The silent spaciousness of your own self practice is a perfect context within which to enquire into the true nature of objects, actions, perception, and consciousness.   The beauty of yoga practice relative to this enquiry is that it can take it right out of the realm of intellectual speculation and ground it fully in the direct experience of action.   So it´s not important whether you are familiar with any concept about the nature of actions, objects, perception or consciousness because you are familiar with actions, objects, perception.   And yoga practice is a way of establishing very deep intimacy with ones actions, ones thoughts, ones feelings, ones mind, oneself and with ones life.   Within that intimacy there is a movement from the appearance or the apparent nature of actions, objects and perception to their actual nature, their true nature.   You could say that the primary or the pivotal object which is being investigated is the self, the subject of action and the subject of perception.   However, direct investigation of the self, direct investigation into the true nature of the self, is fraught with difficulty because on the one hand the self appears to be so obvious and so concrete and on the other hand when you start to look more closely it´become so elusive and subtle.  

Were it not so then it would be relatively easy just for everybody to sit down, cross their legs and examine the true nature of the self, or enquire into the true nature of the self.   And it is possible for some people and this is the path that the Buddha took and you could say that this is the path that those who follow the teachings of the Buddha also are attempting to tread.   And even though it is a path that seems not many people finish, neverthless, it´s very beneficial to tread it even a little.   And it seems to be that the difficulty of that path for us today is simply because of the way our minds are, the way our lives are, which is quite different from the way the minds and lives were in India two thousand five hundred years ago.   The pace of life, the speed of the mind, the incredible range of experience to which our minds are subject means that the self has a huge catalogue of impressions and characteristics which are all very superficial but very obvious compared to those more subtle characteristics that have always been there and that were there two thousand five hundred years ago but weren´t covered up with so many other experiences.  

My friend, Juan built this house with the help of the local people whom he became very friendly with and a few years ago he bumped into a very old lady who grabbed hold of him in a fit of excitement and said, "Juan, Juan!   I had no idea there were so many people in the world".   He said,  "how many did you think there were?", she said, "fifty, sixty", because she knew ten or twelve.   So she assumed there must be a few more.   So there weren´t very many objects in her life, in her mind.   There weren´t many different kinds of experiences and opportunities that she had to look at, or would have to look at, to come to herself, to sift through.   There are women apparently alive today, on this island who have never seen the sea.   It´s hard for us, people like us, to imagine that.   Whose experience of life is so limited that they haven´t even seen something which is only a couple of miles away.   People in the time of the Buddha, their lives were more like that than like ours.  

So what this means is that the contemporary mind is very very full of knowledge, very full of experience, very full of information and this information is kind of like the balls in the lottery thing, just spinning round all the time in there creating lots of noise.   The purpose of the physical practice, the posture practice can be seen in many ways, but relative to what I am saying, it can be seen as a fantastice medium for harnessing the movement of the mind, for going with the movement of the mind by moving the body.   So this is where vinyasa comes in and becomes very powerful; the movement from posture to posture rather than stopping and lying in Savasana in between postures in which case the movement of the mind tends to just take over, completely restablish itself, and then you go back into the next posture and you go on off, on off, on off, and you never go very deep but with the vinyasa linking posture to posture, the movement of the body or the flow of the practice harnesses and expresses the tendency of the mind to flow but by harnessing it focusses that flow of the mind into the flow of the body.   And then when that harnessing of the mind has brought about enough focus then all there is for the mind to be concerned with is the body, it´s actions and its impact on the mind.

So then the mental activity is related totally to what´s going on in the body and so you are immersed in an instantaneous field of actions and objects.   By instantaneous I mean actions and objects that are in your awareness that are happening right now.   That are constituting the moment whereas most of the time the actions and objects that are catching your attention are not present, they are absent, they are from the past or they are in the future.   Of course that can happen also in your yoga practice but it tends to happen less and less. So eventually you are just brought face to face with the actions that you are taking and the object with which you are taking those actions, the straightening ( action) of the leg ( object) , etcetera, etcetera.
 
