Meeting Transcript

Lisa: I try to split it up, to make a difference, between when I’m speaking about Non-Duality and when I’m speaking about helping the person and relaxing the person. But also, it’s really hard in language to continuously do that.

So I’ll tell you a bit about myself.  I started getting interested in this subject from quite a young age.  Firstly, it was through Buddhism. So I was a practicing Buddhist for five years, with a group called The Foundation of the Western Buddhist Order, and they’ve now got a different name, an Indian name, and I can’t always remember it. Something like Thratna… (Triratna Buddhist Community).

Attendee: Oh…

Lisa: You know them?

Attendee: I’ve heard of them, yeah.

Lisa: The Guru Sangharakshita. But he passed, I think, last year, or the year before. And then I met Tony Parsons in about 2005.  I got into Non-Duality through Eckhart Tolle and I think I was at an Eckhart Tolle London Meetup group, and then someone gave me a leaflet of Tony Parsons, or a teacher called Nathan Gill. I can’t remember exactly how it happened, something like this.  And then I met them.

And prior to that, a Buddhist friend of mine had been really into Ramesh Balsekar.  And then I went to India to see Ramesh and spent quite a lot of time in India before he died.  And then he passed me off onto one of his students called Roger Castillo, who is a teacher now. And then I went and lived with Roger for three years in Australia.

And since then, so that was about 2011 I left there, I started teaching Non-Duality. And I really love teaching Non-Duality, but I also see it as a teacher to myself as well.  It’s really deep exploring Non-Duality with other people. From this side, it’s a deep experience as well, sharing it and coming up against people’s problems and resistances. And then also integrating it more into my life, and into my body, and expanding more.  So it’s been a really deep experience ,and a really strong teacher I would say as well, teaching it.

So we now move on to Non-Duality. So normally the way I do it is I do an introduction, and then question and answers. Normally at the beginning, I do silent sitting, but maybe we do it the other way around today. Maybe I just do some talking, and then questions and answers, and then we do silent sitting.  Because we’ll find two hours of talking is just too much.  Some people can do that.  But you’ll find your body will begin to get fidgety, or maybe we have to take a bit of a break and walk around, we’ll see.

So I can be really flexible with my words, in the sense that I really see Non-Duality as something that we cannot express in words. And so therefore, I feel that I can hear it in many different ways. And I also feel I could express it in many different ways.

I don’t feel like it’s… I can give you a sentence and say, “This is what Non-Duality is”. It’s way beyond what we can think about. So when I speak, it might sound like I’m contradicting myself often. But it’s more that I just don’t see it as a fixed thing that we can say “This is the way it is”. I see more the expression of Non-Duality, as a pointing to something beyond what we intellectually know. And it’s really miraculous of how that’s recognized and how that’s known.  Because it’s beyond what we know, intellectually.

So this is my interpretation, coming through the Lisa body, of what Non-Duality is. So, right now, we’re all looking at each other. And most people have a story appearing, that that person that’s looking is something that you can describe in time. So most people feel, when they’re sitting on a sofa, or sitting on the chairs now listening, that they are somebody listening. And that somebody is a story in time.

So that somebody is, say you’re a banker, or a builder, or an accountant, or an athlete for your job… we feel that is something to do with who is listening and watching this talk now. So we feel that there is a soul or an entity that’s sitting here in these bodies, watching out of these eyes, looking at Lisa, and having an experience. And what Non-Duality is trying to point to is, yes that is appearing, there are thoughts appearing about what you have and haven’t done in your life, but that’s not actually who’s experiencing it now.  It sounds really alien, like there’s something else inside you.

So that person that we describe ourselves to be in time isn’t actually experiencing in this moment now. Non-Duality would go on to say that it’s also an experience that’s happening. So the person that says, “I’m a nice person, I’m a good person” isn’t something that’s always here, it’s something that’s changing, and coming and going. But there is something that’s always here experiencing.

So it’s questioning, who is experiencing? Our assumption is… so when I was younger, before I got into this subject, I had I suppose the Christian view of there was a soul inside here. And I maybe kind of thought that hopefully when I die, that soul would go on somewhere. Maybe on bad days I hoped it wouldn’t, that it was the opposite.

But I kind of had this view that there was something that was inside this body looking out of this body, and that felt like me. I can maybe see, even without Non-Duality and without this subject, that my body was changing.  So I maybe didn’t have as strong identification with the physical body.  But I certainly felt like there was an entity in here, looking out experiencing.  And I felt like that entity was a story in time, went to school, or loved theater, or whatever it was, loved storytelling.  So I thought that was watching.

But when you really pay attention to the experience, you’ll notice that that’s not always there.  So the story of you isn’t always there, but there is always a consciousness.  And I also remember when somebody first told me this, my Buddhist friend first told me this, I thought, “What’s the point in knowing that?”.  I also didn’t understand the point of understanding it.  I was like, “Boring!”.  And he’d be like “Who’s watching and it’s not the character?”  And I didn’t get the point of it.

Whereas now, I can say from experience, that when there is a detachment happening from that character, there is a sense of freedom that happens in your experience.  So when you’re totally identified with that character, there is what I would define as suffering.  And when you detach from that there is a freedom that appears.  It doesn’t mean the character fixes itself, like I still have fucked up dynamics.  So it doesn’t necessarily fix that, it might aid it and help it.  Sometimes it maybe makes it worse, because you don’t look after the personal stuff enough.

But there is, in the detachment, there is a knowing of something beyond being human.  And I feel like living a life where you kind of integrate them both, having this human experience, and then also knowing this non-human experience, is a freedom beyond anything that you can find in life.  That might sound confusing, but I’ll go over again, and then you can ask questions.

