Satsang with Premananda, Tiruvannamalai, India, 2004
PREM: Welcome to Satsang. So there are two recent interesting, spiritual books. One is called The Power of Now and this became an international bestseller. The other is a series of three books called The Power of Presence. So what exactly does it mean to be present? And why use the word Power? This is somehow the crux of the whole thing and it's incredibly simple, but it's so incredibly simple that it's almost impossible to get. This Presence is always now, exactly now, in this very moment, not in that last moment, not about what I had for dinner last night. It's not in the next moment. So it's not about where we're going tomorrow. It's right now. It's when there are no thoughts of the past and there are no thoughts of the future, so in fact, there are no thoughts. There is a kind of potentiality. Everything is functioning, consciousness is working, but actually nothing is happening. If you like, the screen is blank. We can call that Pure Awareness. There's a sound of a bird, the wind on the cheek, an Awareness of the chair and then another bird sings. We feel the warmth of the sun, sound of the traffic and it's all happening Now. We're not evaluating it. We're not saying, 'Aah! That's a beautiful bird sound, but I don't like the sound of that traffic'. There's no judgement. There's just an Awareness of Now. Total acceptance of what is. We don't know anyway if it's good or bad. There is no mind. It's not quite true to say, 'there is no mind'. The mind is somehow there as a potential, but it's not active. There's no story. Maybe even a thought will come and then it will go. It doesn't disturb this Presence. It's just like that. And this word Power, why to use this word Power about the Presence?
When you're really present nothing can shake that. I remember one time sitting with U.G. Krishnamurthi. He's about eighty-six now, and he's a well-known, kind of anarchistic spiritual teacher and he's an interesting man to meet. He's rather small. He travels with a small bag. He eats porridge twice a day. He looks about seventy and his energy is more like fifty. Anyway, we had a conversation. We were on the top level of a hotel in Sydney and at some point in the talk somebody turned on a pump on the roof.
It was very close. It was very noisy. He didn't miss a beat and after some time somebody turned off the pump and it was wonderful talking to this man. We were supposed to be having a discussion, but actually, he spoke non-stop for two hours and occasionally I said, 'yes', a few times 'no', and if I was lucky I could squeeze in a question. He would put forth something. He would talk about it and then he would kind of close it up. It felt as if there was a paving stone; he put down a paving stone and he invited me to stand on it and then he put another paving stone and then just as I was standing on it he would take up the one behind and at the end of the two hours it was like nothing happened. Nothing was left somehow and there was total Presence, vibrant and you can say, powerful because this small man eating porridge twice a day, he's a personification of Power. Not in the sense of corporate power. It's like sitting in front of a cool tornado. Very focused.
There's nothing to do to be present. It's absolutely given. In fact, you have to do something not to be present. In fact you have to do a lot. As soon as you stop you are absolutely and automatically present. It's a wonderful way to live and it's the whole attainment of spirituality, not to carry any baggage, any old stories. Be free of all that. To live on the edge. To have no idea what the next moment will bring. Everything is a risk. You don't care. Actually, there isn't anybody to care. There's just an Awareness, we can say a Pure Awareness.
Let's just close our eyes for a moment. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel the weight of your body on the chair, the slight coolness of the air on your skin. Sounds - children's voices, birds singing, sound of Premananda's voice and Leela's voice, the traffic, some voices. Some thought passes. The sound of the birds seems to be a little louder. Perhaps, some pain in the body. The wind ruffling the hair. Traffic passing by. Something opening inside. A kind of emptiness, expanding, seemingly without boundaries. The odd thought passing. Sound of the traffic. Wind on the cheek. Bird songs. Traffic sounds. Bird songs. Some thoughts arise and suddenly we identify with those thoughts and then those thoughts lead to other thoughts. The whole story starts. We no longer hear the sound of the birds because suddenly we're absolutely in the story. We're feeling terrible. We're remembering last year's holiday. It was a terrible holiday. It rained everyday and the food was awful. There were so many mosquitoes and the traffic was terrible, awful pollution and anyway, the room was uncomfortable, had no view at all and I fell out with my girlfriend.
