Through a simple shift of attention
From object to experiencer,
From phenomena to experiencer of phenomena,
One’s perspective can change diametrically.
The birth of this shift occurs with the question,
“Who am I?”
This is not about a future state of enlightenment
Or something that is going to come to you
If you are really good and work very hard.
This is about what is already here and now.

For words to be heard
There must be silence
In which the words are occurring.
For form to be recognized
There must be limitlessness
In which the forms can exist.
For there to be phenomena in time—
Beginning, duration and ending—
There must be an eternity
In which time is occurring.
When you truly understand this,
It will change your life.
Then it becomes obvious.
To perceive anything with limits,
There must be limitlessness
In which it is occurring.
If a phenomenon is taking place
Within something else with bigger limits,
Within what would it be occurring?

This question,
“Who am I?”
Brings one immediately to limitlessness,
To eternity,
To That which is unborn, undying,
To That which has no fear of erasure
And to That which is not separate.
As soon as you look back into your Self
And recognize that there is no separate entity to be found,
Only spaciousness,

Then it is not much of a leap
To look into the eyes of what you thought was another person—
Not at the other person
But through the window of those eyes—
And see the eternity that is common to both of you.
Then what is the difference between
Vast spaciousness and immense boundlessness?
Where does infinity end and eternity begin?
This simple yet profound recognition
Signals the end of separation.

At different times this understanding
Has been given a diversity of exclusive names—
Enlightenment, liberation, self-realization.
People have spoken of this
In a very exalted way,
With massive amounts of worship,
And fast cars and real estate acquired
In the name of this uncomplicated principle.
It is a simple thing we are speaking of here.
This is everyone’s birthright.

This is an excerpt from my book How About Now: Satsang with Arjuna. Click here to purchase your copy today!

The post The Window Of Eternity appeared first on The Translucent View.

The veil that hides this Secret
Is becoming so thin
It can be easily torn now by anyone.
It all comes down to what you value.

Value emptiness above content
And you are free.
Value peace above drama
And you are at rest.
Value not knowing above concepts
And you are wisdom itself.
Value love above relationships
And you are bathed in love.

So simple.

If you hold the idea,
“I can’t get this,”
You create an unnecessary barrier.

It would be like a wave in the ocean saying,
“Oh, I don’t know,
I see all the other waves
But I just don’t think I can be wet.
There are some really big waves out here
But could I,
Little me,
With all my frothy foam,
Could I really be the Ocean?”

Dive deeply.
Become immersed in your Self!

This is an excerpt from my book How About Now: Satsang with Arjuna.Click here to purchase your copy today!

The post The Wave Is Already Wet appeared first on The Translucent View.

If the translucent revolution prevails, can we expect to see churches and synagogues closing? Will Grace Cathedral be remodeled as the world’s largest Ikea (come to think of it, the Ikea outside Stockholm could contain several cathedrals), with millions of translucent people set free and wandering aimlessly on Sunday mornings, filled with an ecumenical devotion? Absolutely not. Many translucents love their roots, their traditions, and their rituals but see them as flavors of a universal religiousness. Any religious ceremony reminds you that you are whole, not broken, and there is a divine and beautiful world waiting to dance with you in this very moment. All that is asked of you is to shake off the shackles of dusty belief and lose yourself in celebration. Any kind of gathering in spirit, be it a church, a synagogue, a Twelve- Step meeting, or a silent meditation, is an antidote to the dense smog of Iago-based thinking that overshadows our world. Television, advertising, the speed of life, even our families and our work can seem to pull us away from ourselves.

In the Iago-driven model of religion, we need an intermediary between divinity and us. The priest represents the dictates of the church, the moral code that we must follow, and reminds us of the consequences of our actions in the life to come. The translucent minister or rabbi reminds us of the power of now. Translucent religion brings us back to ourselves, to our innate divinity, and indeed back to its original meaning: religare, “to tie back.” The translucent religious leader has a specific role: to facilitate an environment that can be a fertile soil to bring people back to themselves. Mary Manin Morrissey described her role: 

I have a gift for speaking, and a gift of inspiration. I also have a gift of being able to see through the crust of our misconceptions about ourselves, so I don’t attach myself to people’s stories or their past experiences, but I help midwife their own understanding to a much truer sense of themselves that isn’t attached to or bound by or restricted by the experiences they’ve had or the stories they’ve been told about themselves. My role is to expand in the high remembrance of the whole being, which is in every person, to tell stories about that, to create services, music, and experience.

