When you are walking in the mountains, high up there in Nepal, there is always a problem to be faced.
Things are always in a dance with each other.
The clouds might be low but there is warmth.
The rain is coming down but there is a cozy fire somewhere.
The sun might burn but the visibility is amazing.
The wind can be freezing yet, it blows away the cloud and leaves photographs inspired.
You may be tired, but the altitude you gained may bring you closer to your self.
Your feet and knees are sore, but you meet a Sherpa and hear something that changed your life.
You may get stomock upset but because you take a break, you meet monks on the way and stop and talk.
Life is how you see it.
That person who is trying to create patterns of pleasure will be wanting the clouds to go away, the soreness to subside, the cold to become warm, the warm to become cold.
They will be wanting the belly to clear up and the wind to stop.
The one who is with love will praise the sunshine, the clarity, and the gift that always exists in the shadow of the darkness.
You choose this approach here in the mountains.
Because wishing the obstacles removed tires you, weakens your resolve.
You know, that a mind that is wishing things to be other than they are, is the mind that never left home.
It is most evident when I am staying in a village.
There on the hillside, sits a monastery.
An old, old monastery.
It becons but the thought of trekking up to it spoils the attraction.
Here I am in a warm lodge and there it is way up there.
I can see the goal, the clearer I see the goal, the worse it is.
The next day, it is time to move to the next lodge, It is 6 hours away, I pack my gear, eat breakfast and trek on.
I dare not think of how far or how high I must journey, it would turn me around.
Each step becomes a joy, an obstacle here and there, problems to solve, one cannot keep looking up to the top, and thinking, "I wish it would come near" it won't, and doesn't.
Yet, on this day, I climb 10 times the distance of that monastery.
I am willing to do so because every step is a moment in itself, I am forbidden that luxury of sitting in the lodge, looking up at the end result and wishing it to be near.
That luxury, wanting to remove obstacles is what keeps us safe and warm and dead in our spirit.
We look, we think of the hardship and then, with resolve find good reason not to do.
We sit, and think of what it might have been like to stroll up to that monastery and find good reason not to have done it.
Problems of this nature face us every day in our life.
We must understand our patterns and ways of dealing with those issues lest we become like the trekker, who sits in the warm lodge, sees the difficulty of the achievement and elects, rationalizes the negation of it.
This is the death of the spirit and the life of the average person.
There are two typical habits that you will need to overcome in order to be authentic in dealing with lifes problems.
The first is the the temptation to suppress them.
The second is the temptation to run away from them Both provide an escape from problems.
But anything that prevents the understanding of a problem at its core, means that the problem will go on tomorrow.
Any problem that goes on day after day, kills the spirit.
To solve a problem we simply try to understand it at its core.
Once we understand something we have learned from it.
And we must make sure that we achieve that understanding on the day it occurs, otherwise, this problem from yesterday, adds to this problem from today to create 2 problems and now a third, which is the accumulating tiredness one feels when problems accumulate.
If we carry problems forward, we kill the spirit.
We become insensitive to others and hypersensitive to ourselves.
This is a fearful and ugly state of mind.
The whole spirit of the person becomes defensive and mature.
their innocence is dead and they loose the joy and lightenss of being.
The ugly man.
The ugly woman.
they are beautiful souls whose problems have accumulated.
Accumulated for years, tens of years, some think lifetimes.
It is not important what good things you carry forward, they are your automatic skill, but it is important what problems you carry forward because these are the burdens that hold your heart heavy when it should be light.
False solutions are very common.
People are most second hand people.
They repeat, and repeat.
They are second hand because their self is on holiday and some other person has become their self.
A guru, a preacher, a Lama.
No, we can be authentic only by experience.
If you follow a guru your solutions are not authentic.
They are second hand.
Only you can know the solution.
You can recite the Gita backward, you can learn the sanscrit and speak the sutra, but you are still only a parrot.
repeating some words that got written.
Where are you in this? you believe one thing but not another.
Therefore you are mind.
No heart, just a mind, accepting something, rejecting something.
No true you can be there in listening to the guru.
One psychic is just as illusioned as the next.
and when they earn their income from your followership, you are guaranteed to be deluded, they cannot tell the truth, it is unattractive to you, and you would reject them.
Truth always disappoints.
You might quote someone famous in your speech, or even tell some story you heard from an ancient book, but you are not solving problems you are creating them.
Instead of the emptiness of truth, you are finding the fullness of lies.