So, right now, there is looking happening.  So you’re all looking at me, and as well as looking at me, there is a consciousness of the wall behind me.  And when you’re looking at me, you might have judgments of me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there might be a judgment arising of me. But the wall behind, it’s most probably, it’s in your consciousness, but there’s no judgment of it.  So you’re maybe putting effort into listening to me and focusing on me, but there is also a consciousness of the wall, of the chair, of the table, of the space, but that consciousness isn’t in thought.  So you’re thinking about me, you’re interpreting me, whereas other items aren’t being interpreted, but they’re appearing in consciousness.

So they’re appearing in experiencing.  And what we get mistaken by, when we hear this word consciousness, is we think what I’m talking about or what the person is talking about, is personal awareness, is personal focus. So you’re looking for an interpretation of what I say, so something in words.  And you’re looking for something in time, in something which you focus on, rather than seeing that there is a consciousness here, that’s free all the time. So your consciousness that’s conscious of the wall has no personal investment in it, it’s just conscious of it. It doesn’t care if the wall is pretty or ugly, it doesn’t care anything about it. It’s free. It’s recognizing it freely, and it’s recognizing it instantaneously.

So this is happening all the time, but what we’re normally focused on is the personal world. So the personal world of you going into time. So the personal world of me, my story, how you feel about me… so maybe you’re having an emotional reaction, that happens to me, which is totally allowed. That’s totally okay to have a personal reaction. That happens, and we’re focused in that world. And we don’t recognize that there is another part of experience happening.  That there is a consciousness that isn’t invested in the emotional human world, that is conscious, and this consciousness is still.

Another way that I could say it is that when you wake up in the morning, there is a consciousness that switches on before you. So when you wake up, you don’t wake up first and say, “Let me just turn on my consciousness”. Consciousness appears, and then in that, the person goes, “Oh, who am I?” or “What am I gonna do today?”.  And then there’s a memory of you that appears, so you don’t “Let’s switch it on”.  The consciousness switches on and then the “you” switches on. It’s not… we don’t even know what happens when you wake up in the morning, whether consciousness switches on, that’s beside the point, but what I’m trying to point out is there’s a consciousness here that’s beyond the personal.

And what can happen in experience, which is an energetic expression, is there can be a movement from that personal world, to this impersonal world. An energetic movement to a consciousness that’s here. And we can break down consciousness. And we can call it different words. So with Tony Parsons, he would maybe call it “everything”, he would hate the word consciousness. I think it’s a very convenient word, but I have no affiliation with it, in the end.  I’m happy to chuck that word out. But I think it’s very convenient. Especially when you’re communicating about this subject.

So in every experience you have… so you could equally say there is always everything.  To which the mind is like, “No, there’s not always everything. The moon’s not here now, the trees aren’t here…”  So you could question that. But the other thing that you could say is, “There is always consciousness”.  So you can’t have an experience without consciousness. But you can have an experience without you.

When you were a baby, you had no sense of you. When you were a toddler, you had no sense of you.  But you always have consciousness.  No matter where you go, no matter what you do, there is always consciousness.  And it’s amazing that that’s never really explored in our society.  We don’t really think that is always here.  Whereas the person is always changing.  You could change your jobs, you could change your view about yourself, you could change your emotions, you could change your feelings, but you can’t change consciousness.

And this consciousness has a freedom in it.  The reason it’s free is because it has no emotional investment in anything.  It doesn’t care about anything.  Not in a negative way, not in a human way where it’s like, “I don’t care about you”.  In the sense that it is just sitting here. It’s silent. It’s still.

Your consciousness isn’t invested in anything. It doesn’t have any desire for anything. It doesn’t reject anything. So if something really happened to us all now, like we all started spewing [vomiting] on each other. One person starts and then the rest of us… the consciousness part doesn’t care. The same if the house fell down.

The consciousness part is free. The person cares and I’m not talking about ignoring the person. But we’ve forgotten this element of us, that there is something here that can endure everything. It also doesn’t have a memory so it doesn’t hold on to anything. It sounds really awful, I could imagine a psychologist listening to this and being like, “What?!”

But it doesn’t care or have a memory. So you could do the worst act, and consciousness has forgiven it. Consciousness just witnesses it and experiences it. And then it’s gone. If you don’t like this word consciousness, you can switch it to everything, you could switch it to God, you could switch it to Brahman, whichever word you like. It just is holding life.

And this, as well as, in combination with the human element of stuff, the human dynamics, is a freedom.  This consciousness… not consciousness, but this shift in perception, a recognition of something that’s free right now, as well as living as a human being, can radically change your day to day experience of life.

But it’s this combination. The human side, I’m not really talking about at the moment, but I don’t mean to ignore the human side.  I’m not talking about becoming really detached or unemotional, or without having issues, it’s remembering something in us that is never touched.

But it’s not really a memory, like you would remember being a child, it’s knowing of something that’s inherently here. Every one of us here has consciousness, we’re all conscious that this is happening. I used to get consciousness and thinking muddled up. So I used to think that consciousness was a thought, “I think and so therefore there is a lamp there. I know this world through thinking.”

Whereas actually we know this world through consciousness. There is a consciousness of everything.  This isn’t not happening.  This isn’t deep sleep.  This is happening.  And this consciousness is still, it’s only here, and it’s recognizing… and this is the most amazing part about it, is that it’s not separate.  So it’s not dual.

So I’m not outside of your consciousness. It’s not even your consciousness, but we just say it like that, for simplicity. I’m not outside of your consciousness.  Nothing here is outside of your consciousness, there is only consciousness happening.  And there isn’t a separation. So I’m not appearing outside of your consciousness. It’s not like your consciousness comes up to here, it stops, and then I appear. I wouldn’t be appearing to you, I’d be just like a black hole.

I am in your consciousness, my skin is your consciousness. And if you are consciousness, then that means that there is no separation. There is no distance between us on the fundamental level. There’s difference between us on a human level, but on an essence level, who we truly are beyond form, there is no separation.