It was just the most terrible holiday. You become absolutely attached to this movie, the movie of last year's holiday. You even start to get emotional about it. It seems to be absolutely real as if it's happening right now but in fact, it's just a memory. However you become totally attached to it. There's no sense of Presence. You don't hear the traffic. You don't notice the wind on your cheek. You just remember the mosquitoes and the rain, breaking up with your girlfriend. It was a terrible holiday.
So we lose this Presence because we become attached to our mind, to some thoughts or stories, mostly from the past. But they can also be from the future. Sometimes we get in tremendous fear about the future. This fear takes over our daily life. We have no idea how we can get from here to there. 'How can I pay the rent? How could I buy that train ticket? How will I survive?' An enormous fear comes inside. We're as if transfixed by it.
It was 'my' holiday, 'somebody's' holiday and it's 'somebody' who's afraid, it's 'somebody' who's not going to survive. I completely lose touch with the Pure Awareness. So these attachments are always a wrong identification. We're always getting again identified with somebody. When we're present there isn't anybody. There is Pure Awareness, if you like, an empty screen and the sounds impinge on that.
It's like being in the flow of the river. Moving without effort. Things seem to just happen. In exactly the right moment suddenly appears just the right person. 'Oh, you're going on a bus tour and you have a DVD player in the bus. Go and see Gabriel he has many DVD's.' There's no effort. It takes tremendous effort not to be present, "doing" my life. Just flowing down with the river. No effort. Things unfold. And when you become attached to a story, in that moment you can rescue yourself. You can ask yourself, 'Who is attached to last year's holiday? I am attached, and who is this 'I'? When you do this enquiry it takes the energy away from the story and it comes back to the Source. The Source is this Presence, it is this Pure Awareness, it is the Self, the Eternal Self.
So once again, feeling the feet on the ground and the seat on the chair, the spine against the back of the chair, perhaps some body sensation. Sound of the traffic. The clucking of the bird. The sound of the traffic. A kind of symphony. Perhaps, some thought passing by. Not much is happening. A certain space. A sense of peace, stillness.
The other day you met Hans, the German. He took you up on the hill. Thirty years ago he met Papaji in Switzerland. He was attending the lectures of J. Krishnamurthi. He was a famous teacher and every year he had a kind of retreat in Switzerland. Papaji used to go there and J. Krishnamurthi would talk every other day and on the alternative day Papaji would be available. Hans met Papaji on one of those days and he was very impressed by that meeting because he noticed that Papaji seemed to be very present most of the time and he realised that was what he wanted. So he became very connected to Papaji and some years later he would spend up to three months at a time in India sharing a room with Papaji and after some time he asked Papaji one day, 'Your experiences of Presence seem to be much longer than mine' and Papaji answered, 'That's not the right way to look. Presence is not an experience. Presence is your nature. 'Your Life' is an experience'.
We've become so conditioned. What we think is normal and natural actually requires great energy - to keep all these stories going. So Papaji was pointing to something very important and we can just live in this Presence, in this Pure Awareness with nothing between, understanding that these stories are not important. It's all garbage. Anything that has happened is already garbage. It's already passed. So the whole effort is just to be present and it needs no effort. It needs an absence of effort. This is your nature, so it's very easy. You don't have to understand anything. You don't have to do anything. It's just a given.
I remember one time I was just sitting with Satchitananda quietly in his room and many people were coming and meeting him as he is the head of a large ashram. Just before, I had made a donation. I put some money in an envelope and he gave it to his assistant who put it in the drawer where he was sitting. He went on with his meeting and was giving some kind of spiritual answers to some people and then one of his assistants came in with the electricity bill. He stopped what he was doing. He just glanced at the electricity bill. Perhaps, he was checking the total to see if it compared to last month's bill and then he nodded to his assistant, gave him the bill and then he pointed to the drawer. Then the assistant opened the drawer to take the money for the bill and somehow there wasn't quite enough money. Then he opened up my envelope and there was enough money and the assistant left with the money to pay the bill and Satchidananda just continued his meetings. Almost nothing happened and in this way he was running this big ashram.
