I spend a lot of time transmuting forms. I spend a lot of time getting caught in things and then extricating myself. It's a process, it's what my life is about really. Aurabindo, a great Indian saint, said, "The spiritual path is like somebody standing up, taking one step, falling on their face. You get up, you brush yourself off, you look sheepishly at God, you take another step, you fall flat on your face." It's like prostrations all the way to the end.

There are different ways I've worked with getting caught. I mean, in some ways I've made it into a career. Because by being honest about the way I get caught, everybody says, "Yeah right, that's human." It makes everybody reassured. But I also watch the way in which my mind grabs, or when I wake up to the fact that it has grabbed, a process goes into effect. And I've been thinking about that a little bit, I've been thinking about that a little bit and it has to do with intention. That once you have tasted, once you have acknowledged that you have tasted the possibility of freedom, of the heart, of the mind, of awareness, of your soul, of your spirit, it becomes, I mean the negative way of saying it is an obsession. The positive way of saying it is it starts to draw you to itself.

And the more you move towards it, more towards unity, towards being in peace, in joy, in presence, the more you are haunted by your imperfections. Not imperfections in the bad sense, they're just stuff that keeps you from getting on with it. There's another side of this which is interesting, which is that you work and you work and you work to become free of somebody experiencing things, to merge into it all, and then as you get near to it you start to push against it. It's like extending foreplay. It's just pushing against it and against it. Because you don't quite want to merge because the experiences become so blissful.

In the story of the Ramayana, Hanuman is a form of God that comes to Earth in order to serve. And Hanuman serves Ram, which is the name of the formless in that story. Hanuman, because of his devotion to Ram, he can do anything -- he has infinite power. And he does remarkable things. Finally, Ram, who is formless, but is in form as this king, prince -- Hanuman is kneeling before Ram and Ram reaches over to lift him, to merge him into himself. And Hanuman, who is devoted only to doing the work of Ram, at that moment takes everything to push against Ram in order to stay in form, in order to be devoted, in order to keep serving.

So there are these two kinds of emotional forces I experience. One is an impatience to be free in order to free everybody else, or to be free together or however you want to say it. That's the bodhisattva part of it. And the other part of it is the pushing away of freedom because of the exquisiteness of the taste of approaching freedom. Most people say, "Gee I wish I could be in that position." I'm busy wanting freedom.

But we can work a lot on that journey to freedom just by that intention to become free. And as I've been trying to understand that path, that path is the path in which all of your actions bring you closer to liberation. Not just what you do Sunday morning or when you're sitting on your zafu, or when you're praying to God. But everything. Going to the toilet, and striving and serving and shopping and eating and being neurotic - all of it. But yet, all people doing all things aren't doing karma yoga. But what's the difference? And then I realized it had to do with intention.

Once you see that your life is a set of experiences which you can either experience or witness yourself experiencing it, or ultimately being the experiencer. Now, most people are experiencing their lives. They look at a sunset, they look at a mountain, they do their taxes, whatever. It's a series of experiences, one after another, and there's somebody going, it's like a train going through a tunnel. It's going through a series of experiences.

But it's interesting that when you start to notice your predicament, you will see that in addition to the experiencer and that which is experienced there is a part of your mind that is just noticing the whole thing. Call it a meta game if you will. Call it the part that says, "Ahhhhh! Experiencing!" It's called 'the Witness' by Gurdjieff. It's the part of the mind that is not lost in the drama.

Now just to allay some of the anxiety when I say, "Caught in the drama..." There are stages in the spiritual path. There is a stage where you realize how stuck you are. Gurdjieff says, "If you would be free, the first thing you must realize is you're in prison. If you think you're free no escape is possible." You've got to realize you're trapped. So there's the first experience of how trapped you are. At that point you just want to get out. There's a tendency to push away the stuff that traps you. It's called the Path of Renunciation at times. By pushing it away you get very established in that part of you which is not trapped. But then you see that the final place you are stuck is in your aversion to that which would trap you.

Because what the Buddha said was, "The cause of suffering is attraction and aversion." So your aversion to physical reality, to the human plane, to being on earth, becomes a final trap for you. To become free of it, you've got to turn around and face your aversion. That is you have to embrace your humanity. That is you have to accept life. That is you have to embrace suffering. In that process you rise above the experiencer, and at the same moment you are in the experience.

So you start by being the experiencer, you push it away until you're standing back witnessing it all but separate. And then finally you see that aversion is keeping you stuck and you come back into life and you embrace it into yourself so that you're in it but yet not of it. It's such an interesting sequence. So that when I talk about drama, or the melodrama, it's to help us get free of it the first time. Not that we won't come back into it. Because you can't live life, I mean people say to me, "When you get enlightened, what happens to passion?" And that seems strange to me because it turns out that it's all passion. I mean, where isn't passion?

So I have a few little helpful techniques that I use, I've been reflecting about a couple of them. One of them is the story that I've told many times that somebody told me, that I've read somewhere. The story of the girl who gets pregnant by the fisherman in the village and she doesn't want to admit that it's the fisherman, so she said it was the old monk up on the hill. So when the baby is born the villagers all take the baby and their torches and they go up to the monastery and they beat on the gate. And the monk comes. And they say, "This is your baby, you raise it." And he says, "Ah, so." And he closes the gates and he goes back to his life, with the baby.

