Welcome to satsang.

A very common question that people ask is about their experience. “All I know is what I sense, what I hear, what I see, what I feel.” This is a stage of growth, a stage of awareness. All we initially know, all we experience is ourselves. But we never stop to be aware of the one who observes this seeing and hearing.

If I raise my hand and ask, “Who is seeing this?” Someone will say, “I am seeing it.” But you’ll find that everybody else in the room is also seeing the hand. Take away the ‘I’ from the seeing and you will see that the one who sees is not you, the ego. The one who sees is the SEEING itself. The one who hears is the hearing. The one who experiences is the experiencing. In other words, there is only seeing, hearing, and experiencing.

We are conditioned through a process of identification and conditioning to say, “I am seeing it.” ‘I’ is the most powerful thought there is, and all thoughts emerge from that thought. Every thought that crosses your mind has come from a long, long time of identification with that ‘I’ that you think you are. But if right now you were to ask, “Who is this ‘I’?”, you won’t find it anywhere.

What is happening right now? You are listening and I am speaking. If you remove the ‘I,’ then there is just speaking taking place and listening taking place. The two are one - there can be no speaking without listening. This is that which lives as you. We have identified so long with who we think we are that we have lost the ability to feel without separation.

The conditioned part of us is made up of three things that always contradict each other - desire, seeking, and resistance. They always contradict. Let me give you an example. Did you know that every desire to feel good creates a bad feeling? The conditioned part of you doesn’t know this, but every desire you have to make yourself feel good eventually becomes feeling bad.

Here is another example. Say I desire to live a simple life. So what do I do? I go about planning and constructing a way to live a simple life. Then it becomes complicated! You can’t desire to feel good, because feeling good is part of who you are this moment. Feeling good is the awareness of now. If you are listening to Burt and totally feeling my words without trying to figure it out, all you are is now-awareness. This now-awareness is the very listening itself; it is feeling good, happiness, peace, love, connection, totality, wholeness.

Another thing that creates contradiction is seeking love. We are seeking love all the time. Seeking love brings fear of love. The reason there is so much fear in the world is because everybody wants love. Have you ever seen any one of the 6 billion people on this earth who doesn’t want love? There isn’t one! But all you see is fear, war, violence, corruption! Why? Because you are love, but when you don’t know it, it becomes a need.

Your heart, your center of being, wants love more than anything, because that’s what it is. But because it doesn’t know that love is its very nature, it comes as a need. When it comes as a need, you are telling yourself, “I don’t have that love.” Then you go about seeking it, and where do you seek it? You seek it from relationships, from people, from society at large. When you do that, it is called codependency. The need for love says, “I don’t have love,” which becomes a fear of rejection.

So are you beginning to see that every time you make yourself a personal ‘I’, you are creating a contradiction, creating pain? There are 6 billion humans, and one Being. We miss the Being, and that Being is all we ever want. But we lose sight of it because in separation we have the desire to feel good, and it creates the opposite.

We seek love because we are love, and we get the opposite. And then what do we do? We create a resistance to fear. And that resistance to fear creates the greatest tragedy of all - great emotional pain, loneliness, deprivation. The greatest suffering is in that resistance.

The great masters say that there is no such thing as emotional pain, there is only the resistance to your own fear. What is fear? Fear is the thought that there is a ‘me’ that is going to lose something. But there is nothing wrong with fear itself - we started out with fear as part of survival. But then we turned it into psychological fear.

If fear is seen as a signpost, as a part in us that we need to learn from, we can grow tremendously. But the interesting thing about growth is that in truth, there is no growth. We talk about a process, but in truth there is no process. You don’t gain anything, you don’t achieve anything, you don’t go anyplace. There is only here - this is it. That’s the beauty of it, the eternal awareness that is complete here and now.

But because of this belief that we are going to go someplace, we create something called process. But what is this ‘process’? Are we growing, are we progressing, are we really going from stage to stage? Seemingly so, but what is really happening is you are learning to trust who you are, that which lives as you.

When you begin to trust it, to the extent of your trust you find what you have always been - love, peace, joy. The moment you trust who you truly are, not the conditioned part in you, but the aware space that you are right now, it will take care of you in ways you never dreamed possible. I talk from experience, because financially I gave up everything, even tore up my credit cards a few years ago, but I have never been poor. My debts, everything is paid for month after month. Sometimes the way it comes is unbelievable.

I will just give you an example of something that happened a few weeks ago. My computer has been having lots of problems. I love technology, videos, and creativity, and a few weeks ago I had problems with Windows XP in my latest computer. I couldn’t get sound on my video no matter what I did, and no one was able to help me. I read the literature and tried everything and nothing helped. So I gave it up, saying, “Bhagavan will show me.” Yesterday I got up at 5:00 in the morning and I heard this voice explaining to me what I need to do. “Go back, delete the program, use that software that you’ve never used before,” and it works like a dream. This is happening all the time, with everything.