It doesn't matter what is happening on the outside. If you're really present there's Pure Awareness. It doesn't matter if there is Pure Awareness of the electricity bill or Pure Awareness of a spiritual conversation. This Awareness is the same. Presence is the same.
Ramana Maharshi was famous for sitting on a couch. But he also liked working in the kitchen. So each morning he got up very early and went to the kitchen. He prepared the breakfast for the ashram and he helped to prepare the lunch. We don't know anything about that because that was not really for the public. The people who came to the ashram to visit and who met him on the couch, they probably weren't there at four o'clock in the morning when he was in the kitchen. For him it didn't matter if he was sitting on the couch or he was chopping vegetables in the kitchen. It really doesn't matter what you do. If you're present, you're present. You can be present with a vegetable or you can be present with somebody coming to meet you.
Spiritual life is every moment. It's not a special thing and that's why, for example, in this retreat we prepare the food together. We don't want any separation. It's not that this meeting is special. The whole effort is simply to be present for each moment of our lives. In a way, you can say there isn't any spiritual life. It's just life. So the Zen people say, 'Before Enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water and after Enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water'.
In the next few days we are going to meet three extraordinary spiritual teachers. You can call them saints and you'll find they're very ordinary, very simple. The thing that somehow each has in common with the other is that you can feel Presence and you'll feel the Power of that.
When we visit Tuli Baba, you'll see that, people are in the habit of bringing biscuits and sweets to his Satsangs. His assistant prepares it all on a tray and then at the end of the Satsang he gets up with the tray and he goes to each person and gives some biscuits, but he does it in such a way, it's almost like he's giving you the most delicious chocolate. It's just an old Indian biscuit. And Tuli Baba is almost naked, very dark skinned. Just wears a little loin cloth. He has a very big belly, but he walks somehow like a king and you can enjoy this Presence because being in his Presence you'll find it much more easy to be in your Presence. A kind of magic happens.
It's hard to talk about these things and these three men are not going to give us a great philosophy. They will probably tell us nothing that we don't already know, but you will feel that your life has changed. It's like you've seen some kind of beautiful sunrise appearing in the early morning in Antarctica over the purple colour of the snow. Something rare you've never experienced before and your life becomes enhanced, touched and yet it was just an old, ordinary biscuit. Nothing special, but you felt something because maybe, in that moment, you became really present and this moment of Presence is such a moment your whole life is changed.
OK, some question about Presence?
QU 1: The problem is that it goes so fast. Everything becomes just memory so quickly.
PREM: But life is like that. For example, we all came here, I don't know, ten or twelve days ago and it's just like a flash, you know, it's gone so quick.
QU 1: Everything flashes away so quickly. When I go back in my memory, I think, I already experienced a moment where everything starts to glow, but then I'm tricked out very easily.
PREM: So what happens in this trick?
QU 1: These 'nows' go by so quickly. So yesterday the reason why I didn't sit on the couch was that I thought that I can only talk about things that are already over. It didn't feel like just..., wow!...I don't care I just sit there. I didn't dare and even now I don't really. I'm not always capable to do that.
PREM: And what isn't flashing by? What is constant?
QU 1: The perception of me being it or not being it. It changes, I think.
PREM: Is there something that doesn't change?
QU 1: Contemplation. Watching what happens.
PREM: And who is the watcher?
QU 1: Somebody who's judging, having an idea of what that's supposed to look like. My body, kind of, gives me a hard time and hinders me.
PREM: So maybe you can use these fluctuations from your body, these changes from the body. So you put in some chemicals and the body has one kind of feeling about it and then after some time another, it feels in another way, but there's something that doesn't change.
QU 1: The only thing that I think doesn't change is the watching.
PREM: Not the judging? Because the judgements are always different, yes?