Starting with action: within the intimacy of what´s actually happening in the body in the flow of yoga posture practice the conceptual isolation or the extraction into attention of separate actions happens less and less and you start to experience very clearly that there is always a net of actions going on at the same time, even if the focus of your attention into that network is through a particular action which might be bending or straightening: let´s say bending the front leg in virabadrasana. Within that the primary action to bend the front leg is to take the head of the thigh bone down.   But in order for this not to create collapse in the pelvis and the trunk, at the same time you have to rotate the hip socket upwards.  

So you start to realise that so called separable actions within the integrity of the posture are only perceptibly separable.   And if they are accurately and actually separated then the postures disappears, it collapses. When intimacy with the integrity or the dynamic, or the attempt to establish the body in comfortable stability, stiram sukham , deepens it becomes clear that it´s not just two or three or four or five actions that are going on in the moment, but you can actually take any one of those actions and divide it into any number of actions; say five and then you can divide that into five, you can get down to neural action in the brain, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.   So any action turns out to be constituted of hundreds or millions, depending on the depth of your perception, of other actions.   At the same time as being connected to a field or a web of actions at a similar level of perception to itself.   All of which are part of the one action of making that posture.   Which is a sub set of the activity of your practice, which is a sub set of the activity of your life.

So within the body, within yoga pòstures this exploration is pragmatic, the enquiry doesn´t have to be intellectual; there is nothing wrong with intellectualising about it, but if there is no pragmatic experience behind the intellectualisation then it´s just speculation.   Even if it happens to be accurate there is always going to be some doubt in you as to whether or not it´s really true.   So within this process there is a dissolving of obvious actions into subtle actions which become obvious and it is the dissolving of those actions into more subtle actions which then become obvious, and then the dissolving of those actions, and then that goes on and on forever as far as your sensitivity, ahimsa , or the subtlety of your perception permits.   But it doesn´t have to go on forever for you to realise that it´s going to go on forever that it would go on forever if the process of sensitising continues.  

So what´s actually happened is that actions have just disappeared.   Actions have just melted away into the field of your refined awareness, refined perception.   Which doesn´t mean that the body has stopped acting, it doesn´t mean that the nervous system has stopped firing, it doesn´t mean that muscles will stop contracting, but we´re talking about how you experience, we´re talking about the nature of perception, we are talking about perception.   We are not talking about matter, this is not physics, this is yoga.  

So when I say actions disappear that means a particular action turns out not to be an individual action but an expression of many, many, many other actions.   And as soon as it becomes obvious that if in virabadrasana you take away the straightening of the back leg, you don´t have virabadrasana .   You have a poor copy which damages your lower back, the damage to your lower back is the lesson of the true nature of action.   Which is that you cannot extract one single action from the network of actions in order for virabadrasana to be there.   Virabadrasana requires every single action at every single level in order for it to be there, in order for it to be virabadrasana , not just a shape.  

So this is bringing you to a quality fundamental to the nature of all actions.   There is nothing special about the actions that you are taking in your body relative to all other actions.   Actions are actions.   And what this quality or characteristic of actions that you come to is the inextricability of actions.   You cannot extract an action from its context and the contextual situation remain intact and whole: remain what it is.   If you extract an action from its context, the contextual situation has gone.   But of course we can pretend to ourselves that it hasn´t.   We can say, "I still love you", but it isn´t true.   But because we don´t want to be left alone to do the washing up every night you say, "I still love you", and give them some flowers or whatever.  

After a while your pragmatic investigation of the nature of action in your body, in the posutres, gets to a point where it´s really clear pragmatically and conceptually, that all actions are inextricable from the web of actions within which they participate.   You then don´t really need to go very much further in your investigation.   A few people have said to me lately, "what´s the point in carrying on investigating?", and my answer is none.   When you no longer need to.   Then you just go and play.   But until there is absolutely no doubt that absolutely no one is to blame for any action by which you suffered, then there is reason to continue investigating and that reason is just guilt and blame.   That reason is just that burden: resentment, regret.   That pain is the reason the investigation needs to continue.