One of the things I tell my clients is to learn to trust who you are, because who you are is life. Call it God, call it pure consciousness, it doesn’t matter what you call it - the infinite, totality, wholeness, Christ, Buddha, it doesn’t matter. I call it ‘Bhagavan’ and I feel him with me all the time.

The wonderful thing about trust is that you don’t have to do anything. You trust, and it acts through you. So many people write me letters one after the other about relationships, saying, “What should I do?” and “How should I act?” If I find that they are in that ‘doing’ state, I tell them something to do. But essentially, there is nothing to do.

You know, so many books have been written on relationships - how to satisfy your needs, how to satisfy your mate, how to do this, how to do that. Forget it - there is no work to do in a relationship.

When you love another in the beginning, all you fall in love with, all you are dealing with is the ego. Eventually there is only Being, and the being doesn’t need work. When you see your partner as yourself, what work is there to do? There is only a total acceptance of the moment. When you begin to move with Being, Being takes care of everything, because selfishness is gone, the need for love is gone, wanting to get your own way is gone. There is only, “Here we are.”

One of the things that is expressed very often in the email I get is that people feel personally responsible for things that happen. But what if you realize fully, here and now, that you are not personally responsible for what happens to you? How freeing that is! You are not personally responsible. Even though the things happening now might be the result of things that you did in the past, you didn’t do it willfully in order to bring suffering, you did it because you didn’t know any better at the time. So you don’t need to take personal responsibility for what is happening now.

The moment you take personal responsibility, what happens? First, you feel like you’ve done something wrong. The moment you feel you have done something wrong, you suffer guilt. The moment you suffer guilt, the internal dialogue starts. “I shouldn’t have done this,” “What’s wrong with me,” “I should have said this.” The internal dialogue stays with you all the time, every sleepless night, and brings with it self-pity, which is a form of self-punishment. “What’s wrong with me?” “I should know better,” That self-pity becomes so bad that you want to get rid of it.

Trying to get rid of guilt brings the biggest emotional dysfunction, which has been known to drive people to the insane asylum. Don’t ever try to get rid of guilt, because guilt makes you blame somebody. Your wife, your husband, your children, your neighbors - you have to blame someone and project it out to get rid of it, and when you do that, the guilt builds inside you and before you know it, you have a deep anger or loneliness or depression. It’s inevitable because it came from your feeling of personal responsibility.

People have no idea what personal responsibility really means. Responsibility is the ability to respond, now, through awareness. That is your true responsibility, to be true to you this moment, to be totally honest. And when you are totally honest, in total acknowledgment of how you feel, the action that comes from it will be the right action.

So remember one very important thing - the only responsibility you have is to be true to yourself in the moment. But when we talk about yourself, it brings up a dichotomy. Who is this ‘me’?

When people ask questions, they start out, “Well, I feel that...” or, “When this happens to me...” or, “What about when I...” There is always that ‘I.’ But right now, for the sake of today’s subject, see what is happening without personal involvement. Then you begin to see in a fresh, new way.

Look at anybody in the room. Do not judge them or interpret what you think you know, just look at them, and you begin to feel that they are a part of you. When you look at someone, do you know if you seeing them or are you seeing yourself? Most people see themselves because they are self-conscious. “Am I saying the right thing?” “Am I making a good impression?” “Do they like me?” “How do I look?” “What is my self-image like?”

This self-consciousness brings self-attachment, the idea of ‘me.’ Just remove that idea of ‘me’ for now when you look. Now, all I see is you, just simple, pure awareness. That is who you are.

The moment you bring ‘me’ into it, you need psychology. Now you need a book that thick [motions thick book] to explain the ‘me.’ You know, The Course in Miracles contains three volumes and most of the information in it is about the ego. The ego is such a paradox and contains so many contradictions that you can never talk enough about it.

And yet, you cannot talk about truth because truth is so simple. You can say it all in one phrase, “You are your awareness.” “You are here now.” Anything you think about it is merely what you think about it and has nothing to do with IT. If you begin to live from that truth, you are at peace, in love, ‘in heaven.’ You need do nothing, because IT is complete.

One of the things I love about the Course is when it says, “You did not create yourself.” So true. I look at myself and I find myself here. I did not ask to be born, yet here I am! And if life created me, why can’t I trust it? When I think of Burt, it is just a name I’ve been given, a past I’ve been conditioned into by my priests and my parents and my nationality and all the teachings I have received.

But when I ask myself what is it I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, all I know is that I am here and I exist, and that’s enough for me. I would like to repeat what I covered before, that the miracle of you is that you know you exist. Don’t you know that you exist? Who is the part of you who knows that? That is something you cannot define or even look at. You cannot express or explain it - and where is it?