QU 1: I just gave it a try, judgements or not.
PREM: And what's there when you don't try and you don't have any judgements and when the body is changing?
QU 1: Absence of Awareness. I think I have developed a certain consciousness about these things and there's a story to it. I used to be much less aware. So I notice that when my body disturbs me I can look with my eyes, look out of my eyes and then at some point I decided that I just owe it to everybody else to be as present as possible, and as like in the best possible state so I can give whatever there is possible.
PREM: Sounds like a lot of effort.
QU 1: So sometimes I thought, I just give what's there as it is without manipulation. I think I'm going to fall asleep. I was also playing a little bit with it because I don't want to be anything special.
PREM: Why don't you just be you? Just totally accept it as it is without any judgements and without any idea about how you should present it and not caring if you fall asleep. There's already two or three people sleeping.
QU 1: This is OK.
PREM: The beautiful thing about life is that you're completely allowed. God is just asking you to do your dance. You can learn from Gabrielle. She's very much dancing with God. See, you never know what's going to happen and from this dance we feel, 'Oh! This is Gabrielle's dance' and somebody else is dancing in another way.
QU 1: So like that I would like to love everybody.
PREM: Why would you like to love everybody? Is that better than hating everybody?
QU 1: I would like to live in the Awareness of everybody dancing.
PREM: And your own dance. The dance isn't really important. If you look around, all these people's dances are different. Each dance is unique and the more authentic and the more unique, somehow, the more we notice it and the more we love it. Lions are the kings of the jungle. You never heard about a sheep being the king. And your dance is just as unique as anybody else's dance and you see, this Awareness that I'm talking about, this Presence it's absolutely the same for everybody, but the dance is different. For example, we're going to meet these three saints. Their saintliness is the same, but each one will be expressing that quite differently.
QU 1: I'm really curious. The sentence I like best is the one I once heard, 'There are no non-spiritual beings. That's the one I can live with best. It's nearly the same as the thing you just said about there not being any more or less spiritual things to do.
PREM: I was really trying to say that everything is spiritual or spiritual doesn't really exist. Life itself is spiritual.
QU 1: So why are we trying to make it special?
PREM: Well, we're not. You're trying to make it special, but we're not trying to make it special. I'm not trying to make it special. I'm not trying to do anything.
QU 1: When I look around I see churches and temples and all those kind of things, but for my own part, I'm responsible myself and it's like that for everyone.
PREM: You see, when you speak in that way then you're continuing this whole game of somebody, what I was talking about today. So you're totally caught up in the stories and the invitation is just to see that you can live in a very simple way without maintaining this correct presentation to the world, without making a judgement about each thing. You can simply accept them as they are. Everybody has a story. Everybody has many, many stories and some of these stories are very tragic stories. Almost everybody has had, in their family, somebody die and in almost every family somebody was born and this we can call life. It's just like that. And when we can accept this, the whole quality of each moment of that life changes and that's what I'm talking about today.
QU 1: I'm also not very fond of the story.
PREM: Yes, but you don't have to judge that, that you're fond of it or you're not fond of it. This is your life. When God was shuffling the cards, you got that card. Some people can't see. There's all kinds of things going on. Gabrielle, for example, has a sister whose got brain damage. Maybe you met her yesterday. So she has very good intelligence, but her body is a bit of a mess.
QU 1: You said everybody is Presence. It is not possible not to be Presence because it is our nature. So I suppose there is some difference when you say, 'you are not present', because who is not present when everybody is Presence itself?
PREM: So right now are you present? You are always present?
QU 1: Yes.
PREM: Because Presence is our nature. And what about when a big story comes? Then what about the Presence?
QU 1: Presence in the sense of Awareness.
PREM: What happens when you have this judgement about Marni, for example? Then it goes from a small story into a bigger story and...
QU 1: I don't feel it is a judgement. It is like fact in the moment.
PREM: You have the Awareness in that moment when there's this big story.
QU 1: I don't feel it is a big story and in the sense, when something happens, what we call it 'bad' or I can feel something up....
