same thing again or similar kind of person might do a similar kind of thing. So if your father has done lots of horrible things to you, you are fucked as far as men are concerned. Or if it´s your mother. Doesn´t really matter. Because there has to be an association in your mind based on the assumption of person.

So hanging out in the delight, delightful though it is, which yoga can give so easily, is not enough. You have to understand the significance of the delight. You have to understand what the relationship is between delight and actions, between delight and perceptions which you could say is that perceptions and actions are the impersonal expression of delight, or of emptiness, or of God, or of consciousness, or of awareness, or whatever you want to say. Within this process, when you are realising that aggression arises independent of your intent, you realise that actually it is not arising by itself. That there is a set of conditions which generated it and actually there had to be. This is what physics is all about relative to objects. Establish a certain set of conditions and objects will respond in a definite way. Which means very simply take a knife and cut the stem of an apple on a tree and it will drop. That´s inevitable unless you put something underneath, in which case, if it supports it, it won´t. So these are the conditions and they are fixed of material objects which are being described. These conditions are described by the laws of physics. Krishnamurti for example was really hot about psychological conditioning which is the same: establish a certain set of conditions and a given mind will respond in a certain way.

What´s happening in yoga is that the practices are an invitation to awareness. Now awareness is a condition. And awareness is the primary condition. Awareness is the condition within which all other conditions are recognised. Awareness is the condition amongst all conditions that makes the biggest difference. So that´s why you can stop acting compulsively when you become aware of the compulsiveness of your actions. Because awareness is a condition that conditions all other conditions in the same way. The conditioning of awareness is to dissolve objects and actions into itself, into emptiness. So awareness always invites change.

So when a particular thought arises into the mind while meditating, and it´s a thought that keeps coming back, after a while you start to notice how it comes about, what triggers it. Whether it be other thoughts or feelings, whether it be sounds, or whatever, and you start to notice that there is a web of conditions that produces that thought and if those conditions are there that thought will come. And if the condition of awareness is there maybe soon that thought will stop coming. But what you see very clearly is that when you are meditating and you are relaxed enough, that these thoughts that come, you suddenly notice there are thoughts in your mind not about your practice and sometimes within that, somewhere within that recognition, you realise that you actually stopped being present to your practice some time ago and you have no idea when. But eventually what starts to happen as you relax more, is you notice the gap between noticing thoughts and forgetting your technique gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And if you are relaxed enough, you can get to the point, and you may well have been there, where you can actually feel the impulse that would have generated that first thought arising and then maybe that first thought comes on the impulse. And when you are that close to your mind, when you are that relaxed about what´s happening, then you can see that that impulse just comes; not from your mind. Doesn´t come from your intent. The impulse simply arises.

And let´s say the first thought is a thought that you don´t like. Let´s say it´s about money: constantly find that you are thinking about money or sex, you know, these things that are so bad, we are not supposed to think about when we are meditating but we do. It soon becomes apparent that you are not in control of your mind in the most deepest level. You are not in control of your mind. Okay maybe once you have started thinking about sex you can stop yourself or once you´ve started thinking about money you can make it practical and you can decide, “yeah I´ll swap banks”. And then you´ll stop thinking about money. But it soon becomes apparent that you can´t stop yourself starting thinking about money. You can´t stop yourself starting thinking about sex because to try do that you have to be thinking about it, “I won´t think about sex now”. Too late.
So you start to see that a thought comes as a result of the conditions of the life that you are living; that you don´t have enough money in the bank, or you haven´t had enough sex lately, or you´ve had too much sex lately, or whatever it is making this thought come. And you start to see what actually has been making this thought come. Let´s say that you´re thinking about sex because you´ve been having too much so your sex centre is over stimulated and you start to see that. But you also start to see into why and how and this thought that came starts to open out into the whole of your life. And of course in the opening out into the whole of your life, especially if it´s a thought about you´ve been having too much sex lately and you´ve been having it with lots of different people, it opens out into lots of other people´s lives also. And what you´re discovering about your life is also likely to be going on in their lives, which is that there´s this huge web going back, and back, and out, and touching everything and it´s a web of conditions, or a web of conditioning, or a web of factors that condition your action.