But ministry is not restricted to one person in a church that is alive with its original awakened core. Everyone becomes a minister for the mystery outside time to become embodied as love. That is not to say that everyone goes off to a seminary or rabbinical school, but that we each find our unique way to be a vehicle for the Big Love. Morrissey pointed out that in her church, one woman’s ministry was her motherhood and her passion to create a home, another’s was her business, and one man was a minister for the living truth through his photography. “He’s a wizard with light,” she told me. “That is when he is most alive and it’s his ministry.” When the leader of a religious gathering is willing to sit back in the saddle, to be a facilitator, almost a bystander, to the collective awakening, a spirit of democracy arises in religion that has often been dreamed of, but rarely realized.

At the Unity Church in Cincinnati, groups meet every night bringing people back into themselves from their complicated lives. On Saturdays alone, you can attend the Men’s circle, the Women of Wisdom circle, the Diamond Heart Work group, the Sacred Heart Circle. Each of these groups allows people to invoke the awakened teacher as a meeting rather than as a particular person. Eckhart Tolle’s book has reached more than two million people, and groups based on The Power of Now have popped up all over the world. The people who come together have read the same book, and they rely on their shared direct experience to be their teacher. The great benefit to gathering with other translucent people in this way is that the teacher emerges as the meeting itself. Anyone with a question, or needing support, can offer that to the circle and let the circle become the teacher. There is no guru in the room, spread evenly like hot butter. Rather, the body of the teacher is made up of everyone present and can only speak or move when all come together.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, click on the link to purchase your own copy today!

The post The Potential Of Religion appeared first on The Translucent View.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about doubt? My experience is that when I’m in Satsang it’s real easy, and then sometimes when I’m alone or in other contexts there is doubt that arises in the face of that incredible happiness. It says, “You must be nuts.”

What is that? “You must be nuts.” What is it?

It’s a thought.

Yes, it’s a thought. What else does doubt say?

This is silly.

What is that?

Four more words. This is really silly.

“This is really silly.” What is that?

Another thought.

Now try this: “You are a great enlightened being.” What’s that?

Another thought.

Now we’re no longer in the doubt category, we’re in the “I got it” category. “You must be nuts.” “You are a great enlightened being.” What difference does it make? Two thoughts. Then we had, “This is silly.” We could try, “This is very profound.” Just two more thoughts, you see.

When a thought comes that says, “This is very silly,” or when a thought comes that says, “This is truly profound, great non-dual Advaita,” is there a choice or a decision or an effort prior to the thought arising to have a thought?

No.

It doesn’t require any premeditation. Where did thought come from? Suddenly, there’s a thought—zoom—there’s another one. They arise on their own. They’re self-originating.

Other than the thought, is there anything to be found called a “thinker” creating thoughts?

No.

They just arise out of nowhere. Did you ever drink soda in a glass? Have you ever wondered where the bubbles come from? As a child I used to wonder about that. You watch, and out of nowhere, suddenly there’s a bubble. Where did it come from? I used to look under the table. I had a lot of fantasies about that when I was a child — what is the source of the bubbles? In fact, I think you could write a hitch-hikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-style book around that — where do the bubbles come from in soda drinks? They just appear. No source—they just arise out of nowhere.

Since thought arises on its own anyway and there’s no decision to have it or not, is there anything you can do about it?

No.

All you can do is add another layer of thought called “That’s not an okay thought,” but that’s just more thought too. Since it’s arising anyway and there’s no choice about it, you might as well let it be because it’s going to happen anyway.

Now, in just letting it be, if the interest is no longer paid so much to the content of thought, what difference does it make if there is a so-called doubting thought or a so-called enlightened thought? Does it make any difference? Does it actually make any difference to this moment? Try it consciously. Go ahead now and think this thought deliberately: “This is complete rubbish.”

