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Excerpts from satsangs
Satsang October 20, 2000
Question: At my latest satsang with ShantiMayi I remember her saying "When you have taken the first step on the path then you are already awakened, then there is just cultivation of IT left". It was said so beautifully. Will you comment on this?
Shanti Kristian: Yes, it is true, it happens the day you have accepted that you are a seeker because this means you have understood that your highest possible development is the most important thing in your life. This insight leads to a total investment in the search which is synonymous with "cultivation of IT". You will do everything which can be done and thereby finally reach to what non-doing is: this ability to just be, without being identified with anything not even thoughts or feelings. You will be able to rest in this harmony as long as the situation does not demand anything else. It is even OK when something else is required but you will then find that thoughts, feelings, the body etc. are just tools. They may be valuable and fine tools but you cannot identify with them, you are identified with the Self, which is far deeper. There are many ways to "cultivate IT". Each of you must find the ways which work best for you. This is a luxury which can be afforded in our time in contrast to old traditions where a spiritual master would just offer one or a few techniques for the disciple regardless of whether it suited that disciple or not. We make all known techniques available now, and remember there are no new techniques, they have all in some form been known for centuries. F. inst. the mantras which we have just been chanting were known in India far before even the Viking age.
Question: Does this mean there is no risk for resignation again?
Shanti Kristian: There are always risks that you will go astray on the way but once you have understood that development is the most important thing, then you can always feel when you get stuck and find ways to get going again. Resignation when you get stuck is the worst which can happen to a seeker, it is deathly when you stop this extraordinarily strong drive for development which characterize a seeker. It will sooner or later result in more or less serious psychosomatic illness or other self destructive activities. When you instead get going again, then the original optimism is not far away.
Satsang May 13, 2000
Question: I would like to hear your comments on the phrase "being in the world but not of it".
Shanti Kristian: Being instead of doing is the alpha and omega. Almost everything in the retreat and the satsangs has the purpose of helping you to go deeper in the being and leave the doing. Try to see that any kind of activity or job can either be turned into a work which you are doing, or it can be turned into something which just happens through f.inst. your hands or head while you watch it and remain in the being, which actually is "being in the world but not of it". There are three possibilities: You can renounce and leave the world by living in isolation or in some kind of monastery. You can be absorbed in the world, sharing its predominate values of work, career, conduct etc. You can be in the world but not of it. The first alternative has been the main road for the seekers for more than 1000 years. The last alternative is the way of the spiritual hedonist. The first alternative has several draw backs, one is that any level of meditation or being which has been attained in isolation will have a tendency to be weakly grounded, it is easily lost when you come to the marketplace again. Three things have to be practiced in order to "be in the world but not of it". The first is meditation, which is the state of non-doing. Nobody can do meditation, you can only somehow permit yourself to relax into meditation and into pure being. The second is to exercise awareness, again this is not something which you can do, it is just your absolutely natural ability which you have to discover to the full again. It is not possible to define what awareness is. It can be said that awareness is just seeing, without judging, without thinking, without doing anything, but this is of course not a definition, it is only an attempt to say what it is not. An example of an awareness exercise is the breath session, where we train awareness of everything which is coming up, awareness of the breath, awareness when the breath is stopped and awareness during the satori which often happens during the last stage. And finally the third thing which is necessary in order to be in the world but not of it, is to understand and for a large part get rid of many of those programmings which we got as children. Nearly everyone is strongly programmed in the direction of doing, should and should not instead of just being and following an innocent pleasure principle. When all this is very clear then you just cannot be of the world, you will see how beautiful it is to be in the world but not of it, you will always see what is going on, you will see homo mechanicus walk on the streets or doing all sort of things. You will see jokes everywhere, and you will see what a joke you have been yourself in former days. This lightness will reach a peak when you finally discover what you really are, and what you always have been. Bodhidharma is reported to have laughed for a whole week, when he got enlightened, seeing what a joke he had been.
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