And this is what karma means. That all actions are conditioned. That all actions are the result of not a cause, but of causation, of an interconnected network, a web, or a matrix of forces and factors, actions and objects that led to this (sound of stick hitting mat) hitting the mat with the stick action. Now you can see how many actions led to that: I´m just going to take one angle behind that. Let´s forget the fact that a particular kind of person designed black mats and lives in Germany and I happened to meet him and all that. Let´s forget the temperature and the fact that a friend of mine built this house and offered it to me, let´s forget all of that and let´s just focus on the stick. Now this stick could not exist if Kim´s parents hadn´t made love the day they did. And Kim´s parents couldn´t exist if their parents hadn´t made love on the day that they did. Sperm is dying all the time. A child, a particular child is born because of a particular sperm making it with a particular egg. The egg, okay, takes longer. So if you look at the sperm you can see it. So if you have sex five minutes later a different child is born, a different genetic potentiality. It could be even five seconds. You know? There´s millions and millions of those little things so it´s quite likely that they die really fast when they start to die. Five seconds later, five minutes later for sure. Five weeks later it´s clearly a different child. So if Kim´s parents hadn´t produced Kim I wouldn´t have this stick because Kim made it. So the whole of the history of Kim´s family going back to the origin of time contributed to that action and mine and the guy who made these mats, and the guy who built the house, Juan, and the guy who bought the house next door that allowed Juan to have a little corner of his land, yeah, everybody.

It doesn´t take very long to discover everybody participating, everything participating in that one action. Which means that that action was conditioned by every other action that´s ever happened which means it had to, it had to happen. Just like Kim had to happen if that particular sperm met that particular egg. Likewise this particular action has to happen in that moment because of the factors and forces that go back, go back forever and each one of them was also conditioned in exactly the same way; inevitably by that which came before. And this is where it gets scary for the person. We have already got rid of the person, but you haven´t. The person is still in there. You have still got your personal belief system operating, yeah? You are trying to figure out if what I am saying is right or wrong. True or false.

So the impersonal nature of actions and the fact that you are not in control of them, very soon leads you to inevitability. But if inevitability is too hard to stomach let´s try another one before we go to inevitability. What would happen to this action if Kim had not, if Kim´s father and mother had not made love that day? That action wouldn´t exist. If you can see that all actions sit in the web equally, that every single action is conditioned and conditions all other actions in exactly the same way, if you can just find one action that you can´t remove without everything else disappearing actually, not just this action but everything else disappearing then you can see that each action, every action, is inextricable from the matrix. That you can not take an action out of the matrix. You can not change the matrix.

Sorry guys, you can´t. And if you can´t change the matrix then everything is inevitable and if everything is inevitable then why get your knickers in a twist about what you should do? You will do what you will do. But the journey into seeing that you will do what you will do has made it clear that you are not doing it. That you are not the doer, that you, meaning the person that you maybe still think you are, are not the doer. But in the person disappearing; or the freedom to make an action or not, disappearing; or the extractability of an action disappearing then personal volition has disappeared. In other words we are back to where we started: everything is impersonal. Doing is impersonal. Deciding is impersonal. Choosing is impersonal. Deliberating is impersonal. Intent is empersonal. Volition is impersonal.

But how can you say that if Lily and I have this fantastic kiss? Well, I just explained how so don´t get confused. I can use the word personal with it simply meaning specific to a particular bodymind. And I have to sometimes. Because that´s how most people also do it and I have to talk to people so I´m not going to walk around using unfamiliar language confusing people. So if somebody says “Lily´s a really nice person”, I´m not going to say, “no she isn´t. There is no person there”. They´re going to think I am crazy which maybe I am, but it´s not going to make any sense. It´s not going to be a very helpful thing to say. So I´ll say, “okay, Lily´s a nice person”. But all I mean by that is that the actions that come out of that bodymind tend to be okay by my standards. Okay meaning meet with my approval. And of course the criteria by which i give approval are fery specific, uniquely so. But not personal, at least not according to my usage. Nevertheless they are very specific to the preferences that are operating over here, or in what is called me. Which must be operating over here in expression of this specific history; in expression of the experiences that have been centred over here. Or you could say angled over here, because if I have an experience of kissing Lily the kiss is not centred in me, but my experience of it is. It´s different from hers. She might have thought it was crap and I´m thinking, “wow, juiciest, best ever”, and she´s gone, “oh my God, not another one. I don´t want another one”. Now that´s another way you can see that experiences are specific. But that doesnt make them personal: if personal means subject to autonomous volition. Which simply cannot exist, no matter how much we may want it to, if all actions are irreplacable, and inevitable.