The sound of my voice is your consciousness. You can even eventually get rid of consciousness, the word consciousness, and there is just everything happening. And who you are is everything, which is no thing, if you go really to the extreme.  So, this consciousness is true intimacy.  We’re also scared of this consciousness, because it’s uncontrollable, it’s impersonal, and it’s total intimacy.

Like if who you are now is consciousness over the person, there is no boundary between us. It’s almost like you walked into the wrong changing room… “Sorry!”  The wrong toilet.  Especially if you’re a woman, for a man, you just walk in you see cubicles. For a woman you walk in, you’re like “Oh sorry!”.

It’s really like that, because where is the boundary between us?  Where is the boundary between our emotions?  So if I experience anger, everything that I experience is anger.  If I experience love, everything that I experience is love. Where is the boundary between anything? It’s total intimacy. If you go beyond the human.  On the human level, we can talk about that level later, but on the absolute level… you could call it love, like consciousness is also love.

What I haven’t talked about is the “I Am”, which is another thing when you talk about consciousness.  In my interpretation of everything, I normally call the I Am “everything”.  And the consciousness “nothing”.  That sounds really weird, but that’s how I associate it.

But maybe if you have any questions, if there’s anything that I’m saying that’s really like… and you can ask anything. It’s good for me to gauge where this is going.

Attendee: I’m understanding what you’re saying. You’re explaining things very well, if there’s such a thing. I like the way you’ve qualified what you mean by “I Am”.  Totally understanding what you’re saying, because you’re explaining why you choose certain words, which is helpful. Because it can get confusing if you don’t, but you are doing that so that’s fine.

Lisa: And I also would put the Love with the “I Am”, which for some people is a weird thing to do, but I would say that is love. And then the consciousness is this wisdom.  Similar to what Nisargadatta Maharaj would say, “To know I’m nothing is wisdom, to know I am everything is love, and in between my life resides.” I think that’s so beautiful, that quote.

And I can kind of listen to most teachers and have a sense of what they’re speaking about, even though it sounds so different. I would have never been able to connect Tony Parsons and Eckhart Tolle, and Tony Parsons would hate it to ever hear that I connect them. But I feel like I could hold them both easily, and really respect… I don’t always agree with everything they say, but that doesn’t even matter.  What’s that, it’s just agree or disagree.

Attendee: I would have said consciousness is love.

Lisa: Yeah, but in the end they kind of come together.  I mean you can also see how you could call it love.

Attendee: I wouldn’t have necessarily separated that.

Attendee: You can see that most of the problems between people come from language. Someone says one thing, it’s interpreted millions of ways. Sometimes contradicted.

Attendee: It’s trying to point to the same thing, this is it. So different people may use different language, but it’s always trying to point to the same… I don’t know. Some people might have a different view to somebody else. Like Tony Parsons, as you were saying, and Eckhart Tolle, might say “No, I don’t agree. I have my own interpretation.” So not everyone is trying to point to the same thing I guess.

Lisa: Yeah, I don’t know about that.  For me, it feels like they are.  But it’s like… someone explained this to me once with high intelligence. I have some people that I’ve met that have very high intelligence.  One thing they were saying to me is that often, people can’t see that they’ve got high intelligence.  Only other people that have high intelligence can see they’ve got high intelligence.  So if you’ve got high intelligence, the people that say have average intelligence can’t look up and see the higher intelligence. Whereas the people that have the higher intelligence can look down and see it.

And so it’s the same with this. Like, who knows in the end.  Tony Parsons would disagree. Maybe he does have a higher perspective, but maybe it’s not, maybe it’s Eckhart Tolle.  We would never know until we’re up there looking down, we can’t tell. It’s impossible. I can’t tell. I don’t feel like I have a higher perspective on either of those. I don’t know, I just feel like it all resonates in my heart. And I like it all, even when they disagree.

Attendee: Also your lovely pointer to that, part of our noticing is beyond judgment, and the cultural upbringing, and all the way, the libraries of what we know, the influence of society, your family, your teachers, and stuff, brings so many meanings. These meanings just sneak in so quickly.

One says love, and it means love. But love means so many things to so many people. Things like this, like universal things, goodness gracious, good luck. When the meaning sneaks in, that’s probably where people start operating within conclusions and reports, rather than from the immediacy of what is happening. That’s where the trouble takes over.

Lisa: Yeah, totally. And then believing that our meanings are true. Meaning is helpful. So it’s helpful in our society, if we know what the meaning of “car” is.  We have some sort of comprehension of what it means by phone or cabinet.  So meaning is relative in the human world, but in the absolute world, or when you begin to question this subject, you see there is a relative meaning to things. But then there’s another aspect of us that’s so mysterious.  Really we just don’t know on that level. We are watching. We are conscious. There is consciousness happening. But we don’t know what that is. We don’t know what that means.

It’s a looking. We can’t get outside of our consciousness and then have a good examination of it and be like, “Oh, this is what consciousness is.” Scientists are trying to look at what consciousness is, or to look at, if you go even further, what no thing is. But we can’t ever step outside of that and look. We are it, there is looking, but it doesn’t have any words to it, it doesn’t have any instructions to it. It’s looking, and it has no quality, like at all, it just is looking.

And then as it integrates into the human, there are qualities to it. So some teachers would say the knowing of that creates bliss, or creates love, or creates these different states.  But in itself, inherently, there is no quality to our looking, to our experiencing now.

If you go beyond feeling, if you go beyond thought, if you go beyond sensation, the looking has no quality.  It has no start and stop.  We think it starts here, the consciousness.  But actually when you really go into it, maybe the consciousness comes from all the objects. Where would you even define that, or find that?

This is another thing that can happen. If you’re into Buddhism, I don’t know if they have the same language in all Buddhist groups. But the Buddhist group I was with used to talk about Samapattis, and they used to say this was like disorientation of the body.  Ever heard of this? Where your head feels like it’s on backwards, or your hands feel like they’re twisted? Have you heard of this Louis?  No?

