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The ambitions of Balanced View are to spread this Training all over the world,
have centers all over the world. Now if I could knit centers,
or create them out of thin air then we would, but it requires support.
And the way this Training gets the support financially
and with people, is by people just like you.
If you're brand new, just testing the suggestions of what is on offer here,
and I'll explain what that is in a bit, and seeing what happens in your experience.
So, in my experience after thirty years of trying many, many practices
and treatments in order to not feel depressed,
not have panic attacks, loose weight,
you know all of the things that I needed to be in place for me to be happy
and not having any success and spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds
on these things that don't work, that provide some relief
but in terms of ultimate well being, my experience is that I was still depressed,
I was still fat, I was still miserable. I'm getting older, I can't do certain things
that I used to do for relief ‘cause I'm too unfit.
You know all of these things. So, when I came to this Training,
I was lovingly given a very simple set of instructions
and said, you know test these and see what happens.
And Candice has sort of had a knowing smile that really annoyed me
because it was like she knows that it's going to work, sort of thing.
I was convinced that it's not going to work. I thought this was just a load of rubbish.
And lots of smiling people, it was like a bit, what is this place?
And so I found it very, very afflictive when I came.
So, it's you know, very important just to firstly test what we are suggesting here.
So, this is why we are here for these four days.
And see what happens in your own experience. And then from that,
do you want to support this amazing movement?
I mean I'd give everything I have to allow other people to have the privilege
to basically stop treating yourself like a prisoner of war.
You know, beating yourself up day after day after day.
“I don't measure up, I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough because I'm depressed,
I'm not good enough because I'm fat.
My psychiatrist tells me this and the reason that this is
all like this is because my parents treated me this way.”
But you know, like so, we have hundreds of people that prove to us how we don't measure up.
You know, so it's all very negative for our entire lives.
Mainly we focus on what does not work.
Have you ever read a book about how your parents are to blame for your happiness?
You know, why when you're happy, why isn't that your parents fault?
It's just, you see, we've just been fed a big complete tissue of lies.
We are amazing, we are totally incredible, and the evidence of that incredibleness
is our own emotions, our own thoughts, our own feelings, especially if they are negative.
My God, what is he talking about?
So, you see in order for that to become your reality, it has to be your experience.
So, this Training is about your experience.
It's about your experience of implementing the simple suggestions
that we are going to talk about now. So, that was a bit of a long intro wasn't it?
So, you heard Candice in the talk, she gave you an instruction.
In order to identify what we call open intelligence in this Training, just stop thinking.
So, we can all do that right now. And admittedly it would be for a very short moment.
But, just stop thinking, stop describing.
Obviously, thoughts and sensations almost immediately come back.
But in that brief moment, when you stop thinking,
what do you identify in your experience?
So, just do it again: stop thinking.
And then the next thought might be, “I can't stop thinking. How do I stop thinking?”
So, stop describing.
Now there's an undeniable alertness and openness,
it might be quite subtle, a presence.
Now, this is what we call open intelligence in the Training.
It doesn't matter what you call it, you can call it whatever you like.
So, you already have it, you already have what we are talking about here.
We are not giving it to you; you already have it.
So, the very simple practice of the Balanced View Training,
the only practice is to recognize open intelligence for short moments,
repeated many times, until it becomes continuous.
And what that means, and this is totally amazing,
is that your emotions, your thoughts, your experiences,
the people, the places and the things in your life,
they provide you with the opportunity to practice that simple instruction.
So, when depression comes up you can stop
and you can relax and acknowledge open intelligence for a short moment.
It's not about holding open intelligence
in your attention field ‘cause that is impossible.
And then naturally the next thought will come;
the depression might just come back, so then you take another short moment.
Now we can do a fun experiment here,
just to show you how difficult it is to hold things in place.
So, you may well have experiences in your life that, you know,
“Oh my God I have been depressed all day, oh my God I have had a headache all day,
oh my God my boyfriend didn't shut up all day.”
But what you'll find is that’s impossible;
you know it is impossible to be depressed continuously.
It is impossible to be happy continuously.
So, let's do our experiment, it's called the vegetable experiment.
Okay, so this side of the room is the big red tomatoes,
this side is the big orange carrots, okay.
And when I say go, you have to think of only a big red tomato,
only a big orange carrot and see how long it is
before another thought or sensation comes into your experience.
And nobody is allowed to think of an aubergine.
If you think of an aubergine you have to leave.
Okay, so are you ready? So, tomato, carrot and just see what happens.