Okay.

Now try thinking this thought: “I love this guy; this is the best evening of my life.” Does it make any difference to this moment?

No, but what’s more convincing to me are the feelings that appear from nowhere.

Okay, so do one thing. Just stay here with your eyes and have the thought, “This is really stupid” and think it to the point that it actually generates a feeling. But stay present with your eyes.

Good. Now try another one. Look at me with your eyes and just for a moment have the feeling that we are completely in love.

Okay, now tell me, as those thoughts drift on by, did either one make any difference to what’s here?

Not really, no.

There is really only one choice, and it’s the only choice that one gets to make in this moment. The choice is whether to listen to the unreal or not to listen. You can’t prevent these thoughts from arising. They will actually subside slowly as less attention is paid to them. There is only one choice, which is whether to fixate on them or not. The only way to not fixate on them is to return the attention to the real, to that which experiences all thought. Then doubts or great enlightened insights are exactly the same. It makes no difference, absolutely no difference at all.

“I am enlightened” is just another thought.

What about a feeling?

It is the same thing when a feeling state comes. Do you decide, “Okay, I think I’m going to have some sadness now?” Is that how it is? Doesn’t an event just occur and sadness arises? You can try to repress it but it’s going to get you anyway. Can’t that also be welcomed?

What is left then if all ideas of what should and shouldn’t be are abandoned?

Quiet.

Quiet, yes. That quiet, does it require particular kinds of thoughts in order to be quiet?

No.

Does it require an absence of thought to be quiet?

No.

It’s a quiet that has no opposite. It’s a quiet that includes noise. And that’s who you are. It’s not an experience; it’s not a state. It is who you are all the time. You have never been other than That, and you will never be other than That. And about that there is no choice. It’s the only item on the menu, and the waiter will bring it whether you order it or not.

So now what’s left?

Quiet and happiness.

Yes, quiet and happiness, which is always there—not an attainment, not an experience and not a state. This happiness that you speak of, could it also include misery?

Yes!!

It is a happiness that has no opposite, a happiness that includes everything. You could call that acceptance. You could call that compassion. It’s the abandonment of all resistance to life.

This is the invitation right now. It can’t be postponed. It’s either now or it’s not. There’s no tomorrow in this. “Tomorrow” is just a way of saying no. This is the invitation. This is neither enlightenment nor unenlightenment; this is neither free nor bound.  This is the inevitable Truth.

This is an excerpt from my book “How About Now”.  Click here to purchase your own copy today!

The post Doubt is a Thought appeared first on The Translucent View.

When someone comes to me or others for Awakening Coaching, they generally pass through four stages of evolution. If all goes well, and the client is fully on board and ready to try something new, these four stages can go relatively quickly: in a matter of eight or ten weeks.

Stage One: Feeling Bad for No Reason

Often when someone starts out with coaching, they feel terrible, or at least not nearly as good as they would like to feel, and they don’t know why. Perhaps they feel tired and lethargic and they have tried all the obvious things to take care of it. Perhaps their relationships are riddled with conflict and misunderstanding, and it always seems to be the other person’s fault. Perhaps they have a vague sense of a gift that they were born to bring to the world, but it seems too obscure and out of reach. At the start of a coaching relationship, the majority of people feel too busy, too overwhelmed, too distracted and too entangled to have any clear idea why their life is not working. They just feel bad for no reason.

At this stage, the coaching client feels like a victim, looking for someone to blame.  They are living in an unfair universe, where everything is out of their control. “My parents abused me, all my relationships were with people who turned out to be psychotic, my business partners were all crooks.” They may even blame politicians,  past lives or aliens.

Stage 2: Feeling Bad for a Good Reason

We always start a coaching relationship by taking inventory, by asking some powerful and specific questions. 

What are your aspirations and your dreams? 

What is your intuition of what is possible for you in your life? 

What gets in the way? 

What are the habits that inhibit you living at your full potential? 

What are your strengths? 

What are the disciplines you have already built up, that we can rely upon? 

