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Thank-you, thank-you.
Please, sit down, my ego can stand no more.
Thank-you for making some time for me.
The first thing I’d like to do is welcome the 373 new masters from 32 countries to the Avatar network.
Welcome aboard!
Hey, do you remember when you were a kid and someone would ask you,
if you only had 1 wish what would you wish for?
More wishes, right?
Ok, here’s a question like that:
if you could know everything there was to know about 1 subject, what subject would you pick?
I would pick consciousness.
Because I have a suspicion that if I knew everything there was to know about consciousness,
I’d know everything there was about everything.
So, how does someone study consciousness?
Let’s see, they could read a lot of books about the subject;
they could do a search on the internet; they could go to a library;
volunteer at a research foundation where they put electrodes in people’s heads;
and maybe in 10 years they would be considered an expert.
They could quote from William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung –
Yung, Yuung…
that’s the expert pronunciation.
And they could talk about ego and id and super-consciousness.
And they could name-drop Baba Whatchamacallit, and Ken Wilbur.
And eventually they could write a book and call it, “What is Consciousness?”
And of course, in the meantime when they’re not completely absorbed in their books,
their life feels empty, lonely, meaningless.
And their book on consciousness, it’s not selling as well as Deepok’s book on consciousness;
and the last 2 jobs they had fell through,
and their girlfriend is dropping them for a part-time lawnmower mechanic.
Sad story...
I could go on, but what’s wrong with this picture?
They are lost in concepts.
A concept is something that is thought or imagined;
somebody has thought up or imagined it.
And, you see, they haven’t really been studying consciousness at all
they have been studying concepts of consciousness.
Can you imagine studying food and never eating any?
You could be an expert on cuisine and starve to death.
Now there are 2 kinds of knowledge;
there’s second-hand knowledge of things that you’ve heard or read about,
and there’s first-hand knowledge that you’ve gained from personal observation and experience.
The purpose of both kinds of knowledge is to do something
to accomplish something, to change something that exists into something better.
And the problem with our student of consciousness is that
he’s an expert in concepts about consciousness,
but he can’t do anything about the real problems of life.
And while he has a lot of second-hand knowledge about consciousness,
he lacks the skill to change his life into something better.
Maybe he can make better concepts, but they’re still not going to help him.
You know, it’s time for him to look inward, time for him to do Avatar.
If you want to explore the powers and the pitfalls
of your own consciousness, you have to look inward.
Every human being has a privileged access to a private universe of consciousness;
a private universe of consciousness in which he can be king, emperor,
or even God Almighty if he so desires.
And sadly, a lot of people have wandered into this kingdom and they’re lost.
They bottle up a little bit of consciousness and they call it their mind.
Trying to look at consciousness from a bottled up bit of consciousness
is to become lost in mirrors.
If they had known that there was a viewpoint which can be aware of consciousness,
but remain independent, they would have been alright.
Avatar, again…
So they’re in their bottle, and they have forgotten the way in, and the way out.
They don’t know what they are, or who they are,
or where they are, so they make something up.
And now they’re thoughts floating in a bottle.
I mean, imagine living in a magic kingdom where you own everything,
and you’re the only real person,
and yet you choose to bottle yourself up and play the role of victim.
How foolish is that?
The product of Avatar is a source being –
I seem to keep saying that over and over.
The product of Avatar is a source being,
an awake source being who has experientially realized
that he or she is not a body, is not bottled up consciousness,
is not thoughts, memories or imaginations floating in the bottle.
An awake source being is a self-determining, non-material spirit;
compassionate, positive, and responsible.
The reason I say ‘awake’ is because everybody thinks he’s a source being,
but not every source being has had an experiential awakening.
And if a source being is awake,
they have the power to deliberately create, discreate, or reorganize
– rebottle – consciousness.
And if a being isn’t awake, they’re stuck in “think-it’s”,
and their actions are indoctrinated.
If you decide that you’re happy, but I tell you you’re unhappy,
who’s right?
I mean, the only way I can be right about your universe is if you decide to allow me to be right.
And if you agree with me that you are not happy,
then you can blame me for making your life unhappy.
Yeah, this might work…
And pretty soon you’re going to have to call me to determine whether or not you’re hungry.
See that’s ‘acute co-dependence’, very far removed from source being.
And there are a lot of people competing to define each other’s consciousness
rather than honestly confronting their own.
But there are also beings that you would be happy to have influence your universe.
I guess what I’m saying is there are good influences and bad influences
and the good influences will remind you that you are source,
and the bad influences will encourage you to blame others.
A blame is assigning the cause of how you feel
to the consciousness that you have bottled for someone else.
Do you really want to trade the role of source being for victim bottle?
I didn’t think so.
So it’s good if we gain some first-hand knowledge of your own conscious landscape.
Unfortunately, first-hand knowledge can be wrong.
You can acquire first-hand knowledge that is false,
especially if you’re looking at it from a bottle.
You can misinterpret something that you experienced;
it’s common for eyewitnesses to an event to describe the event entirely differently.
Eyewitness testimony, even though it is first-hand knowledge, is notoriously inaccurate.
Around 1920 the Harvard Psychology Department
threw out introspection as a reliable tool for studying consciousness.
All reports based on introspection were invalidated by the declaration that
“people only see what they expect to see”.
And Harvard’s fail-safe argument was that,
if you really studied consciousness by introspection,
the only thing you would see would be consciousness introspecting on itself.