The knower is not the ego, it IS. You can call it God or Life or Being or the eternal causeless essence if you like, because pure awareness has no beginning. It is causeless - it was never created, and that’s who you are.

Now, what if you trusted it? But we don’t trust it, we worry, we fret. How arrogant that is! We think we have control over our life. You did not make yourself a man or a woman. You did not make yourself your particular enneagram. You did not make yourself your particular zodiac sign or number in numerology. You were born into it because this is the human form that you need to experience to learn what you need to learn, and every moment is perfect for you to realize who you are. Did you know that every moment is perfect? Yes, whatever is, is exactly what you need. But the part of you that thinks about it says, “No, I don’t want it! I don’t agree with it!” That’s called suffering. That’s called pain.

I received an email last Thursday that I would like to read to you verbatim: “Burt, last night someone asked if we could talk to the Being, and you said yes. My question is, who would talk to the being? If it is the ego and the ego is not real, what would be the point in that? And what would you talk with the Being about? It has been running all our life’s experiences and showing us what needs to be learned.” I have received many similar questions, and it is a legitimate one.

How do you feel about this question? [addressing the class] Since there is only Being, can you talk to the Being? Who is going to talk to the Being, and what does it mean?

Student: It’s all surface.

Burt: And what do we mean by Being? The beautiful thing about consciousness is that it is unlimited. And being unlimited means it has the ability not only to be conscious, but to know its own consciousness. Consciousness has the unlimited capacity to be conscious of itself. It’s unbelievable! It just blows you away! You cannot think about it - it’s just like placing two mirrors in front of each other. The images become infinite. Consciousness can recognize itself.

We are consciousness, and we can recognize that we are conscious. I am Being, and I know that I am Being. I exist, and I know that I exist. If you try to figure it out, you lose it. This is satsang. We talk about the ultimate here.

The moment you become silent, your heart knows this. This is the recognition of itself, and this recognition of itself is a part of you, reaching out for itself everywhere. And when you begin to see that you are Being, everything about you is also part of that Being. You feel you want to talk to the plants. The stars are a part of you, the animal, the child, the man in the street is a part of you. And when you look into a person’s eyes, you see yourself, because there is nothing separate from you.

What is happening is you are reaching out and as you are expanding, THAT is acting through you. When you feel this, you automatically begin to feel this tremendous love inside you, just all-encompassing. There are moments of great passion, moments of great ecstasy where you say, “God, I feel wonderful, so good. Thank you!” You begin to say it automatically without realizing it. That’s the true prayer, the real thing.

When your awareness of you as that which lives you begins to expand, you begin to know it and love it. You fall in love with it. What is the difference between a master and an aspiring seeker? It’s very simple. The master is in love with the totality. Not with something - you can call it emptiness, IS. He is in love with IS. He sees it everywhere. Wherever he looks, he sees IT. If you like the word God, he sees God everywhere. There is nothing apart from that. Everything else is redundant. There is nothing else compared to that. He is in love.

Did you ever ask yourself why we love falling in love? We all love falling in love, but then you tell yourself that you are in love with a person. Then you make that person your whole life and you become attached to them, and that attachment brings so much pain. But the pain is necessary to learn that it is not the ego you are loving but the Being within that person, until through trial and error and after years and years and years of intimacy, you come to know that who you are loving is the Being in the other, which is the same as the Being in you. It is the Being reaching out for itself.

Are you seeing how I am answering the question about talking to the Being? Falling in love is one of the ways, the greatest and most beautiful state of all, and there is no other. And the moment you experience it, you find that everything else is just play, leela, a game. It’s called presence. There is only presence.

You know what presence is? Presence is something you normally feel in satsang. There is only presence. As you sit here, you become totally quiet, totally. No thinking about it, not, “What the hell is Burt talking about,” no figuring out, just Being right now, silent. And as you remain silent, you find that all there is, is just awareness. But that awareness is not yours! Awareness IS. There is no one who is being aware. There is just awareness. Just like when you have been with someone for a very long time and you know them so well that you have gone over the ego, you have gone through all the pain and guilt and the shame and the fights and the quarrels and you come to a point where the ego doesn’t play any important role any more. You become one with the Being of the other.

This is what happens when there is real, deep, true love, when there is no one that you are loving. You have come to the point where there is just love. You are not loving anyone, there is just love. There is only being in the moment.

So Being is your beloved, and you are seeking your beloved in every relationship. You are seeking your beloved in your child, you are seeking your beloved in your husband or your wife, you are seeking your beloved in your friends. The student seeks the beloved in his teacher. But eventually, you realize that who you are loving is who you are, the Self. That’s who you fall in love with.