And finally, perhaps most important, 

What are the outcomes that you are looking for from a coaching relationship? Where do you want to be, in very specific and concrete terms, eight to ten weeks from now?

By taking inventory in this way, it is possible to point out that the life they are experiencing right now is the inevitable result of actions they have been taking. 

For example, if you stay up late at night, eat a lot of processed food, don’t drink enough water and don’t get enough exercise, anyone is not going to feel good in their body.  If you withhold relevant information in your relationships, if you lean toward criticism and blame more than appreciation, it is not a big surprise when you feel separate and lonely. If your life is full of distractions, internet cruising, watching mediocre movies and TV, and indulging in substances (both legal and illegal), it is not a big surprise that you lose your purpose and direction in life. Now we have moved up a notch. The client is no longer feeling bad for no reason, but for some very obvious reasons that we can do something about.

The client no longer feels like a victim, but begins to feel responsible.  At this early stage it may even be tinged with some embarrassment or remorse. They may feel overwhelmed or powerless when they recognize the momentum of dysfunctional habits, but they begin to see that this is all coming from within themselves. 

It is possible to get stuck in this stage, endlessly analyzing why my life sucks, wanting to develop the perfect model to explain the suffering. Some styles of psychotherapy can get bogged down here. So the coach can ask the client, “Would you rather understand why you are suffering, or would you like to do something different and feel better?”

Stage 3: Feeling Good for Good Reason

In Awakening Coaching we use some very specifics tools. Radical Awakening, for example, is a very reliable way for anyone to reconnect with their true nature as limitless, spacious, and free. Radical Releasing is a method to take the resistance off of stuck feelings so they begin to flow again. As a result, you are able to take action more easily and effectively. Perhaps most important, Empowerment Practices are short, simple tailor made shifts, that usually take just a few minutes a day, which can help the coaching client to change their behavior from automatic habits to something new, fresh and creative.

This is the pivotal difference between feeling bad for a reason and feeling good for a reason. In just a few weeks of shifting the right parameters, the right tweak here or there, everything can start to flow again.

I wrote a whole book about such empowerment practices, it is called Leap Before You Look. 

Now the coaching client again lives in a different universe.  It is a world of opportunity and creativity.  They feel empowered to create the life they want, because they now have the freedom to try new things. 

The difficulty with changing behavior, even in tiny ways, is that there is, in almost everyone, a strong momentum to keep things the way they were. Most people would rather stay with dysfunctional habits that are familiar than with creative habits that are new. For this reason, an Awakening Coach has daily contact with their clients. The client sends in a short report each day, that takes just a couple of minutes to fill out, just to indicate if they did these short practices or not. We advise our coaches and also their clients to anticipate resistance, and then to be prepared to work with it. 

Stage 4: Feeling Good for No Reason

Because of the “awakening” part of Awakening Coaching, we aim to bring our coaching clients into not just having a life that works: honest and intimate relationships, a sense of purpose and meaning, being in good health, etc… but to go also beyond that into an irrational sense of well being, for no reason at all. 

This happens not through tweaking the habits in your life, but through coming into a clear, stable and unshakable recognition of who it is, or what it is that is experiencing that life. It is important for people not only to have a powerful experience of their true nature as limitless, as free, as love it self, but to be able to access that awakening in any situation.

Now the coaching client is once again living in  different universe: one which is benevolent, fun and easy.  Creativity flows on its own.  Relationships are naturally humorous and appreciative.  Money is just not an issue.  The client lives in a flow of gratitude and wanting to serve and make a difference.

Not everyone, mind you, is equally “coachable.”  You might be surprised how many people would rather be right about why they are unhappy, unhealthy and stuck, than to try something new.  Being “coachable” through this work requires the client to give up their stories and theories about what is happening and why it is happening, and to be guided into something new and different… to think thoughts they have never thought before, to say things they have never said before.

I am just bubbling with excitement these days for what is possible for all of us. Anyone can shift from feeling bad for no reason to feeling good for no reason in a relatively short period of time.  We can do this without needing to fall back into the old, hierarchical relationships which have dominated spirituality for so many thousands of years.