You can also get that from drug experiences, or drink, or alcohol where your body begins to feel different. And this is a really interesting learning curve, because even the assumption of what our energetic body is, is an assumption that we’re making.  So you can have some amazing experiences when you meditate, or when you do these different spiritual practices, because you begin to learn that the feeling of your leg is not necessarily your actual experience.  That sounds so weird.

So I would be sitting there meditating, and sometimes I’d feel like my head was on the ceiling, and I would be “This is really…” If you went into psychology, they would be like, “Oh gosh, she’s having depersonalization…” All these negative things. But it’s really profound to go beyond what we think is happening. Because when you do that, you begin to question all your presumptions.

Like you’ve always been told you’re a certain body with a certain size. You might notice that your sense of your body changes if you’re in a good mood or bad mood, if you feel confident or not confident. But also if you begin to question, how big are you in experiencing?  So normally, our consciousness is limited to our body, because we’re telling ourselves that.

Whereas this energetic shift that I’m talking about, is that you begin to see that your essence, so beyond the person… Lisa is, you could say, limited to this body.  But beyond that, where is your sense of self, which is sense of consciousness?  How big is it?

If you were to shut your eyes now, if you just practice or try this… if you shut your eyes… we have an image inside our head of what our body looks like now, which is really amazing. What other animal can do that? So we have an image, but there is the possibility of going beyond that image.

We also have a story. So our story might be… that we’re not good enough, that we are better than, we know more than, we know less than… whatever the story is… you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, what that person did or didn’t do…

But if you go into the experience, beyond your image of self, beyond your stories, and even beyond the feeling of you, how big or small are you? If you don’t use thought, where are you? You just become really present, the background idea that there is no you that can become really present. But if there is a presence that happens, where are you? What size are you? Where does your foot end and the floor begin? Where does your back end and the chair begin? How big is your head?

So your consciousness, your essence, is really in the experiencing. And in this experiencing right now there is no size to you. You are not a size. You’re not your story. You’re not your feelings. You are the sound of my voice. You’re all the sounds outside. You’re the warmth, the coolness. Beyond meaning, just in this moment, you are what’s appearing, which is everything.

So how does this make people feel?  What’s your experience when this happens? Like you can say anything. If it makes you feel alienated, if you feel really relaxed, it gives me juice to work with.

Attendee: When I close my eyes and you’re talking about everything that’s happening was me or whatever, like the birds tweeting, something like that. At that point, if I say “I”, am I immediately losing?  Because if it’s me and I use the word I, I want that experience to become pleasurable. So I seek pleasurable things, rather than just what is. As soon as I say, “I would like to feel love or warmth, or start manifesting bank account going up…”, those sorts of weird things, is that losing the point?  Or is that… do you understand what I’m saying?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, totally. So in Buddhism, there’s a difference between desire… well, it depends what Buddhist group you’re in, just like Non-Duality. But the way I was taught it was, there’s a difference between desire and craving. So there is natural desire towards pleasure, this is the way our bodies are made up. And this gets us into all types of mischief. Because we all have particular pleasures and dislikes. So some of us, I’ve got coffee in here, might like the coffee, afternoon coffee. And that’s not the best thing to be drinking, but that’s what it likes.

That’s a pleasure to drink that, and it’s a pleasure to talk about this subject. It’s not such a pleasure to do all my admin, which I had to do for my accountant yesterday. It’s not so pleasurable.  You get into the zone and it’s okay, just doing the numbers, but it’s not so pleasurable.

So this is what our bodies have, and we’re dealing with all the time, it’s what directs us. We think that belongs to us. So we think, “I’m in control of my pleasures”, which makes us very judgmental sometimes and hateful. And also idolizing people… “Why would they do that?”, or “That’s so wonderful they do it.” They do it because that’s the way they’re programmed.

So I have a dog, and she used to live on the streets in Thailand. I was one of those crazy tourists that got sucked in by the big eyes and prospect of her being killed.  I’m also a bit funny… I don’t like to feed her dog food and I like to feed her raw stuff.

And her favorite is… I’m a vegan. What I do for this dog is so gross. But her favorite is… thank goodness a chicken leg. It’s not like eyeballs or brain. Her favorite is a chicken leg or chicken breast or something. Organic preferably is what she likes the most.

So if I put that and a carrot in front of her, she does also like carrots, but which one do you think she’s gonna pick?  The chicken, and we all know that she couldn’t do it any other way. We can have that sympathy for the dog because we know, through genetics, breeding, there’s so many things that cause her to pick chicken.  And it’s the same for us.

I can’t help it that I drink coffee. I can try to recondition myself by reading all the bad things about coffee, and that might recondition me to stop it. But I can’t help in each moment the pleasures that I pick. Neither can any of you. I’m sure there’s many pleasures you pick, you have, that you’d be like, “Wish I didn’t have that pleasure”. Or pain as well. We all have them written into our body and it determines our life, and it makes things easy for us or difficult for us.

And we can recondition them, to an extent. I really don’t think I could ever recondition Khaleesi to stop liking chicken.  I don’t even know how I would do that, she just loves it.  But as humans, we can recondition ourselves by putting information in, and then we learn about things and we change.  But that’s still not a personal doership, it’s still something that’s simply happening.

So we have all these natural desires. And then we have this other element called separation that happens. And this is where my Buddhist group called it craving. Where we believe that pleasure is going to one day lead us to freedom.

Whereas Khaleesi doesn’t think “My chicken’s gonna lead me to freedom.” She doesn’t sit there imagining… she’s in agony, imagining when she gets to eat her chicken, the freedom that it will have. She didn’t in Thailand envision… she totally sucked me in, they could smell the weak tourists, I used to have ten, fifteen dogs follow me down the beach.  I was going to move there, and then I realized I couldn’t, I would just be the dog lady with 10,000 dogs.

