From radio show altitude September the 13th, 2012
The topic of discussion today is the world within. This a topic that many of us, in the seeking of spiritual balance, confuse and I want to clarify certain points so that you have a clear perspective of what it is that you need to cultivate to really enhance your inner world.
I would like to start by pointing out certain aspects that you confuse with your inner world. The first one is your internal conversations. You think that your own privacy, your mental chatter, your opinions about relationships, about the world, your perspectives of different aspects of yourself, has a certain make up. You have created different points of reference. When I meet certain people, there is internal chatter; I go ‘well, this person has certain opinions, dresses a certain way’ and is that person is therefore categorized, put into a category that belongs to a safe, friendly group of people. That conversation that you have, you think that it becomes your internal world. You start relying on those opinions, on those judgements, on that scanning of your environment or of yourself, to become to your inner world.
You can also be mistaken by the palette of different emotions. You can be feeling sad or feeling angry – unpleasant emotions that you perhaps do not express – and you think that, that which is in a place within yourself that you don’t tell anybody about, that is your inner world. You think that inside I am sad or I am happy, or I have my secretive way of feeling, my secretive way of thinking, my secretive way of wanting to gain something from the outside, all of the plans I may have in my head: all of these things you start believing and nourishing with different thoughts and different emotions and different experiences. You start nourishing that sense of inner world.
The problem is that these thoughts and emotions, and even the physical sensations of pain, or the feeling of upliftment, or of good health, or of illness; all of those relationships that you have are impermanent. So your inner world becomes a very shakeable aspect of yourself. That’s why I say that it is a mistake to believe that those shakeable things are you internal world. Anything that is impermanent is not your internal world. Even if you have an intimate relationship, or if you have an attachment and you don’t want to let go and you think that is you. That is not your internal world. What happens when you relate to the shakeable aspects of yourself is you become insecure. You start defending and trying to stabilize those opinions or those emotions, so that your sense of self doesn’t get destroyed. For example, if I believe that I am in a role of an artist, and that role carries certain opinions and a certain style of living, perceiving and expressing, and I am 23, 24 or 40 – whatever age range you are – that is inevitably is going to change. Simply because nature brings evolution into your perception. The way you think, the way you feel, the way you behave is not going to be the same in a few weeks or in a few years. Your sense of inner world becomes unstable. You don’t really know what to hold on to for your security and your inner projection. You start thinking that those changeable personality traits are your inner world.
That’s one of the pitfalls of the spiritual seeker: that they try to defend the opinion of ‘this is what I am, what I think, this is what I communicate with the world, this is what I don’t allow anybody to come into because it is my private way of thinking, my perception, my style of approaching reality.’ That sense of defending and attachment to the way your inner world is, creates great stress within yourself. It removes your naturalness and your actual perception of what the real world within is.
I wish I could tell you what your inner world is. But it is such a space – it is a frequency within yourself – that has availability to all spectrums of wisdom, to all spectrums of evolution. It is beyond the time frame of what you think, the linear time, it is beyond the way we perceive things, it is just a constant happening in the present moment. Your inner world is constructed and reconstructed every moment with all of the possibilities that are around you, and with all of the potentialities within yourself. The richness, the depth and the alititude of your inner world are really indescribable, and are only met through meditation, through stillness, through patience. That is where you simply observe all of these other conversations of the mind, the emotions, the relationships and your inner expectations or your inner judgements. Even if your inner judgements are never spoken, they are still an impediment to your access the real depths and tranquility of your inner world.
So if we, at least for today, stop defending that privacy that we think is us – because in reality, there is no real privacy. We are just in a vast ocean of vibration, resonance, light, electricity and magnetism that allows us to constantly interact with each other. In a place that is beyond matter.
If we go into the concept of common consciousness, for example – we all share the same mind. It is a collective way of sharing, of being. That is part of your internal world. It is the acknowledgement that you are not a private individual having an individual experience with your own individual chatter, opinions, emotions; you are part of a collective vibration that is in constant interaction and exchange of lessons, mostly, and possibilities. That is a vast glimpse of your inner world. It is a part of you that has the capacity to have that expansiveness, have the capacity to tune in with every single part of nature – humans, plants, insects, the elements, the sky, the underground. All parts of life are part of your inner world. It is a vast, vast part of you, ready to be explored. But the first part that we need to acknowledge is that what you think is your inner world is not real, it is not what it really is. That is the beginning of coming into the real inner world.
