Enlightenment - Yudhishtara

A lot of the Olmec and Toltec teachings that I have been involved with for many, many years are very beautiful because they teach us how to become a warriornot a warrior that goes out and fights and kills people, but a warrior that lives as an independent free being.

This means that we know our strengths and we know our weaknesses. We know what desires we are going to follow and which ones we are going to leave behind. And we take action.

After we take action, we don’t continually re-inspect our actions. We have acted! We’ve acted and we do not double-guess all our actions. We have acted.

We cannot split ourselves into halves and make one part go this way and the other part go that way. If we do that, we never do anything because we are not able to act.

If we are living with somebody that is causing us continuous misery day after day after day and we’re allowing iteither we like the misery at some level and choose to stay with it, or we get out.

But this has nothing to do with absolute reality which we can not speak about. It has nothing to do with That! This is simply the wisdom of being honest with ourselves. Maybe we want to deceive other people. But we have to be honest with ourselves.

We have to be honest with ourselves in really finding out what we want. “What do I want? Without trying to justify it to anybody else, what do I want!” If we want to prove something to somebody else, if we have to justify something to somebody else, we are a slave!

The goal of Poonja-ji and so many beautiful teachers, has been to create lions. And lions are lions. They are not sheep.

We have the right to tell somebody, “No, I don’t want to do this.” We don’t have to say, “I don’t want to do this because… because… because.” It’s just, “I don’t want to!” Period.

Then we claim that such a response is impolite. But many, many times all the reasons we come up with are lies anyway. Why not just say I don’t want to? Everybody knows that we’re lying when we don’t want to do something and we say I have to do this and that instead. It’s just I don’t want to.

Or how many times are we caught by other people wanting us to be only theirs. We have to do things and behave in a way that pleases them all the time. Then we have no ability to do anything on our own. If we ever do something different, we’re not considered a good person any more.

So before we get so focused on enlightenment… enlightenment… enlightenment, we have to do many things on our own to make ourselves free. It requires some effort to free ourselves of our entrapments. When we are free, we become very loving.

It’s an amazing thing

how loving we become when we are free

and how kind we become when we are free.

I used to think it would be just the opposite, that when we become very free we would end up hurting a lot of people with our freedom because we would not be doing many things that others want us to do. But it turns out to be just the opposite. When we really know that we are free, then whatever we are doing is a choice made in freedom. Then we become lighter, more content, happier with whatever we are doing. And when we do something for others, it is because we want to. Subtle resentments disappear and everyone benefits.

We’re doing it because we want to. We’re not being coerced. We’re not being forced. We’re not doing it because we’re keeping a ledger where we say, “I did twenty-five good things for you last month and you’ve done only ten. So you owe me fifteen. And if I don’t get those fifteen things in the next month, I’m going to be mad and I won’t speak to you.” Many times the other person doesn’t even know what happened. Meanwhile we’ve been angry all this time.

So now in my life I do two things on a daily basis. I get up in the morning. I open my eyes and look around. Automatically, I find myself saying, “I thank you, my Beloved. I love you.” And then I move on in my day. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, I just have my day until I’m ready to go to sleep. When I know I’m ready to fall asleep I find myself saying, “I love you, my Beloved. Thank you for my day. I’m in your hands.” And that’s all that I do now.

I don’t meditate anymore. I don’t sit someplace staring at something. I just do what happens during the daywhatever happens or doesn’t happen. I just do what I do, or I don’t do. And I get curious about all kinds of things. I read things. I do this. I do that. I talk to you. I’m talking and talking and talking about things that can’t be spoken of but I’m here doing it.

The days come and the days go,

and I try to live them as fully as I can.

Sometimes I think I’m helping somebody. Sometimes I’m not helping anybody. Sometimes when I think I’m doing the right thing, I find out later it was the wrong thing. Sometimes I do so much and nobody appreciates anything. Sometimes I do hardly anything and the greatest appreciation takes place. Sometimes I get totally attached to something and I cannot escape from my attachment to that thing. Some other times I do something and I’m totally detached from the outcome.

Sometimes I ask, “Why is this, and why is that?” Then I remind myself, “Why are you asking all these whys?” Sometimes I forget, and sometimes I remember. When I come to talk to you here for a while, talking helps me to remember. Then people come to me and say, “Yudhishtara, thank you very much for telling me this.” And I tell them, “No, thank you.” But often they don’t believe me when I am thanking them. And it’s all a mystery. We could do well to remember that.

We could remember the wordmystery.

We can remember the wordlove.

And we can rememberBeloved.

And there’s nothing else.

With these three things

life is very, very special.

And we have

everything we ever wanted

within ourselves.

The most beautiful beings that we’ve ever had in this worldin their last moments before they’ve left their forms, have all said more or less the same thing. They all have said, “Look within you.” They have all said that.

Why would they say that as their last words? They know they have only a few seconds. They’ve already thanked their Beloved, but they have a few seconds left. What’s the final advice they give to somebody who happens to be there? “Look within yourself.”

Look within yourself

because you have

within you

everything

that is required.

It is not for somebody else to give it to you.

You already have it in you.

Do we hear what that means? Look within your own hearts. You have everything there. Don’t follow somebody because they’re wearing different clothes than you are, because they’re wearing some kind of a robe and they have a turban and they tell us all kinds of stories and untruths so that they can control you and lead you to donate to their personal accounts.

We can have conversations with a huge variety of peoplebut we must look within our own hearts because all the answers are there. And all the answers are mysterious.

A Free Being