The Kleshas Week 1 - Avidya: Turning Away from Presence
The Sharanam
I depend on You alone.
I desire You alone.
I serve You alone.
I praise You alone.
I love You alone.
I know You alone.
I see You alone.
You just put those statements in
and you feel it.
Sometimes they land really deep and rich.
And you just get a resonance back.
And sometimes the rebound isn’t quite so strong.
We’re not feeling it so much.
It lands in denser material.
Perhaps we can say we’re a little light on the inspiration,
and the aspiration.
So it lands a bit mildly, or whatever.
And that’s just bloody inevitable.
To be on the path, especially in a sustainable way,
requires that we accept that is the case.
And then throw them in anyway.
And to ask:
Is there anything more in me that I can give,
in order to inspire these, or intensify these,
or feel these more deeply?
It’s almost a yearning to come from a deeper place.
You know what I mean?
And then that’s all you can do.
And if it seems to land on hard ground,
and seems to come from a dry place,
so it is.
And you did it.
Sometimes with a little more endeavour
you can start to enrich it a little bit.
The ground starts to soften somehow.
The place that it’s coming from
feels like it’s got more juice behind it.
Just by doing it, that can happen.
And sometimes you don’t have to do anything at all
and it’s just:
“I love you. I love you, God I mean it.”
So one of those three things tends to be going on.
And they don’t determine the outcome.
They just reflect the actual situation inside
that we’re working with.
Which you can only do so much about.
So when you’re sat there
and it’s all dry inside.
Remember that satsang.
That is a forever satsang.
It is me speaking to you forever.
Ten years down the road,
that satsang stays very relevant.
Twenty years, thirty years,
on your deathbed.
This relationship that you are developing
in the Sharanam
will be the relationship you have when you leave this earth.
And that determines how it goes.
It’s your first relationship
and it is your last one.
All the relationships in between
come and go.
This one is sustained in your entire life.
Whether you paid any attention to it or not.
And you go out on it.
And it’s the last one you’ll speak to
on your way out.
So the ideal of the spiritual life,
the living yoga kind of life,
is it’s lived from the wave,
down into the ocean,
and then out into all waves.
So the endeavour in any situation,
what I’m doing now inside of me,
is I’m dropping inside.
And I’m making sure I’m feeling my spirit inside.
I’m feeling the presence.
I’m feeling you through my heart.
Call it what you like.
Essentially I’m going in,
and then to you.
I’m not going out onto you.
And that’s what those Sharanam statements
are basically there to make clear.
That our greatest relationship with each other
is through God,
through spirit,
through the heart.
Not through our psychology
and our egos.
So when you say:
“I depend on you alone,”
you’re saying fundamentally:
my relationship is with the great power
that exists in me,
that brought me into this world
and that will take me out.
That is my number one thing.
Because it’s the insurance policy.
It’s the one place I will land
when the shit goes down.
When everything seems like it’s collapsing
and falling apart,
where do you land?
That will tell you a little bit about your work on the path.
Maybe you just need to give it a tweak, of like,
What am I doing? What’s this about?
Because if we’re landing in anxiety,
and stress,
and instability,
it means we haven’t really firmed up
on this ground of ourselves
We’re looking to fall into a ground of being
that you just know will never fail you,
no matter what’s going on.
That’s the one to look for, guys.
Wouldn’t you pray for everyone to have that?
The Kleshas
Our topic this season is the kleshas.
So the kleshas are a yogic enquiry
into the cause of human suffering.
A yogic enquiry to find out
why we create suffering for ourselves.
And there are five of them.
Five stages.
They’re not really separate,
they’re more of a chain reaction.
A domino effect.
So klesha means affliction.
Something that harms us,
something that hurts us,
something that doesn’t serve us.
Another definition of klesha is poison.
Something that we do or ingest
that harms us,
that is not nourishing to us.
But let’s do it differently.
Let’s take klesha to mean
an obstacle, or an impediment.
Something that blocks
or impedes the flow of God through you.
Something that impedes the flow
of goodness, love and light through you.
That is a Klesha.
The first klesha,
the one at the beginning,
which is said to be the root cause
of all other impediments,
of all other afflictions,
at the root of all human suffering…
The first thing that impedes the flow
is that we turn away from our source.
We leave our ground.
We deny the giver of power within ourselves.
We turn away from that
which is giving us everything.
We leave ourselves.
That moment where we leave ourselves,
when we turn away from presence,
when we leave our heart,
when we go up to our heads,
however you want to call it…
That’s the moment
the first domino,
is knocked
on the trail of suffering.