But when she did that she didn’t sit on the beach and be like, “Hmm, I’m going to emigrate to England, I hear it’s quite good there for dogs. You get fed this, raw chicken, organic, not like eating out of the bins.” There was an instinct in her to move towards me and to keep coming back towards me.  So she didn’t have this separation from her pleasure, and then this imagination, “When I get to England, my life is going to be good, I’ll finally be safe. I finally will have arrived.”  She just does her pleasures in each moment.

But we as humans, because we’ve got self awareness which is an amazing quality, we get into this program of our pleasures are going to complete us one day, and then it turns into craving. So this is what Tony would say is seeking. We get into this dynamic of seeking to find freedom in our pleasures. And this gets us into more trouble than just on original pleasures.

So our original pleasures can be difficult for us. But then when you seek in your pleasure, because if you believe your girlfriend is your happiness, is your freedom. Or if you believe that your work or money is your freedom, then it becomes too important. It becomes this massive… like people would kill themselves over these types of subjects, it’s so important to us.

And this is why Non-Duality to me, to a healthy happy life, is so important because you’re realizing that your pleasures are pleasures, and that’s okay. But that you won’t ever find freedom in a daydream of the future.

So even though it’s so elusive to us, that if we collect enough money we’ll be able to relax.  I meet such a wealth of people through this, and I meet lots of millionaires. And the reason that I meet lots of millionaires, or billionaires, is because they really get that you don’t finally arrive.  They then have to protect their money, because everybody else wants it.  So they’re sitting on all their eggs.

And then there’s all types of complications when you have money. This is the biggest elusive one to us, even more maybe than relationships, that “Enough money will allow me to relax”.  If you’ve been unrelaxed your whole life, it’s not going to suddenly change by getting this.  It just won’t.  You’ll get another problem.  Your mind will go to another problem of how to maintain it, how to save it, which stocks to put it in… it seems very complicated having lots and lots of money.

I think a good amount, an average amount, is nice.  They say that it’s 25,000 I think a year, or say maybe 30,000 a year.  If you earn that, then your happiness level doesn’t change after that, if you go up any more than 30,000.  Maybe it’s gone up now though, with society.  But they did a study where 30,000 was enough to make us not feel like we were on the breadline, so we felt comfortable enough.  Something like 30,000 a year.  And I don’t know if that was dollars or euros or pounds.

Attendee: I think they call it, scarcity is finishing when you’re earning 60 or 70,000.

Lisa: Oh yeah, really? That much?

Attendee: 65 or 70.

Lisa: Okay, 65 or 70.

Attendee: That was in dollars.

Lisa: So maybe about £50,000?  So 50,000.  Okay, so double, nearly double.

Attendee: Sorry. Correction.

Lisa: No, I have a terrible memory.  And this is what we do, so we spend a whole lifetime just seeking in our pleasures.  And what Non-Duality is suggesting is that this moment, the what’s happening now, is the freedom.  So it’s this remembering of something that’s here present.

It doesn’t mean your body won’t go and collect money, or won’t go and have partners, or whatever it is that it likes.  It’s just seeing that you never ever find freedom in any of it.  It just continuously turns.  You’ll be rich, you’ll be poor, you’ll be happy, you’ll be unhappy, the emotional body will turn.

Attendee: The cynic in me says that this is another, in the same way that maybe someone outside this room who’s never heard of Non-Duality is chasing money to make them happy.  Having done a few things like this, I just think, “Well, would I just be chasing this, to again find some kind of freedom in this, and again to be disappointed.”

And also, I just don’t know if you’ve just got to accept that you’re a human being, you’re always going to search for happiness in things that you won’t find it in.  Is this an idea that you remind yourself of, or did a switch get turned on and “Now it’s just something I feel all the time”?

Lisa: I would say it’s my experience, but that’s a pretty bold claim. I would say that I’m not talking from a place of hope.  On the human level I’m sure that there’s times when I use the ideas or concepts of Non-Duality, to make things better.  When you’re in a really stressful situation, I’m sure that there’s times when I do that, it’s hard to judge.  But I’m sure that happens.

But there is something else that happened that I can’t… that was an energetic thing that happened about 10 years ago.  And it just feels like this wealth of freedom, but it’s not personal.  That sounds so crappy when you say it like that.  And that isn’t a story. And before that, I didn’t really think that was possible. Really. Some part of me that hoped that it was, but I can see how it sounds like a hope to you. And I can see how the mind would use that.

So then if I was working with you in a one to one session, because that’s most of the time how I work, rather than being in big groups, is one on one with people.  So if I was working with you on a one to one level, once you ask that question, I wouldn’t really answer that.  I’m answering it, most probably because we’re in a big group, and I don’t want to put you on the spot.  But I would move away from that a bit, and my experience, and I would go to what actually happens to you in that dynamic.  And I would just speak generally, not so much about you.  So I would then go into talking about chakras and the body.

So, we’ve got this consciousness part, which I would say from my experience, even though we can question the “my”, there is this energetic shift that can happen and there is a freedom that happens in that.  But I can see how that can become a psychological game, for the person to deal with difficult scenarios.  So then, I would move away from that, and I would go onto the psychology of the person.

So, when I talk about the person, I talk about chakras.  Not because I believe in all the wooey-hooey stuff that they say about chakras, but because from my experience, the chakras describe very well the emotional and physical body.

So you know when you feel fear… I don’t know if you’ve ever felt fear so bad, you feel like you’re going to shit yourself… so in Chinese medicine, they would actually be able to connect fear to your organs and why that happens. And the meridians. And the same with heartache. If you have a broken heart, you do physically feel it in your heart. I’m sure you guys have experienced this. And you know how when you don’t express yourself… when you’re in a situation where something’s really sad, you’re watching a film, and you don’t want people to know that you want to cry, you just hold it in… and then it feels like you’ve got like a big, something blown up in your throat and you can barely speak.  We have these chakras, and I think they’re really accurate at describing what happens to you physically with emotions, and your emotional centers.