Exactly the same as in virabadrasana : the reason to continue investigating the true nature of action required in virabadrasana , is the pain that comes, that´s all.   Just the pain.   Okay we often can´t feel the pain that´s going on in virabadrasana and of course most of the time we don´t feel the pain of our guilt, the pain of our blame.   We take too many drugs.   We are running too fast.   Our mind is moving too fast.   We make it move so fast so that it won´t feel the shame, so that it won´t feel the blame, so that it won´t feel the resentment, the hostility.   But in yoga you can´t keep that up.   Within yoga practice, as you harness the movement of your body, it all slows down and so yoga brings out this kind of pain, just as yoga brings out the pain that´s already in your lower back or the back of your knee, or the front of your knee, or your hip joint.   It brings it out.   Sometimes it makes it when you are doing it wrong, but even when you are doing it right it brings it out.   It shows you the pain that is there, it shows you the damage that has been done, not just to your body, but to your mind, to your heart.  

And of course there is a lot more resistance to acknowledging the pain in your mind and in your heart than there is to acknowledging the pain in your body.   So it´s very easy when it gets to that pain that you just start turning away and you go back to the speeding mind.   And then you use the vinyasa element and the handstands, and the, "I can get my feet on my head, behind my head", as an expression of the speed of the mind and as a defence against the recognition of pain, which is unfortunately also a defence against the recognition of the source of pain and it´s lack of necessity; that it´s simply a habit.   It´s a habit that is based upon the extraction of individual actions from the inherently unified field of activity.   The isolating of actions.   "I´m unhappy because my mother kicked me down the stairs when I was two", or, "I´m unhappy because she left me for another guy".  

The belief that actions are extractable means that it is assumed that an action didn´t have to happen, that it could have not happened, and everything would still be the same.   I would still have the same income, the same house, the same friends, the same holiday opportunities.   There´s absolutely no evidence for this.   This is pure conjecture, that if one thing had been different, everything else would be the same except for the one consequence of that that you don´t like.   This is called childishness.   It´s called pathetic unwillingness to think.   But this is what we all do all the time, all the time, all the time.   But thinking has to be based on something and it has to be based on something that´s yours, not anybody else´s no matter how brilliant you may think that they are.   The Buddha, Patanjali, whoever.   It´s no good.   The thinking has to be based on your own experience and yoga gives you plenty of experience upon which to base your thinking.  

The inside of the recognition to the inextricability of an action, is that all actions are imperfectable. Inextricability means there was no other option for the part that it played in the context within which it happened.   For its context to happen the way that it happened, and for the consequences of its context to happen the way that they happened, it could not have happened in any way differently, neither better, nor worse, neither sooner nor later, neither harder nor softer, neither lesss nor more.   It could not have been in any way different. It could not have been done in a better way. It could not have been done any better. It could not have been better. Now this 'it' refers to every event, every action, every thought and feeling that has ever taken place. Every action is perfect, is immaculate.   Every action that has happened has been sanctified by it´s happening. Within the inextricability of its happening is its being immaculate. Perfect. Everything is quite simply perfect. Even if we do not like it much. From our point of view maybe it sucks. But from the perspective of the whole, for an awareness of the true nature of action, it is perfect. Every action is absolutely perfect: absolutely immaculate.

That´s the easy part: to go from the inextricability of an action to its perfection. That is the easy part of the investigation of the source of action.   So far we´re just looking a little bit at the nature of action.   But yoga is isvarapranidana, finding the line to the source of choice.   We are on the line right now.   Inextricability, imperefctability, immaculateness taking us on that line of action back to the source of choice.  If that set of actions that did actually happen, just in the way that they did, did actually happen in just the way that they did, they could not only not have been better or worse: they could not have been in any way different. They could not , not one of them, however small, subtle or diagreebale, have happened differently. which measn they could not have not-happened. Which means, oh shit, that they had to happen. The could not have not-happned. They absolutley had to happen. Not they were meant or suposed or by divine decree ordained, but simply they had to happen. They were inevitable. All actions are not only inextricable, imperefctable and immaculate, they are all inevitable.