This is just a concept, but something that can help with the conundrum of everything being impersonal is to look at the matrix, to look at this web of conditions, to see the inexitricability of all actions that confirms its inevitability as a whole. No matter where we start from we keep on finding links in the chain of causation, that spread out infinitely in all directions. Then we have to see that it doesn´t have an end, it doesn´t have a start, it doesn´t have a centre. You can pick any place you like and say that´s the start or that´s the end or that´s the centre. And of course as far as the centre is concerned we do that all the time: and we call it myself.

When you really go into it the matrix turns out to be so huge it´s actually infinite. How can it end? How can you go back to the beginning? Philosophers have been looking for this forever. Where is the first cause? You can´t find it. It goes on forever in time, eternity, and in space, infinity. In doing so it includes everything, absolutely everything, absolutely every action, absolutely every object is in the matrix. So when you see what that might mean, that the inextricability of an action from the matrix means that the matrix is undividible, indivisible that you can´t take anything out, that the matrix is whole, that it´s infinite, it´s eternal and it´s one, you come to God. Okay, it´s just a concept, a concept that you can lay onto the implications of the inifnitely indivisible inevitability of conditioning factors behind all actions.

When you start to understand how any action is conditioned, the more deeply you understand it, the closer and closer you come to the signficance of the concept God. You don´t have to take concept the God, but it´s a very powerful concept to help you to see the impersonal nature of all things because you can tell yourself that it is always and only God that does everything. It is always and only God that feels everything. That it is always and only God that experiences everything, that thinks anything, that wants anything, that likes anything, that dislikes anything, that causes birth, that causes death, that causes delight, that causes suffering; it is always and only God. So when you are taking things really personally, and you remember that you´ve derived some relaxation, some benefit when you are not taking things personally, you can invite the possbility of not taking things personally by reminding yourself that it´s always and only God.

But Godfrey, if everything is in the matrix what´s outside the matrix?

That´s just a concept. Go outside. Find your way out. That´s a concept. You are assuming that the dialectic modality of the thinking mind, the dualism of the thinking mind is an arbiter of reality. Is an arbiter of that which is. It isn´t. That´s called arrogance: assuming that the human mind is shaped in such a way that it can determine the shape of that which exists. So outside the matrix is just a concept. Nobody has ever been. You know because we are making objects all the time inside and outside is really a big deal but from the space of delight, objectlessness, samadhi, whatever you want to call it, there is neither inside nor outside and it is not a big deal. In fact it´s an intrusion, and you think, “fuck, take your inside and outside away. I´m not interested”. The matrix is only an appearance.

Every action and every object is only an appearance and in fact that´s the beauty of that film, The Matrix, it is just an appearance. It is just an appearance. Why is it such a cult movie? It´s got Keanu Reeves in for God´s sake! The most wooden actor on the planet! But why does everybody like it? Because it´s touching the truth. It´s touching the truth; that it is a matrix, we are in a matrix and it is just an appearance. It´s the appearance of God and they make it an appearance of a bunch of robots but that doesn´t matter. The impact is the same relative to your own perception. Every perception you have is just an appearance, an invention. You know I thought it was a great kiss, she thought it was crap. What was it? It wasn´t a kiss. We just made it a kiss. We called it a kiss. That´s the appearance that we give it, the label that we give it. It´s just a couple of tongues going lubulubulubu. What´s the big deal? Yeah, that is how I kiss! That´s why Lily didn´t want to do it again!

If there is no personal volition, and somebody does something that pisses you off, and you go okay it stopped then but you are still pissed off, I mean is that just living in the moment and going, well okay I´m aware that I´m pissed off? Or are you still attributing something to that person really?

Well not necessarily, it depends how it happens. Being pissed off, the reaction of anger to certain actions is conditioned into the organism. So some people get pissed off by the fact that I swear. Because it´s supposed to be holy yoga, you´re not supposed to swear. The people that get pissed off by me swearing, they swear. It´s not that. But they have a set of conditions within them based on their expectations and their beliefs and all of this stuff, that when they hear a swear word in a yoga class, they get angry. Nothing can be done about that in the moment: as long as they are carrying those foolish beliefs they are gonna get pissed. But once the notion of freedom of choice, of personal volition has started to crumble then things begin to change. Then even though anger may arise, neither the anger, nor the trigger are attributed to personal volition, to a person. They are seen to be inevitable expressions of the conditons operating in the organisms involved. They are seen to be the inevtiable, and impersonal expression of the matrix.