So what you describe, the hopelessness, is something that happens in the human world.  And this is different from the consciousness. The consciousness is here, no matter if we’re feeling hope or hopelessness. So the consciousness is like a different story in a way. And that’s something that you as the human can never arrive at, you’re never going to get consciousness, you’re never going to understand it. But there can be some type of shift where this is remembered. But we still have to live in the human world.

And what happens to us in the human world, is we have these chakras that can open or close, and they’re meant to do that.  They’re not meant to always be open, I don’t think.  So if somebody came up to you and told you that you were an asshole and that they really hated you, more than likely what would happen is your heart chakra would close and you’d begin to feel physical pain in your heart. What you would do, is you would most probably defend that, so not deal with it.  And you defend it in your brain, and you’d start telling yourself what an asshole they are.  Or maybe you’d start attacking them, or you’d defend or something.

So you’d go into your mind, and you most probably wouldn’t feel that in your heart.  And this is when people really chronically ignore their emotions and feelings, they end up having sick bodies.  Not all the time, that’s not the reason for all sickness, but this is sometimes what we do.

Hopelessness, I think, is one of the most difficult… hope and hopelessness is one of the most difficult human emotions to deal with. And I think if it’s not understood, and dealt with on a human level, it can easily lead to depression. So hope to me is from here, because I don’t know if any of you can feel this area. If you can’t feel it, you can poke there a little. And it’s really a sensitive area.

So this chakra here is about choices. This all sounds really esoteric, but I promise you this is from my own experience. And I really… I might have talked myself into this, but I really experience these things.  So this chakra is about choice.  So when this chakra is open, you feel empowered, and you feel like you can make a choice.  You feel you have the ability to choose now to get up and walk out if you don’t like it, or to stay sitting.  When it’s closed, you might feel disempowered, like you can’t walk out.  But I’ll just talk about the openness.

When it’s open you feel empowered that you can choose.  You feel like you can do things, that you can achieve things. You feel like in a way there’s that sense of infinite possibilities, that anything is possible. There’s other feelings to it, but I might forget them now. It’s a feeling of strength. A feeling of action. Empowered.

So that’s what it feels like when it’s open and positive. And when it’s in its negative, it can feel hopeless, depressed, frustration, anger, all the yucky ones. Disempowered, and inability to choose. And that hopelessness is depression. That sense, like very bad depression where you feel totally stuck, like invisible.

And often we’re unconscious of this. So this is acting out in our day to day life. And then we associate it with Non-Duality. So we don’t realize that feeling hope and the desire for something to happen is to do with the chakra and absolutely nothing to do with Non-Duality. So your hope for Non-Duality is actually this chakra, either in or out of balance. And it’s got nothing to do with the subject of Non-Duality. I know that sounds really impossible. It’s actually all about the personal and it’s all about your personal psychology.

Attendee: Feeling better.

Lisa: Yeah, feeling better. And then when you listen to Non-Duality, you’re right, you start hoping, which can open the chakra, but it can also close it because you feel disappointed that Non-Duality will fix your life. And you don’t realize that they’re actually not connected, because it sounds like they are. “How can it not be about me, Non-Duality? Why would I be here if this doesn’t make my body feel better?”

And often, even when I speak, I make it sound personal, and I make it sound like it’s got something to do with you, as a human, arriving at something and being hopeful.  So when people ask this type of question when I’m in a one to one session with them, I really explore this area with them, and what it is to be hopeful, or to not be hopeful, or to wish for something, or not wish for something.  And just get them used to experiencing the opening and closing of that chakra, and seeing when it’s happening.

So seeing that you can come here, you can listen to this subject, and you can have like a positive experience from Non-Duality. But you don’t have to be lost in the story that Non-Duality is going to fix your human life, and that you’re going to arrive somewhere in the future and be free.  That you can just adjust or work with this chakra, and that experience of it will change.  Does any of that relate to your experience? Or is that a little woo-woo? It’s okay if it’s woo-woo.

Attendee: For me, it’s just on the brink of being tangible.  I don’t quite… just as soon as I think, “Oh yes, I kind of get that bit.”  And then…

Lisa: It goes.

Attendee: And also, I’ve never even heard the word chakra until about 10 minutes ago. So I’m still trying to…

Lisa: Yeah.  Sometimes I most probably on the human level use Non-Duality to fix that a bit.  Like I go into… it’s so easy to go into that bliss of Non-Duality. But it’s the pain of it, is pain of life.  Life can be really sad sometimes.  And it’s seeing that these two are really different subjects.  But they often come together because as you begin to get into Non-Duality, you inevitably begin to become more realistic about what it is to be human.

And a lot of the time, you have to clear up being human, so you have to become less neurotic in order to hear it.  Like when the person is really neurotic and uncomfortable, you’re deeply involved in yourself.  And when you become more comfortable, then there’s less clutter or something, you’re not so focused on what you can or can’t get.

So I would try and separate them out. And I would love to go in more depth to you what it is to be hopeful, and what the solar plexus or this energy is, and the stories that it tells us, and how it convinces us of things, and how it hopes.  And just coming back to feel.  That it’s okay to feel disappointed. That it’s okay to want to escape some of the things that we have to see in life. That’s really okay.  But it’s also not the solution either. The solution actually is to be really, in one way, radically human and feel it all. That life does have disappointments, that life does have sadness. Really feeling it.

Does anybody else have anything else?  I would love to go into that more, but I feel like it… in order to go into it with somebody, you have to really get them to go into their story. And I feel like it’s not so easy when you’re in a group. They have to go really into their story to feel it and to really recognize it. It’s not easy to show it less personally.