How long can you hold onto your vegetable? And you can't absolutely have
carrots and you absolutely can't have tomatoes.
Okay, so are you ready? So three, two, your carrot, I'm tomato.
Okay, go.
It's impossible.
It's tomato, carrot, orange, aubergine, leek, pumpkins.
It's just, then there's a sensation and
then I hear a sound and the dynamic-ness of the display.
So, your thoughts, your sensations, your emotions—everything,
it's all an amazing flow.
It's just seamless, completely seamless.
You cannot hold onto your vegetable
without something coming almost immediately in. Now the ridiculous thing is,
your depression or whatever your pet negative data is,
is no different to that imaginary vegetable.
The only reason you think it is very, very powerful is because you've
sat there thinking of a big red tomato for forty years,
going “Oh my God it's a red tomato, what can I do it's my parents fault,
oh my God, oh my God. I'm bad, I'm bad
it's my thousand past lives that's why I can't get rid of this red tomato.”
You see, all the while there is nothing there.
And this applies to your emotions, your thoughts, your hopes, your fears.
They do not have an independent nature.
If they did, you could take them out of and put them in a jar.
This is Adrian's depression.
You can't take the tomato out of your head and make pasta sauce.
I learnt something really amazing the other day in the Italian Open Meeting,
that pasta all'arrabiata means angry pasta.
That’s amazing. It's brilliant.
For my entire life I was eating angry pasta.
So, that was just an introduction to how thoughts and emotions,
they flow on by effortlessly. And that, you know, you don't need to do anything;
you can't hold onto anything, you can't get rid of anything.
Nothing has an independent nature.
So, if you are working on something, if you're working on what vegetable
is appearing in your head, you are essentially working on something that has
no independent nature; it does not exist in and of itself.
And if you work on nothing it's a lot of effort
and you get no results, which is why it's just so frustrating.
So, that's a really simple practice. So, you already have open intelligence.
Now thankfully, it's not just that practice. There's, we have trainings
and many of you today are participating maybe for the first time.
And in the trainings we just share the language of open intelligence.
It elicits the direct experience of what we are describing here.
And what we are describing here is that you are okay,
no matter what is going on in your experience.
Then we have trainers, amazing trainers,
who are there just to support you in bringing this into your own experience.
It's not about us making you believe something, some new philosophy.
It's about you, just testing what we suggest.
And testing, and seeing what happens, and we'll support you in that.
So, we only share our own experience. And I guarantee you;
there isn't one person in this room who was more cynical than I am about this Training.
I point blank refused to believe it would work.
Tee hee, the joke was on me. Because I just tested it,
almost with the motivation to prove that this Training does not work.
Okay I'm going to test it, yeah, short moment, short moment;
reading texts, doing trainings, sitting at the back really miserable,
really angry, and even despite that,
I just saw, wow, there is something about me that is just,
simply gone unnoticed that’s totally okay, totally relaxed, very potent, very alert.
And when I emphasize this rather than the descriptions,
I just become a much nicer person. I used to be so cynical, sarcastic, and miserable,
oh it really makes me, makes my skin crawl
—very negative person. And the reason that that was the case
was because that was the only way I could get satisfaction, was to drag people down,
point out how miserable they should be as well, it made me feel a little bit better.
So, I simply tested the suggestions and when I started there weren't huge roomfuls of people,
I mean pretty soon there were, because this Training, it really does work.
It's, and again, that's a bold claim, but the only reason you're going to find out
is to test in your own experience what happens when:
a) you just practice that simple instruction.
So, I am just going to say it one more time: short moments of open intelligence,
repeated many times, become continuous. And just to emphasize,
it really means that essentially whenever you remember,
emphasize open intelligence rather than the data, rather than the descriptions.
And so, that's just one more term to clear up for you in the Balanced View Training.
Anything we can experience as human beings we just term as “data.”
So, thoughts, emotions, sensations, people, places and things
and this is another great power of this Training is the simplicity of the instruction.
And what you'll start to see is that your life, everything about your life,
is perfect for you to practice short moments.
So, what that means is your thoughts and emotions, they remind you to practice.
So, right there nothing needs to change and then,
just by simply allowing yourself, just gently to test the support structures,
what you'll find is there is no differentiation
between your, the data, thoughts and emotions and the sensations,
and the expanse of potent ease that is open intelligence.
They are equal; they are the same thing, an expanse of equalness.
And this recognition, it never stops getting more and more potent,
it never stops deepening.
So, that's great, you've all already got open intelligence and there is nowhere to get to.