PREM: When you become identified with the story you are no more in this Awareness.
QU 1: Yes, I am more likely to be caught up in the event, I notice.
PREM: You become identified, don't you? You become attached to this event, to this thought and it consumes you, so that there's only the story and there's no Awareness. You become absolutely identified and you believe that this story is real. You can say right now that nothing is happening, but I've experienced many times that you're absolutely in the story and then you're only experiencing that a lot is happening. Maybe later you can say nothing happened because actually nothing did happen.
QU 1: My question was not so much about stories, but more about this meaning of Presence because even though when there appears to be stories there is still a Presence.
PREM: When Mount Everest is covered by a cloud, Mount Everest is still there, but you can't see it. So when there's a big story you can't see Mount Everest. So the Presence is always there because you are the Presence. There's no way it couldn't be there. But when there's a strong story, when you become attached to that story, you're identified with the story and not with Mount Everest.
QU 1: Something maybe can become now a little more difficult because when you say Mount Everest something is seeing Mount Everest, but I am speaking...
PREM: No, no, no. Don't make it complicated, I'm just saying that Mount Everest is like the Awareness.
QU 1: Everybody is a Mount Everest.
PREM: But what happens is you become identified with the clouds covering Mount Everest. You believe you're the cloud.
QU 1: Yes, but Mount Everest is always aware of itself.
PREM: This is the whole point, it's not aware of itself. It becomes aware of only the story, the clouds. If you become identified with the cloud or the story you have no Awareness of the True Nature.
QU 2: It helps when I'm in a story to step back and ask who is it being caught up in the story. Just now when you were speaking I was in a black story. I said to myself 'Well, that's nice. Let's step back. Who is it?' Then I had a feeling, 'Oh well, the trick to get rid of bad feelings....
PREM: It's great! It's a wonderful trick, if you want to call it a trick. You can just blow away the cloud around Mount Everest and you see again that you're Mount Everest; that's a great trick. I mean, this is the whole teaching of Ramana Maharshi. It's a wonderful trick if you want to call it a trick. When you're in this black story you're probably just in the black story, but when it's so black, if you can then just use this trick then something changes. It changes very quickly because it's very hard to stay with the story when you see Mount Everest, knowing that you are Mount Everest.
QU 2: Well, then my mind comes in tells, 'Well, this is only a trick. You don't want to stay in this story, you don't want...
PREM: But there's nobody. There's nobody to say it. It's a wonderful trick. Just use it and as you use it more and more you just discover that you're this Mount Everest and then stories, clouds, come and you don't get identified. And it doesn't matter if it's a black story or a white story.
QU 2: The point is I couldn't use it in the right way... I didn't get out of this cloud. So for me it's not the point to get out of it, but to accept it and to love it.
PREM: Tell us again what happened when you did this enquiry.
QU 2: Well, I just had bad feelings and I had thought I wanted to come out and now like, in Pune groups with aggression and pain. It was coming up and by stepping back from these feelings was little bit like to me, it came up and it said, 'you have to go through it again and it's not allowed. This is only a trick. You have to stay in it, otherwise, it's not real'.
PREM: But these black stories aren't real. You know that because if you just totally accept the black story it will change very quickly. So it's not real. No story is real. We're trying to find out what is real and I'm suggesting that the thing that's real is the Pure Awareness.
QU 2: So there's Awareness of the cloud in that moment.
PREM: But don't identify with the cloud. The point is that when you do this trick it takes you out of the story back to the Source of the story. It prevents you being totally identified with the outside, with the apparent world, with the mind and in that mind there are different stories arising. We're wanting to bring all that back to our beingness. So it's a wonderful trick.
QU 2: I was asking for the process of this trick.
PREM: OK.
QU 2: But I have to find it out on my own.