Attendee: I think it’s lovely you make that clear that they’re slightly different things. You could utilize things, but when you’re honest, deadly honest, with a very immediate what’s happening, so if it’s pain, it’s just pain.

Lisa: Totally. And of course we prefer pleasure, and that’s never going to escape, you’re going to prefer pleasure, that’s the way it’s set up. If we preferred pain, then we would be sadistic. It’s the way it is. It is as it is, it’s pain. And it’s really, on the human level, really comprehending that.  That it’s bound to be half and half, or maybe you get like 60% or 70% pleasure and 30% pain, and maybe slightly the other way around as well.

Attendee: So on a human level you said, I’m being picky with words, forgive me that, first you said something like “perception shift” which actually is not another kind of perception, it’s maybe an ease of what we were holding onto, that sort of shift.  But on the other hand you said on a human level, just reminding yourself that…

Lisa: I said what, sorry?

Attendee: The conclusional report is not what’s happening, it’s just a story.

Lisa: You just have to tell me that again, because you know sometimes when somebody reflects something back that you’ve said, you kind of have one of those blanknesses.  I can’t remember.

Attendee: I apologize… but you know what I mean, it’s similar to what Graham was saying.  This reminding yourself of what’s actually happening, what actually is going on right here.  What doesn’t change, but that immediacy of new experience, direct experience, direct experiencing what is.  On a human level, that reminding of it, it brings some ease, in a sense.

Lisa: Yeah, it brings some ease. I think maybe what I was relating to… I’d forgotten that.  Sometimes when I do talks I’m a little bit like goldfish, like six seconds, I’ve said it, and then “What did I say?”  I think it has to be like that, otherwise you’d be too intense.

I think maybe what I was relating to is that sometimes it’s good to bring an ease from that remembrance.  And sometimes it’s good to just allow it to be really uncomfortable.  It’s like a gentle balance.  So you sometimes allow yourself to just be really uncomfortable. And then sometimes it’s like moving your attention away into what you truly are.  Even though really none of it’s your choice, it’s happening.

So from the perspective of consciousness, there’s really nothing happening. There’s just this moment.  From the absolute perspective.  So there isn’t somebody going through time that’s progressing, there’s just this moment. So that’s from the absolute. From the human level, there does seem to be someone going through time.  And I would say that human does have hope, that it would get somewhere better.  And if it didn’t, it would most probably be sadistic.  Like it’s meant to work towards pleasures, it’s meant to go forward.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, at all.

I would say that having hope, as long as it’s in the right… like you understand what that hope is, and you understand what it’s coming from and where it’s going, and you understand the feelings and you’re not unconscious of it, then it can be beautiful and it can be healing on the human level.  As opposed to no hope and feeling depressed and disaster, and to feeling really uncomfortable.

And I think there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a writer as well, and I’m writing a book about a cat called Andrew.  It’s from his perspective.  He lives in a cult of channel future people.  I love sci-fi and mystery, so it’s like a mystery, and a sci-fi, and fantasy all combined.  And I have hope that will be completed, and that will get published. And that helps me in staying focused and staying motivated. And I use that to get my energy going with it.  I use it in a positive way, and I think really positively about it, and it gives me ecstasy in my heart and in my solar plexus.

And I don’t sit there and worry about it not going.  That’s what I did when I was younger, and I used to fail often, because of that, and get myself into dark places.  So I use the law of attraction, or these types of practices, to get me being creative, to get me going in the morning sometimes when I can’t be bothered.

Actually the reason, so when I first… it often happens when people first start speaking, they often tend to be very extreme non-duality.  Not all the time, but often. And then you see them loosen over time and become more human.  What began to happen to me, which I found really painful, was that I would see people using Non-Duality to try and fix their marriage, or try and fix… like I’d often come across young people that hadn’t started a career yet, and were in that terrible place that we all go through where you’re kicked out of home and you’re suddenly like, “Go! Now go!”. “Well, I’m not ready. Can I come back in?”

And then they’re using Non-Duality to try to avoid that. And so I just started speaking human with them and being like, “What do you feel now? You’re obviously distressed, what’s happening?” And they’re using Non-Duality, “There is nobody, but there’s nobody here.” You can see that they’re distressed, and then they’re repeating Non-Duality back to you and to themselves a lot of the time.  And it’s kind of making it worse, they’re kind of becoming more detached from the actual original problem.

I speak mostly one to one with people.  So in a group, it’s easy to do the hardcore Non-Duality, and it’s really beautiful. I think that’s like a really radical meditation when you go and listen to like Tony Parsons.  But when I started speaking to people one on one, I could see that really, sometimes there was the interest in Non-Duality, and when that came up I could speak to them about it.  And then other times it was because their marriage was falling to bits, there was problem with kids, or their childhood, or getting a career or money.

And they were traumatized by that, and Non-Duality, using Non-Duality, hardcore Non-Duality to fix that is a disaster.  It’s like, get yourself more detached from the actual problems.  Your heart is breaking because your wife or your partner is leaving you, and you’re like, “There is nobody, there is nobody, there is nobody, there is nobody.”

And I just couldn’t do that.  I just had to be like, “So what’s happening in your heart now?” And they’re like, “But there is nobody!” And then that’s how I started speaking more personally, it just evolved over time.  I still totally love the hard message and I really agree with it, like it’s God’s Will how it happens, and it’s a mystery, and it’s so beautiful, and it’s so divine, but ungraspable for the human.

But really, that’s only a problem for the human when the solar plexus is out of balance.  Like do you really care about that?  It’s only when the solar plexus is in depression and feels like it’s stuck and feels like it can’t do something, that it suddenly feels disturbed about not being able to get to Non-Duality.  So it’s just going back to the original source of the problem, and then once that’s all more balanced, then we go for the Non-Duality.