Falling in love seems as if there is another that you are falling in love with, and that is the dichotomy of spirit, that spirit loves itself. It appears as all created things, and all created things are seeking, creating war and conflict and strife. But nothing is actually happening, just the seeking of the beloved in their crude way, until finally it is found and says, “I am home.”

Think of it as a circle. The beautiful thing about a circle is that it has no beginning and no end, and it keeps on going around and around and around. Did you know that what we call time is a circle? We think time is going by, but it is just the earth going around the sun creating a cycle every 24 hours. When it faces the sun we call it day and when it faces away, we call it night. Then we call the days Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and we give them a calendar.

But what is actually happening is movement - movement is what we call time. Nothing is happening, just movement. In all this movement, there is repetition - the body grows old, but it is just changing, because everything that lives, dies. The spirit, of course, never begins or ends, but everything else is just a circle.

One day you see this, that everything is just a circle. When you reach the age of 50, 60, 70, you begin to see that you are going to die. You think you are reaching the end, which is of course a lie, but you believe it because you have identified so strongly with this vehicle of expression. Then you have had it with the world and you feel like you are going crazy - you know, “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

So what happens to a master who realizes the Self? He gets off the circumference of the circle and goes right into the center, the heart, the essence, pure awareness. From that point in the center, he can look at the circumference detached. He can see everything going round in a circle, repeating again and again and again, day after day, thought after thought. Just like Deepak Chopra said, that we think 26,000 thoughts a day, and the next day we think the same 26,000 thoughts.

Stop. Go into the center, observe the surface of the circle, and see it all as a movement. Then you will be at peace, because only in the center is there peace, love, happiness, and fulfillment. If you stay on the surface, there is insanity. We call it ego, but ego is just an idea.

So is this clear from what we have covered? May I have some feedback?

Student: You have to die to your personal self.

Burt: And how do you die to your personal self?

Student: It’s like giving up a relationship.

Burt: And who gives it up?

Student: The person you thought you were!

Burt: And how do you do that?

Student: You just see that...

Burt: That’s right. You just see, that it’s causing nothing but pain, and it’s a lie that you have been telling yourself since you were born, since the beginning of our parents’ training and everything else.

Actually, it is not since you were born, since you were not born with an ego - the ego doesn’t build until a year or so of age when you start to say, “This is mine!” “Me,” “My.”

Get in touch with your inner body because your body is a wonderful vehicle. Feel the loss of energy every time you say, “me,” every time you say, “I.” The moment you get in touch with that, remove the ‘I,’ remove the ‘me.’ Just see what IS without judgment or interpretation - then what you are seeing is what everybody else is seeing.

Everybody that is looking at Burt now is seeing Burt sitting here - why? Because your awareness is not yours specifically, it is just awareness, it is what is happening. When you make it yours, when you begin to think about it, interpret it, and judge it, it is called the personal. But the personal doesn’t exist - awareness is all that there is, consciousness is all that there is. The personal only exists because of consciousness. Consciousness is the only reality there is.

When you see that very clearly, the ego doesn’t die, you just realize it was never there, it was just an idea! Then you are free. Now you live in total trust, which is automatic, and how else can it be? That is all there is, and it takes over your life. Then you wonder why you struggled so much, why you tried so hard to live life, why you worried and fretted and got angry and upset and defended an ego that never existed! Wow!

When you were born, you did not come with a manual on how to live life. What you needed to do is to find out who is living. Who is aware? And then somebody said, “I think I’ll name you ‘Lauri’,” and all of a sudden you begin to identify with the name. Now every time you hear the name you can feel it in your body. Please understand that the body is an emotional body, and everything you have identified with, you feel in your body immediately. That is very important - get in touch with your body, because your body is teaching you moment to moment.

As you become aware of your body in a detached way, you learn everything you need to learn. The inner body teaches you everything. So if right now there is a fear coming to me, is it really a fear? There is this thing that is making my heart pound, a memory of something that happened. So I look at the story and feel it in my body, staying with it here and now. I do nothing about it, just observe it, seeing it as a sensation.

Incidentally, I have written a book called “Supersentience,” which came from an experience I had in 1998 where the word ‘supersentience’ was going through my head. This book. [holds up a copy of the book] The message came through that there are three steps that you need to go through in order to realize who you are. These three steps are very beautiful, very clear, very simple.

The first step is to know that everything happens now - there is nothing outside of this moment. Nothing can happen outside of this moment! Now is all that there is. Everything you think is happening tomorrow or yesterday is just part of the game that we play, an illusion. When you bring it down to what is happening in the moment, you find it is not fear that is happening, it is not pain that is happening, it is not this or that - they are labels based on your experience of the past. What is happening is a sensation. That’s all there is - the sensation of hearing, the sensation of touching, the sensation of being together. All that ever happens in the moment is a sensation.

To look at the sensation as a sensation is the second step. The third step is to ask, “Who is aware of this sensation?” The moment you feel there is no one who is being aware, just awareness...