I want to share more with you about these four stages of evolution through a coaching relationship. Please join me on Thursday, March 21st at 6 PM pst. I will be glad to demonstrate all of this, to give you very specific examples, and to answer your questions and hear your experiences.

The post How to Feel Good for No Reason appeared first on The Translucent View.

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When someone comes for Awakening Coaching, they have already become, to some degree,  disconnected from themselves. I don’t mean disconnect from their personal story, they are probably over connected with that. I mean that they have become disconnected from who they truly are. That is the standard setting for most people: they have some degree of disconnection from their true nature as limitless consciousness, as limitless creativity, as limitless love.  

The life that we are living is, more or less, a dream that is being created out of ourselves. If we completely, totally understood, at every level of our being, that this is true, then the possibility of complaint would just disappear. We realize that everything we experience is the manifestation of a thought, of a desire, is a manifestation of consciousness. It is so rare that people are fully living this recognition, and they probably would not be coming for coaching if they were. So we are often living as victims of circumstances that appear to be beyond our control. It might be that there is a condition in the body that seems to be out of control. It might  we feel like we are the victim of a relationship. Of course we forgot that we chose the relationship, and that we participated in creating the relationship. We forget what we have chosen in previous moments. 

We might feel that we are the victim of difficult financial circumstances, but of course we forget that we made all kinds of choices along the way to create the financial circumstances that we have. So to one degree or another, everybody that comes for coaching feels like “this is happening to me,” rather than “I am creating it.” They come with a list of things that are not working in their life. “Oh I have the wrong marriage,” “I don’t have a relationship and I want one,” “my health isn’t good…”

We may have intellectually or cognitively accepted that we are responsible to some degree for the way things are, that our thoughts and unconscious drives are responsible for the quality of our life. But that recognition has probably not gotten permeated all the way through. 

At the  beginning of the coaching process, the first important step, is get clear about four basic questions: 

Question 1- What are your bigger dreams? In other words, if you did not have these limitations, if you did not have these unconscious sabotaging mechanisms, what is the dream you came to live?  

Question 2- What gets in the way? What are the habits and the beliefs, the limiting behaviors and attitudes, which prevent you from living the life that really feels right to you?

Question 3- What are your strengths? People are not made up of just limiting beliefs. People have strengths. People have love, friendship, loyalty, all kinds of good things that make them good people.

Question 4- What do you actually want to get out of 8-10 weeks of coaching? There is a distinction between 1 and 4. #1 may take a lifetime to live out, #4 is what we are going to do in 8 weeks.

#1 may be “I want to have a family, a lifetime partner, a bunch of kids, and live on an organic farm in the county.” That is a great lifetime goal. Somebody else might say “I want to make an incredible movie and win an Oscar.” That is a great goal. But we are not going to do that in 8 weeks. 

#1 might be “I’m single right not but I want to have a great relationship and a bunch of kids.” Then #4 might be “I want to release all barriers to attracting my mate so I feel really ready and open.” That is a realistic goal for #4, but we still want #1 expressed.

That is the first thing we do in coaching, and we do not want to skip that, or do it quickly. It is a very deep process to help people get clear about those four questions. It may take the whole of the first session to do that.  

The second step is to help someone reconnect, on a regular basis, with their true nature as limitless consciousness.  We want to help the person to come into direct experiential recognition of that which they truly are has no limits, no boundaries, was never born, can never die.

The third thing we want to do is to start to work with those barriers that get in the way of what they really want. Many of them were listed in Question 2, but we are going to get more of them by talking about what they want and listening to what they say.Maybe they say, “I want to be married and have children and live on an organic farm in the country.” So if we talk about that a little bit, we’ll find that there are lots of attitudes that get in the way. Let’s say there is a man who we’re talking to. He says “I can’t trust women, I  am wounded, I don’t have enough money, I don’t think women are attracted to me…” He could come up with 30 different stories he is telling himself about why he cannot have what he most longs for. If someone did not have these stories, they would already have what they long for. Inevitably, there is what they long for, and also the invisible barriers.

