Transcribed Talk by J. Jaye Gold
The promise of the spiritual pursuit—being free and happy and light, feeling a connection and an inner calm—is very attractive, especially after you’ve read about that possibility or had a flash of it. It’s very attractive in comparison to the way life ordinarily is, which involves acquisition, pressure, tension, rushing, and so forth. Once we have the idea of something else that’s better, because of our programming, we expect to go directly for it. We expect to attain it in a certain amount of time and not be dependent on others in order to get there. But in this first phase of spiritual growth, it cannot be done in this fashion. I’ll call this first stage knowing yourself as you are, knowing every detail of your behavior so that you can’t fool yourself, so that you can’t deceive yourself, so that you can’t imagine something about yourself that isn’t the case. This really is the building block of aspiration to consciousness.
All the feel-good stuff you’ve pursued will never take you anywhere if you don’t have the foundation below it of knowing yourself as you are. It doesn’t matter how well you pretend, it doesn’t matter if you teach, if you learn—it doesn’t matter what position you’re in. If you can fool yourself, your spiritual development will soon come to a stop and you’ll be caught in an eddy, going around and around and around. You’ll end up looking for people who are less experienced than you. You’ll be teaching courses at city college, writing books, holding seminars, and passing on the information from that circle you’re going around in, but you will not be expanding.
Once you’ve been caught in that eddy, it’s very difficult to go back and start learning this first step. You’ve already proceeded as if you know it, and dependence on someone or someones to learn that is even more painful because you’ve already imagined and pretended that you are beyond it. It’s very difficult. Imagine if you were painting your house and you didn’t get some of the bubbles out or didn’t scrape the paint below the new layer. You’ve painted the whole house, and then the bubbles start to come out, and you have to do it all again. That’s hellish!
It’s not a fun thing to go back over ground you think you’ve already covered, but that’s what must be done. The earlier you recognize that you are dependent to learn that first step, the better. Once you’re no longer able to fool yourself, the possibility exists for more independence, but until then, you are totally, completely, and absolutely dependent on those who can tell you that you’re fooling yourself. Until you can’t fool yourself, you’re dependent on a team, on a group dynamic, on teachers, on somebody who can’t be fooled. Whatever you think to the contrary, you are wrong! I have never seen an exception to this law, and I have seen a lot. If a person can fool themselves, then when the pressure is on, they will not proceed. When you are climbing and the pressure goes up, any part of your equipment that isn’t as it should be will jump up and fail. When the pressure is on, that self-deception will come forth and you will exit the climb on the note of that self-deception.
I acknowledge that this groundwork at times doesn’t look very spiritual. It’s like saving money to buy a car. You’re working who knows where, doing who knows what for who knows whom, and you’re saving the money to buy the car. You can picture the car, but it’s nowhere around. You know you’ve got to keep doing the job, so you might as well feel okay about it because you know it’s part of the process. That’s really the place where you have to get to. You have to recognize that this step of knowing yourself as you are and getting to a place where you can’t fool yourself is an inseparable, fundamental part of the progression of spiritual enlightenment. If you have any aspiration in that direction whatsoever, then you must become adept at that step.
You must develop the impartiality needed for that step, build the patience needed for that step, and do the examination. That’s the groundwork. You need to remember that the next time you’re dealing with some piddly bullshit about your self-deceptiveness and you’re thinking, I signed up to examine the ethers! What does this have to do with it? Where are the meditation retreats? Where is the silence? I read this book where everybody wore white, and it was all beautiful. That’s what I want! When do we do that? Well, that is completely and absolutely up to you. I know there are some of you here who think we have a construction company or that we do potlucks. I sympathize with you thinking that, but those are the circumstances, the fields we use to take this step of learning to see ourselves as we are, this step of becoming incapable of fooling ourselves. Until you acknowledge the necessity of being dependent to learn that and get better at that, you won’t be able to take those next steps.
I want to put the responsibility back on you, because as soon as you’re ready and willing and become competent in pursuing this necessary first step, then other things can open up, and in X amount of time from now we can have a completely different program. I hope that we will, and if that comes to pass, it won’t be based on your imagination. It will be based on the fact that you’ve taken that step and built a foundation. There are so many people who have aspirations, but there are very few who are willing to put in the foundation work. Very few people. The foundation of knowing yourself as you are will over and over again be the telling element of whether you proceed or not past any particular level.
As I say, when the climb towards more understanding and more freedom gets challenging, there will be two forces in action: the force that wants to take you higher and the force of your resistance, which will manifest in your self-deception. If self-deception is available, those two forces will cross and you will go nowhere. You will build a little house on that plateau and call it “School for Consciousness,” or you’ll call it “I’m not interested anymore,” or maybe “Those guys didn’t know what they were talking about.” Call it what you will, but understand that you will not proceed beyond that point.
You have to come to grips with being dependent to learn what you don’t know. You may be able to find a certain circumstance where you can be bon vivant and tell everybody what to do and be wild and crazy. People may say, “Wow! What a far-out person!” But then you’ll go to another situation, and you’ll be afraid and timid—completely different—and you’ll blame the circumstance. You won’t recognize that you have created a little box that you can operate in in which you feel like you are okay, strong, easy-going, whatever. Freedom doesn’t have that limitation. You can’t pursue freedom and maintain that limitation. You have to face whatever comes in front of you and learn how to examine how you are in those circumstances. That is a process and a science that you need to develop skills for, that you need help with, and you will be dependent on those who know more than you until you develop those skills for yourself. It wasn’t easy for me to come to grips with that dependence, and it won’t be easy for you, but that’s the way it is.