So when we turn away from the source
inside of ourselves,
that impedes the flow of power.
The energy that moves us and lives us,
the spirit that dwells in us,
is somehow denied.
We ignore it.
And this ignorance of our true nature,
our true power,
turning away from it–
the yogis gave the term Avidya,
which means ignorance,
or to move into delusion.
Ignorance means to ignore
the fundamental thing
that is to be seen and recognised.
And when we ignore the fundamental thing,
we move into delusion.
When I turn away from that power
that’s living me,
I don’t acknowledge it
and I don’t humble myself before it–
I then start to think I am the source of my own power.
And that moment, right there
is where I move into the territory of suffering.
So the action,
that we do to create this suffering,
is rather than turning inwards
towards ourselves,
we turn around and away.
We look away from the source.
And as we do that action,
we also simultaneously contract.
And I think we all know it as a feeling
inside ourselves.
Especially when you know what it is
to rest in presence,
you have a lot more nuance
of what it feels like when you leave it.
We contract
and we impede the amount of
love,
light,
glory,
and power
That can flow through us.
If I just stay looking towards the light,
gently looking within,
and stay open,
then I’m maximising the amount of
god power that can flow through me.
And we know, because we live in the world,
when this first klesha kicks in,
we are capable of all kinds of harm.
Because we’ve harmed ourselves first.
We have afflicted ourselves,
and the afflicted tend to afflict.
Hurt people, hurt people.
But isn’t it wonderful —
That all that has happened is a turning away.
And equally, when turned in,
when that first klesha is not dominoed over,
we can cause no harm.
Only goodness can emanate from us
when we are close to our source.
Test it out.
Look into it deeply inside yourself.
See if they got it right.
See if that really does sum up
the first domino
that leads to all future problems.
Now the tendency, because we have a mind,
is to turn suffering into an enemy.
Always remember:
suffering is a great teacher.
There are two great teachers:
Wonder or awe,
and suffering.
Suffering gives us the opportunity,
directly within our system,
to come back to non-suffering.
It’s God’s loving prompt
to go back to where you left.
Go back and be happy.
Go back and be centred.
So now the name of the game:
if you want
is to step up,
and commit
to not creating suffering.
And because of that commitment,
you will clearly see
when you start to create it.
And you now know the root cause:
you’ve left your heart,
you’ve left the flow,
you’ve left the truth of the feeling
inside your body,
and you’ve gone into your mind
to create some other scenario.
So now you become the end of suffering.
The reasons to leave our heart are so numerous,
so multifarious and so enticing.
I find a good excuse to do it often.
I justify it.
Over the years I’ve noticed
that when I start to blame,
I start to judge.
So what I’m trying to do more and more,
is instead of justification,
I try and confess.
Because in order to confess,
you have to let go of justification.
There was a mix-up earlier in the week
and I started to blame Sarah for something.
She doesn’t take any shit from me.
She knows exactly what I’m doing.
And I remember thinking in that moment
that I wasn’t okay to do that.
I wanted to say sorry,
but it was too difficult.
It was on the tip of my tongue.
I could have nipped it in the bud.
Instead it dragged on all day.
By the end of the day
I found a legitimate sorry.
That’s a poor show.
I should have just outed it.
“I stepped over the line.”
Then I could have released
and come back into myself,
and set up a less suffering day.
Once we understand this
and don’t get me wrong, it gets subtle
we have an opportunity
to literally convert ourselves into spirit
into goodness
into light
into love
Learning to catch ourselves,
not justify,
and confess —
that’s a massive step.
It requires such bloody humility.
Terrible.
But that is the game.
Most of us aren’t going to do
really extreme stuff.
We’re probably not going to do prison level stuff.
You are probably too rooted in yourself
to go that far away from yourself.
But it’s the near stuff.
The subtle stuff.
But it’s the same action
as the really bad stuff,
just on a smaller scale.
It just means some people
have gone further away than you.
And they probably feel like they have a lot of justification for that
because probably,
a lot of bad shit has happened to them.
But getting clear about what has actually happened there,
and clarity doesn’t erase what happened,
but it changes the relationship to it.
That’s where forgiveness comes from.
But also forgiveness born of insight:
that every human being
is dealing with the same
leaving and contracting.
And if that gets really chronic then it can lead to really bad actions.
The room for pride on this path is tiny.
We’re all in the same camp.
The yogis even said
suffering isn’t as individual
as you think.
Namaste.
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