So you settle all that down, and you sort of put it in place.  “Okay, so your wife’s leaving you and it fucking hurts.  And you’re in pain.  And you can’t find a career, you can’t get a job, you’ve been sacked.  So you feel distressed about money.  So let’s acknowledge those feelings.”  And then when they feel more settled in that and they can see that their going to nobody is just a defense, and they just feel more relaxed in the actual feeling of it, then you go in with the hard stuff.  Here we go!

So that’s how I tend to work with people, but it tends to be one on one and I prefer that.  Because then you can really… you can’t really go into someone’s stuff in a big group because that can be very traumatic for people, it’s too much.

Attendee: In sessions like this, where for a few days there was no speaking at all.  So it was pressure cooking.  And then the group was intensively meeting every day for many hours.  And then suddenly speaking was allowed.  And… beautiful breaking… something spontaneous.  And people didn’t even know what they were capable of, that opening.

Lisa: That’s beautiful.  I’ve experienced groups like that at Osho before as well, in a really contained space, and really getting close and vulnerable.

Attendee: It wasn’t easy to speak in front of people during that.

Lisa: So that’s basically… I’m so happy to work with the person and work in time.  But it’s just looking at what hope is, and why we use that.  And what’s happening in us and why we need the hope.  And just looking at that, feeling that, and then we go for the Non-Duality.  And it’s the same as the law of attraction, we put the Non-Duality in there, and then we just give it to God and we see what happens.  And in the end, of course, there’s going to be a recognition of freedom.  Of course that’s going to happen, because that’s what you are, so you can’t hide from yourself forever.  It’s going to happen.

Attendee: When you work with people, how do you tend to work with people?

Lisa: So it really depends as to what somebody… what happens in the original conversations.  It depends on how the person opens up to me.  Yeah, so it depends.

It might be that the whole time I’m just talking about Non-Duality with them. So really pointing to Non-Duality and speaking like that.  But if I detect that there’s something else happening, then I will begin to ask them about that feeling.  And then if they’re reluctant to talk about the feeling, then I’ll do all types of different things.  Like I’ll start asking them about their childhood, or start asking them about their past or their work.  And then I’ll find ways in to then connecting that feeling with their body.

So in your body now, and if this feels too much for you please say because that’s the whole part of it.  What do you feel like, in your body?  So I’ll totally take your lead.  So you can say anything, you don’t have to get it right or wrong.

Attendee: Probably a bit of heaviness, but also vibrancy.  There seems to be a mix of the two.

Lisa: So then, if we started the session like that, I might go for the vibrancy, and then that would most probably take us to Non-Duality.  But if you were to say, “I have pain in my heart” or “I have pain in my shoulders, or in my neck”, then I would go a different way.

Attendee: Just from my own point of view, I find meetings like this… I feel it physically.  I think when we spoke through Skype, I mentioned over the years I’ve done a lot of emotional releasing.  And with that, when you start the process you feel surface level emotions, like just anger, or frustration, or whatever it is.  Just whatever’s happening now, and you feel it in your stomach and your chest.

And the visualization they say to get the ball rolling, feel like there’s… not a trapdoor… a door that opens up and it flows out.  And that’s a very easy way to get started.  And then you go a bit deeper, focusing on feelings of wanting control, approval, security.  Which is basically groups of feelings, or groups of beliefs, so letting go of chunks.  And then at a certain point you start feeling… you focus on feelings of separation, and let that go which pulls out whole sections of stuff all at once.

And I found as I went deeper with that, the releasing process, and especially for hours, days, or even maybe weeks after, there’s like a physical buzz.  And I get a similar thing from meetings.  And it seems to be a physical sensation.  And then I can feel my emotions can change quite a lot, and often I can be quite emotional for days, if not longer afterwards.  I don’t know, it just seems to shake me up.

Lisa: Yeah, totally. And I would say that’s what I kind of am doing with people, along those lines, just in my own unique way.  And it does seem to be when you settle down the human, then there’s an opening for something else, like this resonance that I would call beyond the personal.  So you know that vibrancy, that’s why I used to go to Tony’s meetings was because when I went, I felt like I vibrated with something, it was like a really deep meditation.  And, I don’t see it as you getting somewhere, so you getting more free, even though that’s how we might label it in time.

But it seems to correlate that the more that you become relaxed with yourself and okay with being here and stop searching for so much stuff, then you can hear this other part of the message.  This non dual part.  And that’s all I do in sessions, is I just wait for people until I can go in with Non-Duality.  But I don’t try to use Non-Duality to fix heartache or hopelessness or depression.  I use other techniques that I’ve learnt from Osho, from my own experience, and I just dance between the two.

I think that’s what the Vedas did.  I think that’s what happens in Buddhism, the settling of the mind.  But then when you come to it, and really see “Who is it that wakes up now? Where is that person that did all that emotional release?  And who wakes up?”  It really isn’t that person that wakes up.  But for sure, it seems like that person has to become thinner for the light to shine through.  But that’s all in imagination again, and our ability to connect one word to the other.  And here is presence, here is that light.  It’s shining.  It’s non-divided.

And I think it’s really okay to hold that dichotomy of speakers like myself that seem to give prescription and then also not, and then teachers that really dismiss that.  And it’s okay to not know, and it’s okay to have these different messages.  We don’t need to know, or sew them up, or make them balance.  That’s just for the taxes.  We can let it all not balance.

It used to be a big concern for me as well.  I remember when I first went to Ramesh, after spending a while with Tony, I had a difficulty in Ramesh saying… giving prescription and telling me what to do.  And then the Bajangs, and the kissing the feet, and the guru.  And I just didn’t care anymore, “Oh well, doesn’t make sense.”

Maybe we just go in… I’m not sure what time it is but we have a bit of silence now.  Maybe we’ve done enough talking.  What time is it?

Attendee: Twenty-five to five.

Lisa: Twenty-five to five.

…

Nice, maybe we can call it an afternoon.  Thank you.