Student: There is another one.

Burt: What is the other one?

Student: The other one is to observe your sensations and any judgment you have of them.

Burt: Yes, the second one. Very good - you read the book, eh? Everything is a sensation, now. And then you find that there is immediate judgment - you can’t help it, it’s just happening all the time. The moment you experience a sensation you make a judgment, and you experience sensations all the time.

For example, I hurt my leg yesterday. There was pain - that was a sensation. The next day the pain was still there. I said, “Oh, the pain is still there - the same pain.” But it isn’t the same pain. It might have spread, it might be more intense, or it might be less intense or different. Every sensation is new. Every moment is new. The moment you begin to see that every moment is new, fresh, alive, eternal, then you begin to die to the past. You, yourself, begin to be new and alive, and you stop interpreting because you find it is the interpretation that is making it old, and it makes you old, too.

The moment you begin to see that sensation is just sensation, you move to the third step, which is, “Who is aware of the sensation?” Then you find that there has never been anyone who is aware of the sensation, just awareness. The moment you realize that, you won’t be the same. There is a total shift. You are still the same person with the same personality, doing the same job (maybe more creatively), but you’ve been transformed because you no longer see with the same eyes. The Course in Miracles calls it seeing with a spiritual eye.

Student: You say that the cause of every dysfunction in a dysfunctional family is the fear of love.

Burt: That’s right.

Student: Now, isn’t it that kids in a dysfunctional family have a need for love?

Burt: That’s right, and isn’t that a fear of love? Feel it - because when we go into words, we begin to feel a dichotomy, that there is an opposition. How can we need something and be afraid of it at the same time? But feel it inside of you, that there is a lonely person right now, lonely for love.

Same for a child - if a ten year old is feeling lonely, he is feeling unloved. He has a craving for love, and that craving for love can be so intense that if in that moment somebody comes and says, “Oh you poor thing,” and hugs and loves him, he might push them away, because the more desperately you need love, the more you believe you are unworthy of that love because you lack it. “I am unlovable. There is something wrong with me.” Do you understand?

Student: Even younger kids - all they want is love. Do they know anything else?

Burt: No, they don’t, but at that point you cannot say it is a need for love - it is a lovingness. Remember the difference between loving and needing love. If a child is needy for love, they cry and pull at your skirt, they want your attention all the time, they cannot be left alone. It is that needy love that becomes fear, because now if you are away, there is fear of rejection, fear that there is something wrong with him, fear that he is unlovable.

But a child who is loving at the moment does not express need. Love is the nature of all of us - we are expressing that love. You have to see the difference between needing love and being that love. A child is love, but the greater the need for love, the more he is saying to himself, “I am not lovable. I don’t have love. That’s why I need it.” Need is saying, “I don’t have it.” The moment you say this, there is a fear of rejection.

Student: Maybe when the kids are still young, they don’t perceive it as such, they don’t know any better. Maybe they need time to create such a feeling within themselves, that they are unlovable. When a child is born, they are pure. Every child is pure, and there has to be an environment where actions or treatment by the parent makes them feel that they are unlovable. It takes time to develop.

Burt: Yes, a child wants love. There is nothing wrong with that - it is natural. Love is the most natural thing because love is what you are. Awareness is love, consciousness is love. Why? Because there is only one consciousness. We want to bond, we want to belong, because by loving you I am loving myself. We may not know that because we are not awakened to it, but inside the heart knows it and reaches out. It wants to reach out automatically. Even animals do it all the time, they want love.

When it becomes a need, it is because somehow or other the child has been deprived of love. Say you have a ten year old child or younger who has been left alone most of the time and doesn’t receive too much attention. The child then begins to crave love, to need love. The slightest hint that the parent is abandoning that child and the child begins to feel abandoned, that there is something wrong with him.

Student: Does that create the separation?

Burt: It creates the feeling of separation and becomes a deep need, and that deep need creates a loneliness, the feeling that there is something wrong with him. The child can carry that for the rest of his life unless he has guidance, unless he begins to realize who and what he is.

This is natural, and the point is that the heart, the essence, is love itself. You are Being, and there is only one Being. In this room we seem to be separate but there is only one Being. That Being is love, and therefore when we see someone approves of you, appreciates you, you automatically feel good because it is a recognition of the Being, of that oneness. It’s an unconscious thing.

Now, if a person feels that they are separate, that someone is not paying attention to them, that feeling of separation makes the separation even greater, and they begin to feel loneliness. Loneliness is the greatest pain known to the human being. There is no greater pain - people have committed suicide from loneliness. What is loneliness? It is the opposite of oneness, thinking that you are unworthy of love. How absurd! How can you be unworthy of love when all you are is love? But that’s what loneliness is. Loneliness is the thought that you are not loved, because you are not in touch with the love you are.