If everything that has happened is perfect, if everything that has happened is inevitable, what does that have to say about choice?

There is no choice. There is no choice. But it does not mean that it doesn´t feel like there´s a choice.   You know it feels like there´s choice.   Nobody can take that away from you.   You know it feels like choice.   But you know when a pickpocket pulls your wallet out of your back pocket it feels like nothing happened, but it´s not nothing at all.   Things are very rarely what they feel like. The new age has asked us to abandon logic, to abandon reason, to abandon the male principle and give ourselves up to the female principle and trust our feelings.   Doesn´t work.   You can´t take the female away from the male, you can´t take the male away from the female, you can´t trust your feeling about life. You have to question it.   You can´t rely on logic.   It has to be based on your experience, your feeling.
 
On the basis of your own practice, your familiarity with the melting of any action into subsets of actions, forever, and the inextricability of even one of those subset actions, from the contextual activity of the posture, you can go from there to no-choice.   If you can go against common sense. Common sense tells us that the sun is going round the earth.   That´s what common sense tells us, so how helpful is common sense?   Not very!   I mean it doesn´t matter, most of your life it doesn´t matter you know, but to understand things like tides and menstruation you need more than common sense.   You need to understand the true relationship between the balls that move in the sky, between the planets.   So also if you really want to understand your life you can´t rely only on common sense.   You have to contextualise common sense.   So we do have the common sense feeling that we do have a choice, and we have been told over and over again to make the right choices.   You know multiple choice, eleven plus and all the rest of it.   Make the right choices.   But if you can dissolve out of that habit on the basis of your own experience of your body on the mat in the yoga postures and just consider what is being suggested by that, you might find that deeper than that but not denying that, you have no-choice.

If you want to say that you do have choice in an absolute sense, then inevitability has gone, immaculateness, inextricability has gone. And then supposedly you can take anything that you like out of anything that you like and it wouldn´t change.   How absurd, of course it would change. Something has been taken out, it has changed. And there´s no way that you can predict how else it would change unless you have a huge amount of knowledge.   So sometimes you can.   You know, if you are just talking about a cheque. Less money would be in your account. But how can you predict what that would bring in its wake. Or an arrangement of dominoes; if I take this one out I know what´s going to happen. They are all going to fall down.But i dont know how theyre going to lie when theyve finished falling. If you take your worst enemy out of your life, you have no idea what´s going to happen.   You think you do but actually you don´t.   You don´t know how your so called worst enemy is interconnected through everybody else that you know, doing things to your advantage that you don´t even know about.  

If you can savour the notion of no-choice, if it doesn´t too quickly leave a bad taste in your mouth, then that´s what you should do.   If you want to be free from the pain of guilt, of blame, of shame, of resentment, of envy, of pride, of doubt, of uncertainty as to the meaning and point, the purpose of life. Just take the notion of no-choice lightly in your hand and use it as a lense to look out at the world. That doesnt mean stop making choices. It doesnt mean try to avoid decisions. Its not meant to be an excuse. Its not meant to be a truth. Its just a concept. A concept that can burn up a whole bunch of other invisibly damaging concepts like right and wrong, good and evil, holy and wicked.

What are the implications of there being no choice? If no choice is an actuality then what that means is that with regard to any action that has occurred it could not have been otherwise.   That´s the past. Could not have been, in any way, different at all. All you can honestly say about the past is that it did happen. You cannnot honestly say that it should not, could not, did not have, to happen. This is pure speculation: foolishness: childishness.

The problem is with the future, that´s where you feel like you have a choice.   You feel like you have a choice when you are anticipating the future.   But we have been looking at the past.   But we have been looking at the past so that we can look at the future in a different way.   In a way in which there is no anxiety.   No anxiety about the future is necessary for you to be happy in the present.   If you are worried about whether you are going to have enough money to go on holiday next year while you are on holiday this year, you are not on holiday this year.   If you have anxiety about whether or not you´re going to be able to pay the rent when you get home, then you´re not in the present and you´re not happy.   You may not be feeling that though; you may be making your mind spin so fast and thinking, "I´m happy, I´m happy, I´m having a good time, I´m really having a good time".