As we continue through the coaching, we get more and more familiar with the space of Clear Seeing. That means, the space that is revealed as we clear more transparent beliefs. You could, theoretically, have Clear Seeing about everything, and we do have moments like that. But we are not aiming for that right away. We are aiming to come to Clear Seeing around a particular issue or decision. Where you take the issue or decision: “Should I leave my marketing job, and move more into being a teacher and a guide, or not?” That is a clear decision. When it comes to actually saying yes or no, that is where all these points of view bubble up to the surface to be liberated. 

The post What happens in Awakening Coaching? appeared first on The Translucent View.

We must be willing to look at the “broken zones” of our personality with honesty and courage. In the last decades, several new approaches have evolved that address this calling. These are not paths to psychological healing. They are also not spiritual paths to enlightenment in the traditional sense. Rather, to some extent they all rest on a degree of awakening to be effective. They are skillful means to bring wakefulness into full embodiment.

Until recently, spiritual teaching presented an either/or choice. It was thought that if you were trying to fix, mend, heal, or release tension from your personality, you were identified with it, in a state of delusion. Awakening, in the traditional view, meant that you had seen through the personality as fictitious, and therefore you no longer touched it. This view has resulted in many people with some degree of genuine awakening but who also carry horrendous dysfunctional habits. They obstinately refuse to look at them, because to do so would display “identification.”

One of the most effective and powerful ways to address this schism is found in the work of Saniel Bonder: “It’s a particular passion of mine to communicate the extent of the brokenness of the human soul and psyche, and how gravely impaired we are by the degree to which even  ‘awakened’ people continue to be governed by all that.” He describes his approach, Waking Down in Mutuality, as “not formally psychotherapeutic, but rather initiatory and mutually grounding.” Bonder’s work has three dimensions, all contained in its title.

photocredit: Saniel Bonder

The first is waking. He and his community help people to awaken through a variety of means, including self-inquiry. This awakening is not the end of spiritual life, as it’s often thought to be in approaches that emphasize transcendence. Rather, it catalyzes an exploration of our potential to live with sanity.

As long as you’re predominantly identified with personality, as long as you think “this is me,” you can’t really make any big shifts, says Bonder. That’s like trying to make a major renovation to the hull of a boat you are sailing in — first you’ve got to get the hull out of the water. You can’t do brain surgery on yourself. Similarly, you can’t begin to deeply mend your psyche if you overwhelmingly feel and think you are the psyche. That would be brokenness trying to mend itself.

Bonder sees awakening as the essential foundation for the evolutionary work that follows: “You can’t do that work for real without the transcendental ground of being. Otherwise, it is one part of your split-off self engaging the other, but still to some degree fearing and fighting it.” Without an awakening, we are able to accomplish only a relatively superficial mending of our human brokenness.

The second dimension is down: bringing the liberated spirit into embodiment in daily life, and integrating the broken zones:

When wakefulness comes forward and starts to wake down, to embody, to descend more fully into the psyche, there is a sacred marriage of two great dimensions of ourselves. We undergo a challenging exposure to our issues, traumas, broken zones. When we fall into them, these dimensions of our identity feel radically discontinuous with our ordinary sense of who we are. We start reacting in ways that others may find quite disproportionate to the actual realities of the present moment.

Bonder sees these broken zones as relatively untouched by a radical awakening. When we discover a deeper, unconditioned dimension to ourselves, we identify less with these old habits; we may feel they are essentially unimportant, but they continue nevertheless. He believes that most traditional spiritual approaches have tended either to ignore these broken zones or even to exacerbate them: “Under the guise of attracting people into ego-death and ego-transcendence, the teaching styles of many teachers have practically pulverized people in their broken zones. It takes an Olympic gymnast of a psyche and spirit to somehow leap over those gaps, collect enough energy and attention, and crystallize the awakening. Consequently, only a few in any generation pull it off.”

Bonder feels that traditional spiritual approaches often hole up in awakeness, shying clear of the much more difficult, messy work of evolutionary embodiment. We know ourselves to be limitless and free, untouched by birth and death. “Good,” they might say, “let’s close the book on how we live and treat other people.” Bonder feels that in order to bring forth the real evolutionary potential of awakening, we must return to how we live and heal, or make ourselves whole, from an awakened perspective.

