Tight Energy

Every day we have a life. And every day we have the ability to create a totally different life. Every day! Every 24 hours we can change the play. In wisdom and enlightenment we learn that creating different plays every day is one of the most beautiful things that we can give ourselves.

Trouble arises when we decide at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of a month, or at the end of a life, that the drama we have played is not a good one.

Trouble comes when we’re writing the play in the morning and we decide ahead of time by the attitude we adopt that we’re going to write a miserable play. Then we have a miserable daybecause we designed it that way.

It has taken me many years more or less to accomplish what I’m going to tell you now. I’m not perfect at it. I have a lot of work to do still. On many occasions I have to remind myself to stop the judgments about what kind of a day I am having.

When I stop judging what kind of a day I am having,

it’s almost like a miracleit becomes a beautiful day.

It doesn’t seem possible that it could be that way, but it is. Then what happens is I can allow my day to unfold.

I allow my day to shape itself

and to show me all kinds of possibilities

as to what life is about.

But if I walk through my day with my preconceived ideas that I should do this, I should not do that, I like this, I don’t like that, and on and on, then I cannot be alive. With all these preconceived restrictions we cannot be alive. All we are doing is just thinking in a tiny, narrow frame of what should be or should not beoften in accordance with someone else’s standards.

But if we make an effort, we can catch ourselves being judgmental and opinionated about life. Even if we just catch ourselves two or three times a day, that’s something. And each time we catch ourselves we can change our attitude.

If we are very opinionated and very judgmental,

we end up being very, very tight and rigid.

We end up being very tight and rigid because we continually have to defend positions. It’s beside the point if our position is right or wrong. It’s the defending of a position which makes us rigid and tight.

We spend a huge amount of energy protecting these ideas.

I may not know too many things for certain, but I know this for certain:

What we are in this physical form

is a very, very special bundle of energy.

It is a most beautiful energy.

Our body, as solid as it looks, is not solid. It would be beneficial for us to visualize and to start accepting that this solid looking body is not solid. This form is not solid. It feels solid. We want it to be solid. But it’s not solid.

You can take my word for it that our body is not solid, but better still, you can go to the library. Look at some books that have high resolution photographs of our skin, or of the cells in our body and you will see that these structures are not solid. They are actually separated by more space than by stuff that appears to be solid.

We owe it to ourselves to see that we are not solid because the perception of being solid gives us a lot of problems.

If we are solid

and something happens to this solid thing,

then we are in trouble.

Death is one of the things that happens.

If we are solid it means that the definition of what we are is just my body and your body. If we are solid, everything that is happening is always happening to our bodies and that is all life is.

But if we are not solid,

we start to see that what we are is

a most magnificent field

of energy and consciousness.

Things look different then.

Things are the same because we still walk around with a body, but just the idea that we are not solid, that we are made up of energy, changes our perception.

This energy that I’m talking about is far beyond the electrical current that we have in a house. It’s not an energy that we get by burning oil. Maybe we have to create some new word for it. This energy is different.

With all the work that I’ve done in the Olmec and Toltec teachings and in other traditions, with things that I have studied and felt, with the things that I have traveled into, I know for certain that what I am is this energy I am discussing.

If you look into that, you will see that is what you are too. That being the case, what do we do with this consciousness, this energy, that we are? What do we do with us?

When we are opinionated and judgmental, when we’re unkind and unloving, when we’re negative, when we’re protecting these solid bodies and all of our ideas and concepts, we end up becoming very, very rigid in this energy field.

If you were to look at this tight energy field, it stays in one position. If there were pictures that could be taken, you would see this field to be about the size of my palm. And, like a fist, everything is closed and tight. Inside we have all these ideas, opinions, concepts, misery and whatever it is that we have; and it’s right there tightly bound up.

But the idea is for this energy field to start to open and open and openlike a hand with spreading fingers. Then it can be very, very wide. If a photograph could be taken, it would look somewhat egg-shaped around our whole physical formall these energy fields with tentacles and points and receptors opening up to whatever may be around us, as opposed to being very, very contracted.

In satsang and in all these different traditions we take up (it doesn’t matter what they areBuddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, all these different traditions) what the original teachers tried to show us is to not be so tight. It’s not easy to undo this tightness. It’s a lot easier to be tight.

Tight means heavy with definitions. Tight means having very, very correct opinions. Many times we follow certain religions because they do have very tight definitions of what life is about, how we should behave, how we should not behave, what happens to us upon the time of death, and so on. When we accept these particular things, we can get really tight within this structure.

So in satsang, I am trying to have you throw away all these ideas and concepts that make us so tight. When you discard them, then you start to open up. Then what happens is that you start to see that life is very different. Life is very, very beautiful.

You also start to see that other things are possible about what may happen at the time that our life is not here in the way that we know it.

It’s our nature to want to identify with something that is specific. Here we have to identify with something that is not specificsomething that is very, very wide.

Once we identify with something that is very, very wide,

we start to see the beauty and the mystery of life,

the beauty of the mystery of everything around us,

the beauty of the mystery of ourselves.