So by looking back at the function of choice relative to the past, knowing that you are going to make choices in the future, can help you in the making of those choices in the future. It can become not so hard for you to make choices in the future.   If any action in the past was a result of no-choice operating, it was operating through a psychological process of choosing. It was a subjective, superficial, personal experience of choosing, that was expressing a much deeper inevitability, a thrust that goes back way past your birth, way past the conception of your great great grandparents, way past the first coupling of human beings, way past that, way past the beginning of the formation of whatever it was that resulted in this planet.  

This is the thrust of no-choice, this is the thrust of inevitability which is not what it feels like because our attention is on the surface.   Because our attention is on the juggler,   the pickpocket pulls out the wallet. If underneath the feeling of having made a choice in the past, having to have made a choice, if underneath the sense of that there is an imperfectible and inevitable thrust originating in the beginning of time that means that the statement that we´ve made so many times: "I couldn´t help myself, I couldn´t help it, I didn´t mean to": Those statements that we´ve all made to the people that we care about turn out to be absolutely true, and turn out to have been absolutely true even when we did the brilliant thing that they love us for.   Couldn´t help it.   Had to happen.   If you can ever get to that point where you know that, not intellectually, but you know that because you see it happening moment after moment in your practice and in your life; or even just when you start to get close to that, the closer you get to that, the more the future changes its hue, it´s colour, just somewhat. And instead of being something possibly slightly threatening, possibly, doesn´t mean that it´s actually threatening, but there is an awareness that things may not turn out the way you´d like, things may go wrong, you might lose your job, your boyfriend, your car, the use of your legs, your spine, your nervous system, your body, your mind, all these things, you don´t know could be coming: but when your relationship to choice in the past has changed so that you no longer argue with them, wish or imagine they could have been otherwise, then the future looks different. All of a sudden it changes. It changes for the better.

And the way that it changes doesn´t mean you don´t have choices.   It doesn´t mean you don´t have to make decisions; it doesn´t mean that you don´t ponder and you don´t consider; it doesn´t mean that you´re not uncertain and you can´t figure out what the fuck to do. These things are all going to happen some time, but what it means is that you will be allowing this to happen. This will be happening within a slightly more relaxed context, in that you will have some understanding, some recognition that whatever decision you finally make will be the one that will have to be made.   And whatever the consequences of those actions, will be the consequences that will have to have to happened.   So even though you may be unhappy about the consequences, even though you may not like the actions taken, you will be able to see that you couldn´t help it. In other words you won´t feel guilty.   You won´t feel bad, even though you might not like it which means you won´t feel bad about yourself even though you might not like the situation you find yourself in.

You may feel a little bit like the rug has been pulled out from under your feet in the face of the unsustainability of the notion of free choice. This is bound to happen in the beginning, to a certain extent: saying, "woah, what the fuck am I supposed to do" As it is now the whole of your life is based on trying to make the right decision, right for other people perhaps, right for you perhaps, right for the planet perhaps, but the right decision, always. Well not all people maybe, but most people are always trying to make the right decision: some people only for themselves, but trying to make the right decision, the correct decision.  

So when this kind of insight into inextricable inevitability in the past arises in yourself,   if the experience behind it is not so much or that insight is not so clear and broad and deep then it can make you feel very unpleasant.   "What should I do?" is the question that arises.   And it´s a question that I ask many times, "what should I do?".   And, to the extent that you have accepted the inextricability of action, the inevitability of action, the immaculate nature of all action in the past and therefore in the future, the answer is - it doesn´t matter.   You can´t help youself.   You will do what the thrust of time demands of you.   No matter how much you do or don´t ponder, no matter how relevant your pondering is to that action, that action will happen.   You could say if you´ve got good judgement; your choices and your decisions will always support the actions that you end up taking: or the actions will always express your choices and your decisions as if the action were the result of your choice and your decision.