The third dimension is mutuality, doing this work with others of like mind, catalyzing further transformations together. Bonder sees mutuality as an essential context, one in which everyone is equally vulnerable, open, and willing to see where the evolutionary impulse can be given more room: “You can’t hide out in the enlightened ivory tower of ‘my realization is superior to yours,’ or, ‘I know you better than you know yourself,’ or, ‘I’ve got a superior insight, wow, isn’t that amazing to you?’ ”

In real mutuality, the teacher is no longer one particular person in the room; the real teacher becomes the meeting itself, the highest evolutionary potential of the group, called forth by the gathering.

This has been an excerpted from my book The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World. Click here to purchase your own copy today.

The post Awakening and Mending appeared first on The Translucent View.

Last night I watched Kumaré, a mock documentary made by the very talented Vikram Gandhi. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly highly recommend that you do. It is extremely engaging, touching, funny, but most important it drives home a very important point with extraordinary skill.

Vikram Gandhi was born and raised in New Jersey, of Indian decent. His parents immigrated here from India and maintained a lot of their Indian values and traditions, but he was always highly skeptical about organized religion. He actually studied religion at Stanford and got fascinated by modern day gurus, particularly those who were born in the west. After graduating, he became a film maker and started to interview many of these people.

By 2010, a light went off in his head. He realized that an enormous component of the traditional guru-disciple relationship is actually created by projection (isn’t that what we’ve been saying with awakening coaching for the last 20 years?)

So he engaged in an extraordinary, elaborate and courageous experiment. He travelled to India, the country of his ancestral roots, grew his hair halfway down his back and a long beard, and adopted the personality of “Kumaré,” an Indian mystic. He learned the basics of yoga and meditation, enough that he could pull off his plan. When he had fully got the part down, he travelled to Phoenix, AZ with a film crew and two actresses who were to play the part of his devotees. He sets up shop as a guru.

Vikram Gandhi

The film documents a few months in Arizona where he gradually accumulates a following of people who take him extremely seriously. The film is outrageously funny at times, like when he goes to see a psychic reader, and she says she can see a long line of past lives where he has been a spiritual teacher and avatar. Almost everyone takes to him, sees light and wisdom radiating from his eyes, and divulges all their personal problems to him. Which of course, being a film maker from New Jersey, he doesn’t have the first clue how to answer. So he answers them with questions (exactly what we do in awakening coaching!)

This may sound a bit like another Sacha Baron Cohen mischievous adventure, of the likes of Borat or Bruno. But it has a twist. Vikram Gandhi is not just trying to fool people (although he does pull that off magnificently well), he is also trying to make a point. He actually develops a relationship with his  “disciples” and really cares about them. The point that he sets out to make, both to the unwitting participants in his prank as well as us his viewers, is that the answers that we are looking for in spiritual teachers are mostly to be found in our own intelligence if we only trust ourselves enough to look in that direction. 

This is a must see film. It is extremely funny, never gets boring for a second, very touching and inspiring, but also makes a really important point about the times in which we live with great skill and wisdom. 

Like many things these days, this film reminds us of our own natural intelligence which so easily gets diluted by the habit of looking for answers outside of ourselves. The film is about spiritual intelligence: the wisdom we all carry just one flight of steps down below the busy mind.

We also have physical, animal intelligence. The human body knows when it wants to sleep, when it wants to eat, what it wants to eat, when it wants to vomit, or cry, or run. Allowing the body its own intelligence is probably the most important key to good health, high energy and a vehicle that is completely cooperative in giving your gifts. But this intelligence also gets covered over by a mountain of should’s and shouldnt’s which we have accumulated from intellectual understanding, This coming Saturday, March 2nd, we start our Honor The Body 21-day Quantum Intensive. You can read more about it here. I hope you consider joining us.

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photocredit: Arjuna Ardagh

My teacher in India, H.W.L. Poonja,  used to tell a wonderful story. I remember one day we were all gathered together with him. He used to like to tease us. 