How can you be not loved, when life created you? Life is keeping your heart beating, your cells changing, is breathing you! Am I breathing? I am being breathed! Life IS, doing everything through me. I am not doing anything, I am just here! You think Burt is talking? It is the spirit in me that is talking, saying these words. This is unconditional love. As you begin to recognize this, you begin to trust it. But it is not a matter of saying, “I am going to trust it.” Trust is an automatic process of recognizing yourself as love, as this very Being itself, as now, this moment.

Who are you right now? NOW - not a moment ago, not as you came in, just now, this second! Remove the ‘I’ and there is just experience, and that experience IS. Begin to understand this, live from this moment to moment, and trust it. You will find that each moment is being carried for you. This is real, this is a fact that you don’t learn in school.

But it is so simple that the mind cannot understand it - the mind can only think about it. Being IS, and that’s who you are, but the moment you think about it, all the loneliness and the fear and deprivation come into being because you are thinking about it.

If right now you are worried, and something comes and wipes away the worry for a moment, in that moment there is no worry. In that moment, you become happy, the happiness you’ve always been. All that happened is the worry went away, and you went back to being. Worry exists only when you think about it.

Student: Can you say you are experiencing the sensation of every moment?

Burt: You are experiencing the sensation of every moment. Every moment is a movement of sensation. But who is experiencing the sensation is awareness itself. The moment you make up your mind about it, you bring the ‘me’ into it - there is nothing wrong with that, but just be aware of it. If you look at this chair, you say immediately, “I am looking at a chair.” The moment you call it a chair, you have made up your mind about it. “Oh it looks comfortable,” or, “It doesn’t look comfortable.” Now look at it as it actually is - chair is only a name we gave it. Now what you see is polished wood, a cushion - you are seeing more truly. But who is seeing it is awareness.

Student: So the Being has no emotions?

Burt: It depends upon what you mean by emotion. Emotion is the movement of energy. We have to understand what motion is, motion of energy. A motion can be feeling good, and your body reflects that motion of energy. But when it becomes negative emotion, it means you have identified with a particular thought and made it so real that your body is totally caught in it. To you it may seem very real, but it is not real at all! It is motion of energy, a sensation of movement that you have identified with and made real.

Student: And are those experiences meant to bring in...?

Burt: Yes, because every experience in the moment is not wrong. There is nothing wrong! Every moment that is happening, every emotion you are feeling is exactly what you need, to look at and see as a sensation and ask, “Who is feeling this?” “Who is experiencing this?” Then you’ll find that there is no one, just experience. And you move through it.

Student: And you have chosen to learn through that particular fear?

Burt: You have not consciously chosen it, but in a way you made it real. When you make it real, you could say that you have chosen it.

Student: You have attached yourself to it.

Burt: That’s right. It might seem real, but nothing is real but awareness, consciousness - that’s all. Nothing else is real. It is just movement of energy.

Student: But what about happy emotions, past emotions? Watching my daughter’s birth was a wonderful memory. I don’t want to get rid of that.

Burt: No, and why do you need to get rid of it? History teaches us a lot. What you do is see that it is the past, and that what you felt then is what you want now. What you want is how you felt then, but then is now! Got it? As long as you are clear, it doesn’t have to take you back.

You realize that the birth of the child is a miracle. Why do you need to forget that? Becoming aware of the very miracle of life from moment to moment is the richness of life. Whenever you have been happy, whenever you felt good was always because the Being was uppermost. The things that make you rich are the things you are in love with, and you are in love with Being. If you get in touch with that and really get to know that, you will find that you are in love with yourself. That’s what self love is - it has nothing to do with ego. Ego never existed, it is just an idea.

Who you’re in love with is Being, and you are that Being. Loving yourself is love; trusting yourself is trust. But who is the self? There is only one Self, and you are that one Self. When you fall in love with that one Self, everything else is taken care of.

Student: So you love unconditionally every expression...

Burt: That’s the word - unconditional love is the only true love.

Student: Which is not one single person in the whole world.

Burt: Oh, no. There are quite a few beautiful beings who are unconditionally loving. Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi was totally, unconditionally loving. Poonjaji was the same. There are many pure beings in the world, and it is getting more and more. You have to see that, and then you can see that in yourself. What you want more than anything is that love.

When you look into the eyes of your child, aren’t you being unconditionally loving? Of course you are, I see you smile immediately.

Student: You don’t have to ask that. We all love our children, you know?

Burt: Of course! That’s right! Isn’t that unconditionally loving?

Student: Of course it is.

Burt: All right, so? Now what if you begin to realize that everybody is that same being just like your child?

Student: I know that.

Burt: You see? And it is possible because the Being is one. You begin to grow into that by becoming aware that there is only Being, there is nothing but Being. Right now you’re aware, you’re here now. See the beauty and the miracle of that, the wonder of that. And that is complete - you can trust that.