This is our arrogance. That our actions are the result of our decisions, our chioces.   And the more accurate your judgement, the more clear your judgement, the more able you are to recognise the thrust of history and make the decision that does become an action, then the more difficult it is to accept that you are not in control.   I was having dinner with my brother the other day, and he said, "what is it that you are giving to people?", so I said, "well I´m just trying to give them the opportunity to see that they are not in control of their lives" and he just burst out laughing and said, "well that´s fucking obvious".   If I had said that a few years ago, he would have replied "oh don´t be stupid.   Let me make another million and show you it´s not true".   So you can say his judgement is no longer lining up with the thrust of history.   It did for a long time but he was able to tell himself that he was making it happen.   But actually he knows that he is not the controller of his life, but he hasnt thought it through. He's too busy still trying to figure out what to do. He has not taken that insight deep enough down into the nature of action itself. He still thinks he can control the little things. So he is still unhappy: racked with regret, guilt, resentment, uncertainty.

You said something earlier about childishness and stupidity and it go me to thinking that perhaps there´s a step before accepting that there´s no control which is about being sensitive, kind, open and honest to that child in me so that I am ready to grow up and let go and I´ve realised that I can´t have everything that I want and that I´m not in control but that child does need loving and looking after and that when that inner child is liked and looked after then the whole guilt, blame, fades completely.

Yeah, that´s certainly an option and you know and if that´s where your inclination takes you then you have no choice but to go that way.   But there is another option which is to say, "well actually I´m an adult and let´s see what happens if I investigate these things", and then the child will just go.   Free.   So that´s another option over which you have no choice whether you take it or not.   So when the question´s asked, "what should I do?", the answer is do that which you do. Which of course sounds like an unhelpful answer. Every time that we do something, we are just doing that which we feel most inclined to do. This is not usually what we would most like to do. It is how our conditioning expresses itself in the situation in which we are. We always do what we are inclined to do, so there is really no need to guess in advance what that will, should or ought to be. So the answer to the question " what should i do?" is "whatever you feel like". But what is different once the immaculate nature of action has been recognised is that there is no worry or anxiety, though there may be curiosity and interest, about actions not yet taken; and there is no anxiety though there is uncertainty, and there may be curisoity and amazement, about actions that have not yet been taken. Within this this the deprived child becomes quiet, but not the other way round.

I think they can work parallel

You think they can work parallel. If working parallell is what´s going to happen for somebody then they can and will work parallell.   Likewise if one thinks it´s more effective to work in parallel, if it makes sense to use two options instead of one, then that is the way you will be inclined to go about it. And the question of wether it is more effective or not remains academic. You go about it in this way, or you go about it in that way, and then it works or it doesnt.

What about other people, when you´ve made a choice and you know that it might be wrong for some moral reason or whatever, what about when we´re hurting other people by make a choice that you had to make?   And then you don´t really feel guilty about the choice you make because you couldn´t do it any different but you feel guilty because you´ve hurt somebody else.

Yes.   And this is also childish separation of the consequence of an action from it´s cause or choice. This kind of separation is an indication of a mind simply following a cocktail of habit and preference, in which the social conditioning is totally mixed up, which is where most of us tend to be. But when the true nature of action becomes a point of interest, a point of selfenquiry, then this kind of self justifying separation begins to become impossible. Within such an enquiry you would start to trace the guilt back, and if you take that far enough it spreads itself so thin over the infinite and indivisible matrix of actions and objects that it cannot be attributed to any of those actions and objects individually.

But the other person is still feeling hurt.