Now, there’s a guy named Copthorn McDonald, he’s a writer and independent scholar.
And he notes that after rejecting introspection,
“psychologists turned almost exclusively to behavior as described in terms of stimulus and response,
and consciousness was totally bypassed as a subject.”
A survey of 8 leading introductory Psychology texts published between 1930 and the 1950’s
found no mention of the topic of Consciousness in 5 texts,
and in 2 it was treated as a historical curiosity.
So is it true that when looking inward you always see what you expect to see?
Have you ever had a dream in which something happened which you didn’t expect?
You probably have.
So the statement “people only see what they expect to see” is not always true.
And nullifying introspection was a mistake that wouldn’t be corrected for 50 years.
Now what psychologists should have done
was to develop techniques of consciousness inspection that would result in accurate data.
But they dropped the ball and they went down a wrong path.
So consciousness might have been a dead subject
if it wasn’t for events like China’s invasion of Tibet,
which had the unforeseen consequence of turning Tibetan Buddhism loose on the world;
or the serendipitous rediscovery of LSD by a Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary;
or the Transcendental Meditation fad that swept the world after The Beatles,
remember them?
And in the 1960’s a human potential movement began that’s still growing today,
and it’s preferred method of research includes many varieties of looking inward.
And the message is that the more you understand the operation of your own consciousness,
the brighter, happier, and more successful you will become.
Now there really aren’t many people who disagree with that.
Looking inward, learning about your own consciousness,
is variously called meditation, introspection, or self-examination.
And there are skills in doing these effectively.
Now, since consciousness is all around you,
looking inward has nothing to do with the inside of your head.
Looking inward describes a specialized focus of awareness rather than a direction.
I mean, you can look through a pane of glass or you can adjust your focus and look at the glass.
And you can look through consciousness,
or you can adjust your focus and look at consciousness.
So looking inward is a special kind of focusing.
You’re not trying to see your skull from the inside.
And the fact is you’re not going to learn how to control or change
or structure your life without focusing on your own consciousness.
And the second part of this is that you’re not going to learn anything useful
if you look with expectations, assumptions, desires, and resistances.
If you look up at the ceiling and you recall that a ceiling once fell on me,
and it broke my leg,
and now your observations are colored by that,
you know the more you think about it, the less ceiling you see.
Looking and experiencing are about a hundred times more effective than thinking and remembering.
And you know from the Avatar ‘Define it’ exercises
that you can cultivate a state of mind that just sees things as they are,
uncolored by memories or judgments.
And that state of mind is even more important
when you focus on the influence that your own consciousness is having on your life.
So, this is the first skill level of looking inward.
You have to look without judgment or expectations.
And you have to look for what is there, rather than ‘looking through’,
or dreaming, or imagining what you would like or not like to see.
Have you ever heard the expression ‘the 4th wall’?
Let me tell you about the 4th wall.
It’s an imaginary invisible wall at the front of a theater stage
through which the audience views a play.
Movie sets are built with 3 walls,
and the camera and the director sit behind the imaginary 4th wall,
and the actors pretend that the 4th wall is solid.
And so between the show and the people who are watching the show, there’s this imaginary 4th wall.
But what the 4th wall allows, if you’re in the audience,
is for you to observe without any concerns for your safety,
or without any concern that you’re going to be called upon,
or that anything will be expected of you.
And the 4th wall allows you to meditate undisturbed upon the movie or the performance.
Have you ever gone to a movie and you become so involved that you forget yourself?
That’s because you have relaxed into the simple awareness that low lighting,
comfortable seats, and the 4th wall encourage.
And your bottled up consciousness identity is dropped away.
Do you think that people realize that when they’re going to the movie that it’s a form of meditation?
It is.
And creating a 4th wall between you and the show
allows you to explore consciousness with subjective objectivity.
In some circles this is called ‘mindfulness’.
So let me use this analogy of the 4th wall
to go over the levels of looking inward from subjective objectivity.
The first thing that you see when you shift your focus to consciousness is your life story
– that’s bottled consciousness.
And ok, that’s entertaining,
and we’ve all spent hundreds of hours polishing our stories,
but rewriting and re-editing doesn’t really provide any real insights into the subject of consciousness.
Because the rewrites and re-edits are done for someone else’s consciousness;
so we’re still ‘looking through’, rather than looking inward.
The first level of looking inward is recognizing the emotional memories that the story stimulates
– should be feel-its.
The emotions are what you have bottled up.
And now you’re making some progress because
the longer you experience these memories, the more you will own them
and the less attention grabbing they become.
The next stage of looking inward occurs after you have reviewed and re-edited the movie many times.
You start to focus on the beliefs behind the emotions.
Now you’re beginning to understand the shape and structure of your mind bottle,
and you’re gaining valuable first-hand knowledge about the core of the drama.
And in the future when you decide to deliberately direct your own movie as a source being,
you can decide which beliefs to leave in, and which beliefs to discreate –
in other words, you get to shape the bottle.
Now after this point most people don’t pay much attention to their story;
the bottle is empty and there’s just too much else to see.
And you start to focus on various identities,
relationships, values,
intentions that are creating the world around you.
And that brings us to the Wizards materials.
The next level about focusing is focusing on the collective consciousness
and learning how to shape it.
I’m not going to talk about that today, but –
here comes the commercial…
I’m sure I’ve said something insightful about something,
so enjoy your home movies and please come to Wizards.