Student: Why don’t the people you meet love unconditionally?

Burt: Some of the people you meet do not love unconditionally because we do not love unconditionally and we can only meet people at the same level we are. Start loving people unconditionally just as you love your child, and you feel so good, just like when you love your child, and you begin to see love in the birds, the animals. But then the ego might come back and say, “Oh, if only people could be like...” “Oh, I read in the news...” and you lose it.

You don’t really lose it, you just get caught in the dream. We get caught in the dream all the time. We need to be constantly reminded. That’s why satsang is so important - it stops the dreaming and you can get back to reality. This is reality! I’ve had clients who say, “I feel so good, but now I have to go back to reality!” [laughs heartily] It’s true! I heard them say that! They think their job and their worries are reality and feeling good is not reality, and yet all we ever want is to feel good!

The reality is beauty, it is love, it is joy, it is fulfillment. The rest is not reality, it is a story, a seeking.

Student: And people say, “Join the real world.”

Burt: Yes.

Student: But it’s not always about feeling good, is it? Because sometimes you have awareness of whatever is out there...

Burt: Whatever is happening, yes. That was a beautiful question. It is not about feeling good all the time, and that’s what feeling good is. So if there is fear, there is fear. It’s what is! And the moment you accept it, it becomes part of feeling good. So that was a very good question.

Is it about feeling good all the time? It depends what you mean by feeling good all the time. If you think feeling good all the time means resisting fear, that means feeling bad all the time, because fear happens every moment you have the ‘me’ idea. The ‘me’ idea is fear, and if you resist fear, you are resisting all the time.

That’s why the whole world is in fear, that’s why there is so much turmoil and suffering and war and crime. The world lives in constant fear. Fear is not the opposite of love - it is a crying for love, but it doesn’t understand this, so it takes the form of power.

Power is another way of seeking love. “I want to be so powerful that everyone will respect me.” Why? Because I want love, but I call it power because I don’t know how to love. People who go after external power don’t know how to love so they seek it through power, but power brings war, crime. It brings “I am better than you, and I am going to do everything in my power to squash you.”

Ultimately power is to feel good. But you cannot ever feel good because you are denying the love that is in you. But when everything becomes part of the love - the fear is part of the love, the resistance is part of the love, everything about you becomes part of the love - then it becomes feeling good.

Student: I like what you said in your book about the death of the ego and how some people are fiercely attached to that and are deathly afraid of the ego disappearing or dying, like “What am I going to hold on to?” It’s so ridiculous because you’re holding on to a thin branch as opposed to being the tree itself, you know?

Burt: Very good!

Student: And it’s a wonderful feeling when you don’t have the need to hold on to something. But I remember times when I had exactly the same feeling, like “What is going to happen then?”

Burt: And that’s what the ‘me’ is - “Oh, I wonder what is going to happen then?” That’s what anxiety is, a feeling concocted by a ‘me’ idea of a future that hasn’t happened yet! When you look at what anxiety is, you begin to laugh, it’s so absurd. But that’s what anxiety is, “What if this happens, what if that happens?” You begin to live in this illusory world of so much pain. You do not trust the God you are, the beauty you are, the life that created you, that is breathing you and keeping your heart beating, you don’t trust the very thing you are. And when you lose that trust, you’re dead.

So what is the process? Do we progress, do we grow, do we achieve anything? No, we just learn to trust who we are until there is nothing but that trust, until we fall in love with that, and that’s what a master is. He has fallen in love. There is no longer any ego there, just that love. He sees it and feels it everywhere.

Jesus, who didn’t create Christianity, by the way, was a great master who was very pure in love. Religion was created around him by others - he did not create anything. He wanted to point the people toward living in the moment. He was in love, and we say he was in love with ‘the Father.’

Student: Can you explain in this context what the Holy Spirit is?

Burt: The Holy Spirit is pure awareness. Remember in the beginning we said that you are just awareness, nothing but awareness? The Holy Spirit is holy because it is whole, complete, all-encompassing, and it is spirit, not tangible - you cannot touch it or see it. That which is aware through you is the Holy Spirit. That which is now talking to me and looking at me is the Holy Spirit, looking at the Holy Spirit. See what I mean?

If you think it is Jan who is doing the looking, stop and look at that.

Student: What I wanted to know in addition is that Jan likes to ask for support and clarity...

Burt: And that’s natural and normal and it has to be, because whenever there isn’t clarity, a question has to be asked, because a question is a quest, a need of the unconscious to release and become conscious.

Student: That Beingness is always there and Jan needs to get better acquainted with it, you might say. And so sometimes I like to ask to help me see it differently. It is a relationship that you build...