You have to relate to that, so there´s no reason why you can´t say "I´m really sorry" if you arent happy that they are hurt.   "I´m really sorry that my action hurt you, I´m really sorry that my decision hurt you, I´m really sorry that I hurt you", you can say it any way you like but that doesn´t mean that you have to feel guilty even if you are sorry. Sorry here means you sympathise, not you feel guilty.   And just saying sorry so that they can understand where you´re coming from in terms of how they feel like doesn´t mean that you are taking responsibility for their pain within yourself.   You are for them so that they can function.   But what´s your option? Your other option is to let other people´s perceptions of your actions determine your whole life. Their pain is not just a function of your action, it is much more a function of their conditioning. The same action always produces different results on different people.

Change your actions.

Well all I´m saying is- you did what you did and and then your boyfriend says, "but you´re a bitch" and so if you take it on board that it was your fault you say, "yes, I´m bad" in such a way that through that dynamic you´re making yourself feel guilty or he´s trying to do that, then what you´re doing is you are living his life instead of your life, youre living according to his understanding not your understanding, his judgement, so what´s he doing to you?   What´s that other person doing to you?   Saying, "I don´t give a fuck about you.   I don´t give a fuck about your understanding.   I only give a fuck about what I feel", and this is called facism.   It´s happening all the time in interpersonal relationships.   Let´s say we have a relationship and I´ve done something bad, and to feel better about it I want to make you see it like I do.   No matter what.   You must see it like I do., "no you´ve done this bad thing and it was wrong.   You shouldn´t have". This is psychological fascism. But if, as a result of your enquiry into the true nature of action, you recognise you couldn´t help it, it was the inevitable thrust of history you say to him, "look I´m really sorry you are upset let´s see if we can reach some common understanding"

I just want to say about this, it is very easy to confuse guilt with empathy, so if you are driving a car and you hit someone, if you feel guilty about it then all the energy goes into what have I done, I was stupid, if you just see what´s happening, feel the pain and do whatever helps to continue on without spending energy on "what have I done" , but just see a person suffering, you do everything that you can and you also feel it, but you don´t feel guilty.   It just happened.   It had to happen.

Do we choose to take away the guilt then?  

Your guilt is present on the basis of assumption, a set of beliefs about causation that has been created over time and when the mechanism of the establishment of those beliefs is seen to be simply that, an establishment of a set of beliefs then the guilt weakens. So in other words when you bring the structure of your mind into the light of your awareness, awareness is an invitation to change. But guilt does not go away just because you want it to, just because you like the idea that you are not the doer. Oka,y and that´s fine but that´s not what´s going on within another body mind organism. What business is it of yours what´s going on inside another body mind?

Well it´s your business if its one that you love and you´re going to create pain.

Okay if you don´t want to create pain you are going to respond or react according to that impulse however you do, according to your conditioning. But this impulse cannot gaurantee success. We are always causing pain to those that we love.

Yeah, there´s no choice.

But it feels like there is, especially when we are looking forwards. But that´s because of the past: because of our conditioning that we must always make the right choice, we must always make the right decisions.   That impetus is still there and that impulse is making us think, "I´ve got to get it right". But the changing hue of the future that I´m talking about would be more like, "well I hope it´s going to turn out the way I would like and I´m going to do my best, I´m going to do my utmost", you know, "if I know that such and such a person doesn´t like such and such I´m going to do my best to avoid such and such", but if it turns out that such and such is unavoidable no matter how angry they get and how contrite I might be because of their experience I will not be guilty about my own.   As the inextricable, inevitable, immaculate nature of all actions becomes more and more apparent the guilt is dying away, the blame is dying away so you don´t have to worry about it.   It comes by itself.   And once your perspective begins to change, and you just enquire, you don´t have to believe, but you really start to enquire into the true nature and source of action, guilt is on the run.   Blame is on the run and you can´t control how long it´s going to take until it´s gone.

But then you start to realise, you really start to look at your life.

You are already looking at your life, looking in different way, a very special and potent way, that allows you to more deeply, fully and openly live your life.   To love your life.   To live the life you´re loving, and love the life you're living and all the rest of it.   The only one you´ll ever have.

