Moderator: A comment from a participant in England: I am finding greed/entitlement to be an issue. Could you speak on this and how best to resolve it?
David: Not if you don’t tell me what the situation is. You can’t just feed me a topic like that and separate yourself out and then want an entertaining answer from me. What are you ready to share? What entitlement? Am I supposed to know what that means?
Moderator: From a participant in Germany: I was wondering how to distinguish love/service when we are coming from the ego vs. pure love/service coming from the Divine for the Divine.
David: It’s all ego. Both of the above come under the rubric of ego fascination. There’s only action. None of it is Divine or all of it is Divine. You have to take your pick. Either everything is going to be Divine or nothing is. There’s no mixture. And there’s no ideal of becoming a saint through Divine action. All of that has been fed to you by religious sources that you have not yet critiqued. So, I invite you to go into yourself and ask yourself where such a question comes from. I have never advocated service, so it’s not part of my teaching. Nor do I tell people not to help people. That’s also not part of my teaching. See if you can come up with something that reflects your self-awareness of why you asked the question. What has stimulated you or provoked you into asking that kind of question?
Moderator: A response from England: Greed and entitlement were terms had been offered to me and yet offered to another also.
David: You are completely unclear to me. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I am not a mind reader. You need to find your discriminative mind, find your intelligent relationship with yourself, and ask or comment from that level. If there’s a sense of intense cloudiness and confusion or a lack of ability to express yourself, I cannot help. You have to give something to get something. You have to be able to give a little something to get something. To give means to give of yourself. It means to be clear about who you are. It means to be clear about why your question is arising. And it needs to be considerate in opening the door of understanding to the other person that you want to talk to. You can’t just utter a couple of very general, vague, suggestive ideas and then ask for a commentary. That’s not polite. It’s not intelligent. I don’t know where this issue of entitlement comes from. I don’t even know the context of it. I’m sorry. I can’t help you.
Moderator: A comment from a participant in Finland: Thank you, I feel full of energy and heat. These experiences have grown stronger for me in recent Webcasts.
David: These experiences insinuate the presence of something. This is not just random heat or random energy coming over you for no reason. It indicates a process, indicates something deeper than those symptoms, and through the interaction of you with your experience whereby you clarify it, you inquire about it, you feel it completely, then there can be an integration from wherever this experience is coming from. You can become integrated in knowledge inside of this experience and therefore come to a kind of elevation of appreciation as to what’s happening between us. Even though we are so many miles away from each other, it’s still very intimate even with the long distance.
Moderator: A further comment from Germany: Thank you, now I am just trying to grasp what then is surrendering it, not the ego or is it?
David: Surrendering what?
Moderator: From a participant in Austin Texas: I think that it is often more difficult to clearly express something with a limited number of words than talking to someone in person. It’s a skill some of us are trying to learn.
David: We all have to learn this together, whether it’s done on the internet or in person. The problem lies not with whether it’s on the internet or in person but the amount of time and energy you take to relate to your feelings and your thoughts before you speak and then to try as best as one can to speak in a way where one can offer something to the other. So often, we just talk within our own feelings. Let me repeat that. Often we just talk from within our own feelings. We blurt things out and then we just expect people to understand what we are saying in a deep way. That’s never going to happen. You have to take responsibility for offering your words in such a way that the attention of your guest, the person you are speaking to, is taken into an interest in what you are beginning to say. So, all of this assumes that you know where you are, and you know who you are, and you know what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. But, if you are unclarified in what you think and what you feel, then opening your mouth makes things much, much worse, because now you’re using the platform of dialogue in order to find out what you really want to say, which is a great burden on the one who listens.
So, there has to be a kind of immediacy of intelligence in your life that projects your words, your ideas. You don’t have to be Plato. You don’t have to be Aristotle to do this. Anybody can do this by simply reflecting carefully and with sincerity on what they’re feeling and what they want to say about what’s being felt. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. But, customarily, we’re walking around in a self-created dream and from inside that dream we talk to others, and the other that we talk to is just a character in our dream. The other becomes assimilated into the dream that we are walking around living in, so that when we talk to the other it’s actually talking to some figment of your own imagination. Now if you happen to do this in front of a living person while they are in two places, one outside of you and real and objective, and two inside of you fantastically constructed, then you’re going to come across as being dissociated, dissociated from yourself, dissociated from the world, and ultimately unable to relate, unable to relate in an interpersonal reality.
So, one of the great problems in this field that I have chosen to partake in, this so-called spiritual awakening field is that this problem of living in the imagination is a cancerous problem where people are imagining all sorts of things, absorbed from all sorts of sources uncritically. The things they’ve absorbed have been absorbed uncritically without any discrimination. So, rebirth is true. Reincarnation is true. Life after death is true. All these things that we assume we know have become facts, with quotation marks around the word “facts.” We assume things to be true that haven’t even been examined properly. So, this issue of being able to talk to another person has a lot to do with the one who can or cannot communicate. That’s going to obstruct a conversation, a real human conversation.
Moderator: A reply from Finland: Thank you, your reply to my comment felt very personal and intimate.
David: We should ask how that’s achieved. How is it that even though we just said a few words to each other, we’re many thousands of miles away from each other, or several thousand, or a couple of thousand, whatever it is, we are able to communicate and meet because we are offering ourself to each other. We’re making an offering, and we’re actually listening in a place that’s deeper than the superficial mind, the superficial intellect. And in that, we can actually begin to feel like we are known to each other, that we actually exist in ourselves and for ourselves and also in relation to the other, that there is an other whose existence is equally important to our own. And when you are loaded up with this kind of understanding or realization you’re in a position, at least most of the time or perhaps some of the time, to make conversations explosive in terms of communicating what’s real and not something about a dream, a fantasy that you might be living in, that one might be living in.
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