And in the seeing of that you don´t hold a grudge. You don´t walk around thinking, “I don´t like Godfrey because he swears”, but if you really don´t like swearing you don´t go near Godfrey teaching. That´s all. You just don´t go. But you don´t not go because he is a wanker, because he is this, because he is that. You just don´t go because it doesn´t feel good. It doesn´t feel right. And so this kind of reaction is necessary and is the juice of life because otherwise we would all have the same reactions and it would be so boring. We would just be sitting doing nothing. And it´s hard when you are disappointed: when you are angry it´s kind of easier and clearer, but if somebody disappoints you it´s coming from deeper and it´s less obviously not fun. You know when you are angry it´s obviously not fun, but when you are disappointed it´s not so obvious that it´s not fun and you can really get into disappointment. You can really get into indulging it by story telling. You know this person shouldn´t have, this fucking bitch, this bastard, this and that, you know it goes on like that. And then after a couple of hours maybe suddenly you go, “oh wait a minute, it´s not personal”, or whatever. So to the extent that you have an understanding of the impersonal nature of actions, the more you have it, the quicker it comes in and into the more subtle situations it comes in also rather than only the most obvious ones.

What does that mean then for good actions? We´ve talked about examples of people doing nasty things and then you say well it´s not them. What if somebody does something really nice things? If somebody does nice things, it´s a bit disappointing if you have to then say, well that person might seem nice but she´s not really.

No but it doesnt have to be like that because what you´re seeing as nice behaviour is the conditioned expression of that organism, of that what we normally call a person. Now it´s pretty likely that that nice behaviour is going to continue so you can say nice person. But just remembering that person is just a conventional symbol for that you´re using for consistency in location of a set of conditions that tend towards certain actions: but it doesn´t actually indicate autonomy. Let´s say you think that about me, that you think I´m really nice. Am I free to be nice? Do I choose to be nice? The very actions that you might think make me nice other people might think make me not nice and anyway, I´m not free to choose them. They are just there. They are expressing that way. My parents did this. My mother did that. My school teacher did this, my brother did that, my first yoga teacher said this and as a result I am a certain way and I am going to stay that way in terms of what I express if the conditions that brought about those expressions are similar.

When the illusory nature of volition, and the impersonal nature of action are being recognised then dislike of an action may happen, but dislike of the actor doesn´t happen. So resentment doesn´t happen, blame doesn´t happen, bitching doesn´t happen, gossiping doesn´t happen. All of these things don´t happen. But still the fundamental conditioning of the person, the mind body organism, the human being, whatever you want to call it, is still the same. But that doesnt mean we have to stay around the locus of those actions. If we are sensible we wont do that. Within the recognition of the impersonal nature of action we are still able to recognise the tone and tendency of the organisms conditioning. So if we dislike certain types of actions, we will, if we are sensible and we can do so, avoid their instrument. But we dont blame.

You can´t erase the past. So that means I still like sandy beaches over pebbly beaches. I still prefer cold weather to hot weather. I´m always going to be like that. No amount of yoga, meditation, awareness is going to change that. But a certain amount of awareness can make me not resent hot weather. You know I can either say, “well fuck off. Go back and live in England if you don´t like hot weather”, or “here it is, you are here for other reasons than the weather so stick it out”. So many things do change and many things don´t. But of the things that don´t change, they become contextualised very differently because of the things that do change.

So your liking things having to create an impulse to reach for them, this can change. I dont ahve to likbe somewhere cold: i dont have to resent living somewhere warm. The reaching happens only if the reaching is an easy and inherent expression of the total situation and if the total situation invites its success. If the total situation does not invite that actions it is not reached for. Then something else happens without any, “oh fuck, I really wanted to do that”. “What bastard, what bitch, what cop, what road, what planning, what political party stops me from doing?” that doesn´t happen. So the context changes and the context changes from everything being personal to everything being impersonal. Or from everything being personal to everything being God. And when everything is God things become very simple. You don´t have to worry about the future, you don´t have to worry about the past. The past you know was inevitable because it happened. The future you know will happen out of inevitability so you don´t need to worry about it. It´s going to happen. That doesn´t mean you don´t have to prepare for it, plane for it, ponder for it, that might be part of its inevitability; that you see the clouds coming you think rain, you get rain coat, fine. But you don´t worry the day before, is it going to rain or not? You might think, “is it going to rain or not?” but that isn´t the same as worrying about it. So anxiety goes away, same as guilt goes away, same as blame goes away, worry goes away.