Self deception is always possible if pleasure is your goal.
The pleasure seeker is in trouble from the start because what they seek is not understanding, they seek confirmation.
There are those who have found a dead end after 30 years of searching for self actiaulization because the whole time they were seeking to escape from someone or something, they were seeking pleasure and now they have found a dead end, a raod blokc, there is no more pleasure at the end of their 30 years of searching than there was 30 years ago.
Wasted, although there we moments of hope, moments of high, the lows were there too.
Nature guaranteed it.
Love is the answer to the problem.
Love cannot be a memory, no that is a second hand person, thing this or that is what love can be.
Yes, love is the answer to evey problem.
but what is love? Nature is love because she does not defy the laws that created her, she does not seek pleasure or anything, just obedience to the powers that manifest the universe.
So, mechanically we can say we know what love is, it is a feeling that is created when the mind is seeing things in a certain way.
In other words love is there, nature assures us, the mind can block it, the mind can unblock it.
If the mind thinks in a certain way it becomes the seeker of love, if it thinks in a certain way it becomes the gateway through which the love we have access to, comes out.
So the mind that seeks the balance is no longer seeking the pleasure.
The pleasure is the imbalance and the displeasure is the balance.
Stolen pleasure, could you bare it? That is the mind that solves and understands problems.
because the only problem you ever experience is the loss of love.
All problems, all stress, comes from the mind that is blocking love.
Why? Because that mind belongs to the lonely person the lonely person who can't stand their own company, seeks to identify itself in pleasure.
Can you see this? The search for pleasure is the escape.
The escape from what? the escape from loneliness, from the problems of being a human being in a body.
Denail - the suppression of problems creates pleasure, but never happiness.
Running away to the four substitutes creates pleasure, but never happiness.
Happiness comes from love.
None of those things denial or running away create love..
A tree lives with problems and solves them by being a tree.
Humans live with problems but solves them by becoming someone else.
Humans say " I will become that person, or this life or that religion" Humans complicate it, the distort being themselves.
And each time they add another expectation they add a disturbance.
Seeking pleasure adds more disturbances.
Ambition, competition, greed, status, envy, domination, attachment and power, they cause the disturbance in the process of seeking pleasures.
What the pleasure seeker is unaware of is that nature guarantees two sides, balance.
Each pleasure has a pain.
Denial and running away, accentuates the increased pleasure of being away from a problem and therefore an increased pain in emptiness and lack of love.
Synthetic love, pleasure seeking love is a sad end for a life.
Relationships are the greatest escape from loneliness and pain.
To enter a relationship based on pleasure is guaranteed to cause failure.
Because that person who seeks pleasure can not be satisfied by it.
They are unhappy, lonely so they seek.
the seeker is always a seeker, so they can have no peace.
And in peace there is love.
Contentment is a precondition to love.
So the spiritual seeker, the religious god hunter, the alcoholic or the sexual predator, they are all the same, they cannot love.
They cannot love.
They can mimick what they know love could, should, would be if they act out a certain behavior or do a certain trick, but they cannot love because love is the emptiness of existence.
To love you must be comfortable with dissapointment, with loneliness.
Yes, these are not the pleasures we seek, they are the pains we run away from, the problems we try to deny or escape.
But that is the contradiction of humanity.
We fill up the space that love can exist in with activity, with Gods and goddesses, with Ipods, televisions, telephones, ex husbands, silly friends and needy families.
We fill the space of love with food and drugs and activity and romance and where are we left? We are left fearing problems that might reveal our comoflage.
If the lifetyle that hides our fears is disturbed we are revealed.
And this is the meaning of the word relationship.
Disturbance.
Yes, your relationship is automatically going to disturb your mind.
It is going to reveal, not create problems.
And those problems, if they accumulate, will deaden the spirit.
If we do not understand relationship we cannot have love in it.
It will disturb us and then we can either deny or run away.
But we cannot love anymore.
When we do not solve the problems of the last relationships through understanding then we carry these into the future and there will be disturbance accumulating.
We are deadened, except for sex and some windows of intimacy.
All love comes in emptiness.
It is easy to love a tree or a mountain scene.
We didn't expect it.
But if we see a magnificent tree and then go to the next pleace and say "oh, this tree is not as good as the last tree, or this tree is better than the last tree, we cannot know love anymore, because we are now pleasure seeking.
Innocence is lost.
So, if there is no understanding of relationship, we are unable to solve the problems of it.