The second part is to have a little bit of courage in having an intention to go within. The outer world brings out great impatience and distractions with entertainment to our mind, with experiences and exchanges, with different ideas and things that we can live, things that we want. That is a force that pulls us away from the inner centre. Most people on the planet are interested in the cultivation of the external world, so that they have a certain comfort and sense of safety and security. You need courage to admit that the outside world is not a source of your stillness and not a real source of your life force and perception.
I’ll tell you why you need courage: because as you go within, you are going to meet all of those conversations, all of those self-judgements, guilt, shame; parts of you that you do not like. And you won’t know what to do with them. Instead of accepting them and acknowledging that they are there, the natural tendency is to judge, is to put down, is to make them even more secret. So you think that is part of your inner world. But it’s actually just a passage that you need to cross in order to go into the depths of your inner world. It is a scary passage and a lot of seekers of spiritual freedom get trapped into it by either trying to fix it, or to find solutions to be different. But in fact, it is just a passage. It is not something that you need to do anything about because, again, it is not really part of your inner world. It is just conceptions and misconceptions that you have put into your psyche and it is your perception as a way of relating to you. That is something that you need to consider while traveling within.
You will have another gate to cross with the traveling within: that is to confront the part of you that has memories, that has a certain reference to the past. Most of us, when we sit in meditation, we start relating about things where we are not happy with how we did, or think that we could have acted differently in certain circumstances in front of certain people; your family, your ex, a teacher, any relationship. And you start trying to re-shape that moment in the past. That is not part of your inner world. Your past experiences are more like an archive, where you are using those lessons as a stepping stone to learn your next one. But we usually charge our past with regret and a sense of non-forgiveness. We do not understand that anything we have done is free from mistakes. We don’t actually make mistakes. What we do is we take the best possible action we can in front of a new situation, and that is called learning. You learn a new possibility, never given to you. You are being initiated. But we always want to perform our best and we always judge that our best was not enough. You don’t like to expose or share that sense of regret, shame and self-condemnation, so you bury it. You label that as ‘this is my own inner world. This is my secret space. This is my safety zone that nobody can enter.’
The more compartments you have of that category, the less you are able to be in the real inner world. Simply because you get confused and you want to defend those spaces. In different ways: by over thinking, by getting dramatic, by offering distractions to other people in the form of dramas or over-expressions, or by simply avoiding it. Your inner world becomes a buried ground with many shames. That is a passage that you need to acknowledge – and to see that it is not that big of a deal.
For example, there was a person that we had go on a journey, a walk in the woods – and the walk was simply an exploration of oneself in front of nature – however, for this particular person, he had the expectation that I, as a teacher, was supposed to give him a qualification at the end of the journey. Such as ‘you did very well,’ ‘you passed the test,’ or ‘you did not do well.’ I never intended to give a qualification, but in his head he thought that I did not approve of his performance on the journey. So that experience became shameful for him, and after that exercise the way he reacted to me was with anger. Not wanting me to see his invented defeat. So the inner world of that person becomes tormented passage. It was just a passage, but for him it was his internal world. At the same time, it was not possible to see or experience the real inner world because of that judgement.
That is something that when you go within, you have to pass through. You have to pass through that sense forgiveness and to see that most of your perceptions are not true. You are an expert in inventing what you are inside yourself. If you have the courage to destroy a little bit of your conceptions about yourself every day … that simple intention will start clearing your space for your true inner world to come forward.
And again, although I cannot tell you that ‘it is about this’ or ‘about that,’ I can tell you that your inner world is beyond time, it is beyond space, that it is vast and contains all of the possibilities of your being, and that it is in constant attraction to be acknowledged. It has an incredible magnetism to be acknowledged. It is through the stillness, it is through the patience and through the acknowledgement that what you think is totally irrelevant in relationship to your inner world, what you feel is totally irrelevant in relationship to your inner world and what your physical sensations are totally irrelevant to your inner world. Your inner world is only available when you are in silence with that internal chatter; when you recognize that chatter is being used as a distraction or as an avoidance to go within.
It is my wish as a spiritual teacher to give you an incentive to go within. Simply because it is within that that you will find the stability, safety and happiness that you are seeking. It is in there that all of your questions are answered. The ‘hows’ disappear and you start living in the real flow of your inner nature. Your mind is a servant of your desires to manifest your inner world and your emotions become the colourful part of you. You will not use your emotions or mind to entrap you, but to decorate you. To serve your inner world, you have the mind and the emotions. And once you tap into the inner world, you only have one mission: and that is to serve other human beings, and that is to propagate the glory, the depth and the altitude of the world within.