Burt: A relationship with yourself is built through inquiry. When you say that Jan wants to get to know this Being better, what do I mean by ‘Jan’ and who is Jan? Really go into that and feel that you are asking yourself, “Who wants to do this?”

There is a yearning inside that wants to know itself. It is beautiful the moment you begin to discover it. There is a yearning inside, and everybody has it. But when this yearning is not satisfied, it becomes an emptiness, a feeling that something is missing, that your life is not complete. It is a yearning to know who you are.

And as you begin to explore that through inquiring, “Who is yearning? Who needs this?” and so on, you come back to you, the you that you really are, for that is all there is! Everything else begins to fall away. You begin to see that who you thought you were was just an idea, just a story, just another dream, something you made up, just another concept. And as this begins to fall away, all that’s left is here, and there’s never been anything else than here.

As you keep moving to here, this process becomes total trust in this moment. And when you trust the moment, you are eternal, infinite Being. But you’ve always been that, it is just that now you begin to recognize it. And that’s all there is. What you’ve asked is beautiful, so as you ask the question, get into the question. Who is asking the question? Go back to the source of the question.

Student: I was thinking when you were talking about attachment to things and how our ego gets involved, that when I look at this beautiful plant hanging there, I just see a plant, but this plant has an emotional content for you and your wife because it’s part of your house. You may have remembered going out and buying it, or you may have some guilt because relatives gave it to you and you didn’t really want it or something, while the rest of us just see the plant.

Burt: Just a plant, right. Now, who is seeing the plant is just seeing. No one is seeing it, there is just seeing. Everyone who looks there sees the plant. When Sivia and I see the plant, yes, it’s true we see the history, that it was given to us as a form of love. But at the same time I see clearly that it is just a plant. I see myself creating a story around it, but I also see the story. You don’t try to get rid of the story. A story is a story, and it’s OK.

You don’t get rid of the past, you don’t get rid of anything. You see it for what it is, as what IS. So when I see a story as a story, I don’t get caught in the story. It’s just a story! And it can be beautiful - I love stories! I love watching movies of people falling in love, and when I see a move, tears run down my face. I love falling in love, I love loving! It’s beautiful, and everything makes me cry. But I cry because I feel that love, you see? And that’s a story too, but I am not attached to it. It’s OK to enjoy every movement of life, but you have to see the movement...

Student: It’s not total detachment, you just back up a few steps and see it as it is. But you also have emotional content.

Burt: Of course! You don’t get rid of that! You are not just a being, you are a human being. And the human reaches its epitome of perfection when it joins itself and integrates with the being. You don’t stop being who you are, you just enhance it with greater depth. So you integrate, you don’t overcome, you don’t get rid of anything.

When people say, “I have to get rid of the ego,” I have to ask them, “Who gets rid of it?” I have to go into that, because you don’t get rid of anything. There is nothing to get rid of - everything is just a movement, just a dream, just a story. But it’s beautiful - you can only enjoy the story when you know it’s a story. The moment you make it real, you suffer. But the story is beautiful - why not enjoy it?

You know one of the things I most enjoy about everyday life? Playing with my cat. I just made up a story about my cat with all of his antics and made it into a video with transitions and titles and everything else, and it’s really cute. So the point is, life is a very joyous adventure, but don’t take it seriously. It’s all part of the game. Then you’re not caught in it, you see?

Student: So when Bhagavan talked about killing the ego, was it more for getting the importance of it across?

Burt: He never meant to kill the ego, it’s just a word. There’s nothing to kill. Even in his other teachings he said there is no such thing. You cannot take a word out of context because Bhagavan hardly ever talked - everything was done through silence. But whenever he said anything it was to a specific person, and he talked differently to each person.

Student: Whatever the person needed to hear.

Burt: Whatever the person needed to hear, right.

Student: But also we are the one who only knows our ego. I mean, only we can get rid of...

Burt: Let me answer it this way - I would like to go into that. “There is only me who knows my ego.” In a way, it is true because when I think of my ego, I have these ideas, but you also have to see that the ideas you have about who you think you are is just another story. You don’t know anything, it’s just things you’re making up about it.

Student: What I meant by that is more simple - the negative side of fear...

Burt: Yes, I know what you mean. Whatever you think about Jan is a story that you are making up. Jan is perfect, Jan is beautiful, really. And I’m not just saying this. I know this for a fact. All you have to do is to look into the mirror, look into your own eyes, and you see who is looking, who is experiencing. Why do we want love, why do we want to feel good, because we ARE that. So anything you think about Jan is nothing more than a story that has been planted there, and through repression has become a reality, but it’s not real. It’s just a story.

We are all very beautiful beings, but we don’t believe it because we feel separate. We don’t believe we are God itself, seeing, experiencing, moving, so we think in separation, and that separation is the pain, the suffering. So we go through a ‘process’ until we learn to trust IT. That’s what it’s all about, learning to trust it.