I´m wondering what you think of contextual thinking at the global level.   Most of the situations that we´ve heard about, about whether you make the right decision, whether you are hurting somebody else could be seen as a surf board in appropriately sized context in which you could have certain rules and regulations that allow you to figure out what was right and what was wrong, but in taking the fact of larger matrix sized context that just falls apart, and right now globally it is being noticed that whether it´s financial or environmental or cultural we are having a matrix life appreciation of the effects of one thing on another, a matrix size effect.   Do you think that is so related to what you´re talking about that there is some way that humanity is developing some sense of the matrix?

Well, you know, that´s a bit speculative, its all a bit far away.   So the power of investigation is when it is first hand, on the first hand level, focussed on the actions that you´re taking.   And that´s going to bring about a knock on effect, it has to.   You are going to become less exploitative as an individual and the people around you are going to notice how much you benefit from this thing that also involves you being less exploitative and that´s going to invite them to go in that direction and become less exploitative.   But I don´t think that any healing that we might be hoping for relative to the land or society as a whole can be imposed from above no matter how divinely inspired the sage is, or the politician or whoever they are, who are attempting to impose it.   Because life is lived in interraction between person and person and individual and individual: that´s where the pain is.   And that´s where the recognition of the matrix has to be.   And so I can write books till the cows come home explaining the matrix and how stupid people are not to understand it, and it´s not going to help anyone who doesnt have the relevant esxperience to make sense of it.   There has to be an invitation to experience, it has to be experienced.
 
Godfrey I´ve read quite a few books on yoga and they do not come anywhere close to what you are saying now.

Nor do mine, nor do the books that I´ve written.

But, okay, but all those books they´re enough to put me off doing yoga.

Doing yoga?   But you are doing it and you´re hearing this, so who cares about all the books you didnt like? They brought you here, they brought you here.   First you have to crawl, then you have to walk.

Actually the books on traditional path of yoga to me sounds like a load of bollocks.

Yeah but you have to go through that before you can find a book that tells you "it´s alright, you can eat onions".   So then it was okay, so that means that they participated in your journey. If I were to write a book and call it dynamic yoga from your understanding you wouldn´t be here.

Why can´t we eat onions?   Why do they say that we can´t eat onions?

Because it supposedly stimulates sexual desire.   And that´s really fucking dangerous, because you might enjoy it.   So we´re going to have a hot meal today: onion soup, fried onions, onion tempura and stewed onions for desert. And oysters.

Have you got any idea why all of that bollocks came about?

It doesn´t really matter.   Of course I´ve got ideas.   I´ve got ideas about everything you know and they´re all just ideas. Plenty of them bollocks too, all of them really.

Because going to my first yoga class that I ever did, I loved it, I came away from there, "woah, what the fuck was that?"   You know?   And so I started to read stuff about it and it was just, you know, being an ex catholic the last thing I wanted to do was get involved in more bullshit.
 
Yes the same thing has happened to yoga as has happened to the teachings of Jesus.   It´s inevitable with the passage of time.   It´s called Chinese whispers you know, and these whispers about yoga have been going on for thousands of years, two thousand years, two thousand years or so of mounting confusion.   And what´s happening now yoga is going from India to the west and in going from India to the west we are saying, "well what is this really?".   We are questioning it because we are questioners coming from a different social and psychological structure from the Indians.   So theoretically you could say that they should have been questioning these things, but no, they didn´t have the context.   We have the context, we question everything: so in that questioning we can come back to what yoga really is, to how yoga really can work so that it´s not just another system of self denial and self chastising and self righteousness which is what it has become and what it still is a lot in a lot of places but it´s going, it´s really changing because we don´t want that, we can´t handle that, as you say we know that shit.   We don´t want it.

I´m really glad you´re not like those yogis.

Yeah, I´m really fucking glad too.  

You know every time I meet somebody, "oh you do yoga?   Oh I didn´t know yogis smoke". "I didn´t know yogis were alive."

I always used to say I´m an anti-yogi.   What does that mean?   Id say, "well what you think of yoga, I ain´t there". But now I think that that´s anti yoga and now I say I am a yogi.  

Youre the anti christ.

Okay lunch time.

canam ibiza 2003