Relative, it´s all relative. As your understanding deepens, they go away more and more and that´s the beautiful thing because you don´t have to have a very deep understanding of this concept of impersonal action for big changes to happen straight away. It´s an amazing thing. I think it´s incredible. I don´t know how it works but it just fucking works. It´s the most incredible process I´ve ever come across. It has so much liberating power on people immediately. The recognition that, say it how you like, it´s always and only God, everything is impersonal, there is no personal action or object anywhere, there is no personal doer, however you want to say it that concept and its impact is magic, pure magic.

Its like a virus, the first time it gets in your head, that´s it. You´re fucked. It´s true. It´s the most potent virus on the planet. It´s called truth. And as soon as it drops into your brain, that´s it, you´re fucked. It goes as fast as it can into every neuron, into every cell. It may not go as fast as you might like, but it´s going. There is nothing you can do about it. There is nothing you can do to make it go faster, there is nothing you can do to make it go slower, but that´s its impulse. That´s what it does. When it´s heard. But that doesn´t mean that anybody who hears the word hears the concept. Many people don´t. But when the concept is heard, just even the most basic understanding then that´s it. So I recommend go to Bombay before Ramesh dies to see where it´s comes from. Because it´s coming from him. It´s coming from a man alive today. The most powerful virus that´s ever been dropped into the human belief system. But don´t be surprised. He doesn´t wear white robes. He doesn´t wear flowers.

Does he swear?

No. But he shouts. He wags his finger. He said to me, he said of a friend of mine who Ramesh happens to very much like, Ramesh was talking to him and I was just sitting at the side and then he turned to me you know, because he knew that I was still stuck in this sort of thing and he said “Mutribo is one of my favourite people and don´t tell me I shouldn´t have favourite people”. And really aggressively. And he wasn´t talking about Mutribo, he was talking about Godfrey. Godfrey and his fancy concepts of what happens when you get enlightened. So he can be very ruthless but he doesn´t swear. But he flirts like crazy with Richelle´s sister.

Godfrey, it does change the pleasure thing though. What she was asking about when someone does something nice to you.

Okay, explain.

If someone says that they love me, I´m not going to think I did that. I´m not going get a sense of achievement. I´m not going to think that I chose the right outfit. I did this crazy Jezebel blue thing. It wasn´t me.

You get relaxed about it.

There isn´t the satisfaction there used to be which doesn´t give you the same high which isn´t necessarily a bad thing.

No because high always has to be balanced by a low. So you´re coming somewhere else. You´re coming into an easier fluctuation. And a more gentle fluctuation within which delight is always available no matter what the person says.

But it is different

Yeah, it is different. It´s relaxed. It´s calm. It´s very transparent whereas most of life, most lives are being lived from depression to excitement with a lot of opaqueness not knowing what the fuck is going on. Not knowing why all of a sudden it was delightful and now it´s horrible. All of this starts to become very clear and in that clarification the transparency of the impersonal nature of all actions things start to become very settled and rhythmic relatively speaking. By themselves. I mean, take Richelle, she is seriously fucked up you know. Really. Not everybody is. But in less than a year I´ve seen Rochelle going from really pissed about being like that. You know really fucking trying to stop herself from going to the beach and trying to seduce every man or whatever it was that she used to do.

You should have seen me yesterday.

Now she goes to the beach and tries to seduce every man, quite lightly. She has no problem with it. And she has no problem if it doesn´t work right? Well less, less, less. I´m being a little extreme with Richelle but you could say her fucked upness is still there, but it´s not causing a problem.

It´s what brought me here. So I thank God for it.

Yeah. Her fucked upness. And the thing is that´s a really important point, your conditioning, your fucked upness, we´re all fucked up in a particular way. It´s not going to go away, but the context is going to change so much that it´s not going to feel like you´re fucked up. Other people might still think that you´re fucked up. I mean I´m sure people look at Richelle on the beach doing her and think, “what a fucking tart” or whatever, that she´s fucked up. But who cares what they think. In there, it´s okay. And so for sure the guys that she´s playing with it´s more okay too because they are more okay with her. Only the guys that she´s not playing with are pissed off, and some of the girls who are too uptight to shake ass on the beach.
canam ibiza 2003
 
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canam ibiza 2003