“What is the one thing that most gets in the way of freedom?” he asked. 

“The mind,” somebody suggested.  “The ego,” said another. He shook his head dismissively. “Concepts,” said somebody else. “Beliefs.” This game went one for maybe half an hour. Finally he told us this wonderful story, which I think is my favorite of all time.

A long time ago in a far away land, there was king who had no heir. Now I am sorry to say that this is not a perfectly politically correct story, as in this ancient land it was a king who would inherit the kingdom, not a queen. 

Because he had no male offspring, he sent his squires out to all the villages around, announcing that the next king would be selected not by bloodline, but by an interview. So all of the people from round about were invited to come for an interview with the king. 

When the appointed day came, they all arrived. Of course they lived in the villages, so they had matted hair, they were dressed in rags, many had long beards and many had just bare feet. Before they could be invited for an interview with the king, first they had to go to the royal bathhouse, where each one was scrubbed. Their beards were trimmed or shaved, and they each got a good haircut. When the bathing was over, they were anointed with beautiful oils and scents. Then they were taken to the royal dressing rooms where they got new clothes, made out of silk or velvet or satin. 

Then they went to the royal banquet chambers, where they could eat anything they wanted. There was a buffet that stretched from one end of the hall to the other, with every dish you could imagine from around the world. There were fine wines too, of every possible variety. They dined in a style they had never dreamed possible before, they drank and they drank, and then out came the musicians and the dancers. There was dancing, and drinking, and singing, and all kinds of revelry. 

Finally it came to nine o’clock, and the guards came to ask everyone to leave. These poor people from the villages tried to wrap up a leg of mutton in the beautiful clothes made of silk or satin. But “No,” they were told, “you cannot take anything away from here. You can only take what you came with.” And so they staggered away from the palace, singing and swaying with their arms around each other.

The king called the prime minister. “What happened?” he asked. “I requested you to send out a message to all of my people, so that the next king could be selected by an interview. I’ve been waiting here the whole day but nobody came.”

The prime minister hung his head in embarrassment. “I’m sorry my Lord,” he said, “but they got so distracted with all of the things you provided. They got so distracted by the dancing girls, and music, and food, and drink, that no one remembered to come for the interview.”

The king looked at the prime minister in astonishment. “I can’t believe this,” he said.  If only one of them, one single person, had remembered why he had come, he would have inherited the whole kingdom. Then all of this would have been his, everyday, for the rest of his life. But each and every one forgot why he came.”

I love this story. When you hear it, does it remind you at all about anything in your own life? Do you sometimes wonder if you have also forgotten why you came? When I coach clients in Awakening Coaching, this is perhaps the most important focus of the relationship: To help people to remember why they came.

When a young couple is going to have a child, they have such a pure vision about how the child will be raised. They think of the perfect environment for their son or daughter to grow and prosper, to learn and to become their best. But years later, parents get overwhelmed and stressed, from driving kids to soccer practice, and dentist appointments, and dealing with missed homework, and they forget why they had the child. 

When someone has a vision to start a new business, they raise the capital, they write out their vision statement and their values. But years later, they may find themselves cutting corners to save money, laying off employees, or making deals that are no longer in alignment with their original vision. 

People forget why they came.

And of course this is true in a much bigger way as well. Here we are, with a few decades to live on the planet. We have gifts to give, maybe we have a message to share. Deep down we have values that are important to us, but so many people forget why they came.  

In Awakening Coaching we have developed an elaborate set of tools to help people to relax deeply into who they really are, into their “true nature.” From this “awakening” they can remember, perhaps not with thinking but in a more visceral way, who they are and why they came. They remember the gift they came to give.

Often this starts with a transformed relationship with the physical body. The body, after all, lives in reality, it lives in now. Reconnecting with the body is the first and most important step to coming back to your senses, coming home to yourself. 

Please join me for a tele-seminar this Thursday, February 21st at 6 PM Pacific time, where we will talk about the Language of the Body. I’m going to explain to you how you can communicate with your body more effectively, in a way that can be the foundation to remembering why you came.

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