PREM: No, no. I can tell you. So there's a big black story and you're totally in the story for some time and then there's an Awareness and then you ask, 'who is experiencing this black story?' The answer is 'me', then you say, 'who is this me?'. That second question brings you back to the Source. It reminds you immediately that you're Mount Everest and it breaks the identification with the cloud, with the black story. And when you constantly do this it's much, much less easy to get identified with stories. We get easily identified with the stories because our whole conditioning has made us believe that we are all these stories. So we have to break that conditioning. This is a wrong idea and the Osho therapy way doesn't help very much. It perhaps makes the stories less black, but here we're trying to do something much more fundamental. We don't really care if it's a grey story, a white story, a black story. It may be easier to live with a grey story so the therapy helps in that way, but we're trying to see here that we're not the story. We're simply Pure Awareness. We're simply wanting to live present, in this moment. And if there is some big black story, although, as we were reminded, the Presence is still there because that's your very nature, you have no Awareness of the Presence. You're simply identified with the black story and after a couple of encounter groups the story becomes a grey story, pinky-white story, but it's still a story and that's one of the things that's a little bit sad about therapy and the Osho ashram. People go on and on with the latest therapy group and their stories go from black, you know, to dark grey to lighter grey, then a bit white, and a bit pinky-white and in this way years go by and nobody ever tells them that they're not the story. I have some wonderful friends who go every year to the Osho ashram. They have been going for twenty-five years and nobody got it that they're not the story. And the colour of the story doesn't make much difference.
QU 2: Nobody wants to run away from a wonderful story.
PREM: Was it yesterday or the day before I talked about relationships, falling in love. Definitely a good story. Anyway, during the honeymoon part, this is somehow, the ultimate illusion because the story is so sweet you can get addicted to it, but it's also a story.
QU 3: I want to share something I experienced twice last night when I was dreaming, it was a bad story. All of a sudden I realised I'm dreaming and then I stopped the movie film and I woke up. It was OK.
PREM: Yes, we often have these horrible nightmares and just as a knife is going to strike us we wake up because it's so shocking and find we're alone, just in bed. There's no knife. There's like, 'Phew! Wow! Great!' and this is the whole effort of Satsang.
QU 3: Yes, that's what I thought because in daily life it's the same that's going on.
PREM: It's the same thing. I remember when I was first told that the waking life and the dreaming life were not much different. I thought, 'Rubbish! How can you say that? That's nonsense'. But this is the whole point of Satsang. And so in the beginning when people first come to Satsang, for them it's complete nonsense what's happening. We don't want to be told that we're asleep. 'How can my life be just an illusion, like a dream? My life is very important. I love my boyfriend.' The whole effort is to wake up and to see that all this stuff is our conditioning and it has a similar quality to our dreaming. We're very resistant to this.
QU 3: It's a great relief to just to realise the story.
PREM: And when you're having a good story, you're dreaming that, you know, you're in a bath full of champagne and when you wake up and you're just in the bed...
QU 3: So maybe that's what bad stories are good for, to wake up, for waking up.
PREM: Yes, in one way, you see. It's harder to wake up from good stories. It's actually, in some ways, helping to have a black story because when the story is very painful you can't bear to be in the story. Then you have to really look and there is more reason to do this trick. But when your life is just champagne it's easy just to stay in that and, in fact, many Osho sannyasins do exactly that. They've been many years doing therapy so they've changed most of their black stories into kind of pinky-white stories and they've done many years of meditation so their minds have become very quiet, very peaceful. So they've achieved a kind of very lovely lifestyle and then their ego is very happy because they're a part of a special club of spiritual people and they know they had the best Master because he had piles of Rolls Royces and he looked really good and there were piles of beautiful people around. So they stay on this kind of plateau and this wonderful Master even talked about it. He talked about it as the sixth charka plateau and he warned these same people to be careful about that. I can remember also living very happily in this sixth charka plateau. In those days my journey seemed to be finished. I wasn't looking for another teacher. I thought I was very good and then something happened and I was confronted with something. I was taken to another teacher and from what happened there I could see that where I was before was not the end. It's a very lovely and kind of comfortable plateau and nice lifestyle, but it's not woken up and it's not free.