Nine years later the woman is dying and she doesn't want to die without confessing that it was the fisherman and not the monk. So she does. And the townspeople all take their torches and they go up to the monastery and they knock at the door. And the monk opens the gate and he's got a nine-year-old child. They say, "There's been a terrible mistake. It's not your child. You don't have to raise it anymore." And he said, "Ah, so." Now that's the witness. "Ah, so." The company you invested in just went into Chapter 11. Ah, so. Your car ran out of oil and you didn't stop in time and you need a whole engine job. Ah, so. Now, see I can keep creating them, but just think how good you are at it.

It's so interesting. I mean I get so caught in my drama. And then in creeps, I've got these few lines I work with like, "Ah, so." Isn't that a delicious one? It really, it really, it's like a nice person to hang out by on a rainy day, you know? Ah, so. It really hurts my back. Ah, so. And then my father had a great one. I really, it's interesting, I've been thinking about where it came from and it came from different places. He had one. As he got older and got more frail, you know, sitting down would be quite an operation. Because he'd let go of the walker and he'd sort of fall into the chair, and he'd sit there. And then he'd say, "There we are."

And you've got to feel the full flavor of it. "There we are, there we are." Get out of the car and close the door. "There we are." Get him into bed. "There we are." Put the food in front of him, and he's talking to himself, "There we are. There we are." At first, that sounded like a need for control, you know. "Well, there we are." You know? "I know where WE are." Because his mind was floating all over the place you know? "Well, I know where I am, I'm in front of a bowl of cereal. There we are." But sometimes he and I would be holding hands, and he was like 89 at that point, we'd just be floating in space together. It was just so sweet. And then out of him would come, "There we are." I thought, "That's from a different place than I thought it was! He's been waiting for me."

That's the experience I have. That people are waiting for me all the time. They're all so far out. I really love it when beings cut through my mind. What I do is I take those parts of my life where I get stuck, I don't take them, they take me. It's gotten to the point now where I so enjoy the lightness of being, the lightness of just delighting in the moment fully. No matter what it's got in it, no matter what it's got in it. That every time I start to get stuck, it's just like I go from air into water, it's like going into a thicker medium. It's like pushing aside something thick. And I think, uh, ah, that awakens me. I think I'm busy thinking I'm somebody doing something. And then I immediately, "Ram Ram Ram," or "Ah, so," or "There we are."

Just something that keeps bringing me back to the center again. The Witness. And it has to do with intention. I have the intention to become free and I'm using everything in my life to do it. At first you just have practices like meditation or prayer. And then you go to work, or you do your stuff, or whatever. And after a while all of it becomes your practice, every bit of it. You tell me something that can't be practiced. Tell me something that you can't convert into becoming one with spirit.

So you keep working on yourself to cultivate the Witness, which becomes, in your way, a gift to everybody around you. Because they come in thinking they're somebody, just like you do most of the time. And you're creating an environment where they can if they want to, but they don't have to.

So intention to awaken, finding the part of your mind that is not caught. Even though immediately after you've noticed it gets caught and then you come back again. The predicament is the clinging of mind. The predicament is that awareness clings to thought. I'll just read you the first paragraph of "Extracting the Quintessence of Accomplishment." And it comes from Dudjom Rinpoche who was an extraordinarily beautiful Tibetan Lama who passed on a few years ago I guess.

"The nature of our mind. The nature of our mind is the nature of absolute reality." Try to think of it now as the sky as opposed to the clouds. "Divested of all conditional and artificial characteristics fabricated by the intellect. This nature, this mind, is established with certainty in awareness. Awareness arises, naked, as the self-originated primordial wisdom. It just is. This awareness cannot be expressed in words, nor shown by examples. It is neither corrupted in samsara nor improved in nirvana. It is neither born nor ceases to be. It is neither liberated nor confused. It is neither existent nor nonexistent. It is neither delimited nor falling to either side. In brief, from the beginning, awareness has never existed as a substantial entity with elaborated characteristics. Its nature is primarily pure, void, vast, and all pervasive."

Now take the stages. You're caught in experience. Then you cultivate the Witness, which is that little part of your mind that sees the rest of it. After a while the witness gets stronger and stronger and stronger until most of the time you are "Ah, so." And even though the dramas of desires, fears, aging, life, crisis, are all coming and going, coming and going, they're all undulating within you, there's a part of you that is strong, that is clear, that is saying, "Ah, so." And then, in this particular technique, you become aware of that in you which is saying, "Ah, so."

And you go through, into pure mind. Which is neither the witness, nor not the witness. It is neither the experience, nor not the experience. It's not looking, but it knows everything because it is everything. I am describing to you a very disciplined technique of using the mind to beat the mind. Stand back from experience into the witness, not denying the experience, this isn't dissociation, this isn't a defense mechanism. Stand back so that you're feeling the pain of it all and at the same moment, seeing it. And when you're resting in the awareness, the seeing of it broadly, then you start to note the seer. The witness.

And there's a flick that occurs. And no longer are you experiencing the universe, the universe just is. It includes you but it's nothing special. It's really the process of dying as a separate entity into pure mind. And the moment you do that, a moment later you're fully there as a separate entity but you're also not there as a separate entity. It's all there all at once. You're a star and you're also the heavens.