Transcribed Talk by J Jaye Gold
In the song “Amazing Grace,” it says, “We’ll spend our days singing God’s praise.” What does that mean? How are we going to be spending our days singing God’s praise? Does that mean we’re not going to be cooking? We’re not going to be doing errands? Probably not, but what about worrying, planning, rushing, and being confused? Do you have some idea what it would be like if you were not doing those things? There is a way to live in the praise of the Giver of all our gifts. There will not be a big void on the other side when you stop worrying, planning, and being confused. You’ll actually be able to understand the words to that song.
But now we have to work. They say in Hinduism that souls wait six billion years or so to be hooked to a human body—as opposed to a grasshopper or some other creature. The human body is the crown of creation; it is a great treasure, a great good fortune, and not a frequent one. There are so many creatures and so many things!
We’ve all been given the basic human equipment, but we shouldn’t assume that we know how to use it. Some people get a big box from one of these electronic stores, tear off the paper, plug the device or appliance in, and start to use it like a kid would. They push the buttons, but never read that little paper called the instruction booklet. Humans have some very intricate equipment precisely formed for the job it was designed to do—and that isn’t cooking and cleaning. The job it was meant to do is to realize its connection to the whole, to the Creator and to the creation. En route to doing that, it can do all sorts of other things, but the equipment is given for the realization of that inner Reality.
The Creator created the ultimate equipment—the human body with all its intricacies, its five senses, its ability to think, to move, to have emotions, to be still—in order to realize God within and its connection to the whole. You have that equipment, and you imagine that you know how to use it. Maybe at one time, for a week or two right there in the beginning, you did. But then you were taught by those who loved you and cared about you and wanted to protect you to use that equipment for the protection of separateness instead of for the discovery of the internal Reality.
After a while, you thought, I know what this human life is for. I can use it to accumulate, to keep myself safe, and to judge others. So, the original equipment that you were given, that fine-tuned, incredible computer stereo, is now being used to bolster the leg of your couch that happens to be shorter than the other three legs. Not the highest and best use of the gift you were given—not even close! To think that you were given a human body with so much potential, that so much has gone into creating, and you’re using it for what? It’s such a shame.
You think you know how to use the senses, but you don’t. We only see what we think we need to see, what we imagine benefits us; we don’t see the rest. We only see in terms of what pleases us or what doesn’t please us. We have an interpretation, and we don’t see the rest. We don’t hear the rest, we don’t smell the rest, we don’t touch the rest, we don’t taste the rest. Our senses are numb.
For those of you who’ve read some of the Van der Post books about Africa, you know there’s a dog named Hintza.[1] He goes out every morning and inspects the spoor from the night before. What Hintza smells with his nose recreates the whole story of what took place the night before. What do we do with our noses? I like it or I don’t like it. We record nothing. Nothing is interesting, nothing is informative, nothing is expansive. It is only pleasant smell, unpleasant smell. It may not seem noteworthy to you, but it’s hugely significant because it reflects our other absorbing abilities. The same story could be told for what we see and don’t see, or what we hear and don’t hear. Our senses have become a tool for doing one thing: I like it, or I don’t like it. Think about that. Do you ever smell anything and not think either, I like it, or I don’t like it?
We have to begin to rediscover how to make assessments not necessarily based on, I like or I don’t like, I fear or I don’t fear, I need or I don’t need. You may consider yourself a spiritual seeker, and you might want to chant and read the Bhagavad Gita, but it may be that first you have to learn to re-open your senses so that you can take things in as they are. Your scrambled thought process may have distorted and manipulated what’s out there into something that it may not be.
Occasionally, we run into someone who’s severely paranoid. They’ll say, “Those people over there are looking at me. They’re talking about me.” And you say, “No, they’re not. It’s in your imagination.” When we think the same thing, it makes sense to us, but we’re not seeing or hearing what’s really there. We create a muddle out of it through the muddle of our thoughts. We don’t know the purpose of those thoughts, the limitations of those thoughts, the danger of those thoughts, the effect of thoughts, or the place for thoughts. We also don’t know the place for feelings or what their function is.
You may consider yourself a sophisticated person, and you might consider people who rub ashes on themselves and dance around fires to be primitive, whether they live now or lived five hundred years ago. In actuality, your ability to use your basic equipment looks primitive to me. You may be able to keep a flow of words that fit together coming out of your mouth, and other people may interpret those words in a way they think makes sense, so it looks like everybody’s cool. Things look reasonable to you, but they don’t look even close to that way to me.
This distortion of the senses along with the misuse of the emotions and the thought process has been so complete that unless some dynamic process intercedes, it will never change. A twisted piece of metal cannot untwist itself, and you cannot untwist yourself. You think your moments of unhappiness are caused by something you did wrong that you’ll do right next time, but my concept is very different. My concept is that your experience of life can’t go well because something at the root is distorted.
If you’re curious and willing and have an experimental attitude, and have an inkling that it may be so, then you can learn that you’re not as you imagined yourself to be. You are not seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling what’s out there. You are proceeding on distorted data that you’re absorbing through a defective mechanism.
The job of the mind, this talking inside, should be limited; it shouldn’t be allowed to run carte blanche at every moment. Your mind says, “Don’t you want to know what I think?” You could learn that sometimes it’s appropriate to say, “No! I don’t want to know what I think.” Or your mind says, “Don’t you want to know if I like it or don’t like it?” Sometimes it’s appropriate to say, “No! I don’t want to know if I like it or don’t like it.” Or your mind says, “Don’t you want to know what I prefer?” Sometimes it is appropriate to say, “No!” But you haven’t come to that conclusion yet because you still think it’s working. You need to gather some direct evidence that it’s not functioning properly. Carl Sagan created this metaphor: If all existence were on a calendar, and January 1st was the Big Bang, then man would have shown up on the scene during the last seconds of December 31st. Our creations are incredible, but imagine the Creator of all of it! Imagine that! This human body we’re given that is so finely tuned to realize God within is not a creation of man, but a creation of what created everything. That Creator, in designing an instrument for a purpose, worked and worked to create the perfect equipment for the realization of that internal Truth, that Oneness. And we are that equipment.
[1] Hintza is 13-year-old François’ dog in Laurens van der Post’s A Story Like the Wind, and the sequel, A Far Off Place.