Today we want to crystallize some things that we have been looking at, and pull them together into one simple idea. You have been doing regression work, and you have been seeing how much of who you are today is really a memory of who you used to be. We have been working on it in different ways, looking at different parts of it, and today we want to see if we can pull it together.
You are beginning to see how much you have a dream going on at the subconscious level, and you become aware of how much you project this dream onto reality. And probably your feeling is that you project that dream onto reality from time to time. But today I would like for us to see that we are projecting this dream constantly, that we are always living in this dream.
At this stage in our life, we experience almost nothing new. You can meet new people, you can go to new places, but you are projecting onto those new people and new places old people and old places. You very seldom experience anything with innocence. You respond to situations the way you have responded in the past, so that it is almost impossible for you to be spontaneous.
What we are going to do today, is to start working with a technique that we call intuitive regression, in which we start with an experience from the moment, from the present, and actually trace it back to a memory of something from our childhood. This implies - as you are going to see as you work on this technique - that the emotions we experience most of the time are actually coming from the past, not from the present. So there is no reason to get tied up in the emotions, if they are not even coming from today, but rather coming from a time that is past.
As we look at these emotions more and more, we are going to see that all of these emotions coming from childhood are actually fear. This may sound strange to you, because you know that there are moments when it is not fear. But it's fear and the lack of fear. That may sound like a strange way to define it, but it's like how all colors relate to white, to light. You shine a white light, a clear light, through a prism, and that prism breaks that light up into the different colors, the colors of the rainbow. If you turn the light off, then you have darkness, or blackness. So you can say that all colors are a variation of white. And in the same way, we can say that all emotions are a variation of fear, fear of one kind or another, efforts to avoid fear, success in that avoidance. But if you look at things, you are going to find that they all boil down to the same thing, and that is worry about survival.
Therefore we are going to encourage you to learn to be open to the fact that every time you get angry, you should find out how old you are at that moment. What age do you feel like you are? When you are feeling sad, find out how old you are. You will find out that you are in a memory. When you are feeling frustrated, find out how old you are, and you will find out that you are in a memory.
All day long you are flickering back and forth, from one memory to another. One moment you are three years old, one moment you are three months old, the next moment you are six months old, the next moment you are four years old, the next moment you are at birth, and back and forth. You are a victim of your own movies, unless you start to watch these things. And once you start becoming aware of the fact that this old dream is there, and that you are constantly projecting it onto the present, then it makes it much easier for you to watch, because you are going to be less involved, less identified.
The result of this is that you start wondering who you are. If everything that you are experiencing is a memory, then you wonder who the person would be if the memory wasn’t there. And this is the beginning of the spiritual search, to find out who you really are. This will leave you with a question mark. Perhaps it can't be answered, perhaps it won't be answered. Yet this will be a path to truth.
As you start to use this approach, something else will become apparent to you. And that is that a certain emotion is present before there is a reason for it to be present. The closest example of this is when you wake up in the morning, and you are feeling let's say defeated - you just feel defeated. And you have just gotten up, so it's not really the world that is making you feel defeated, but you feel defeated somehow. Maybe you are aware of it, maybe you are not aware of it. Then, after feeling defeated, your logical mind says, "Well, there must be a reason why I feel so defeated." And then you look around. "Well, I'm not getting anyplace at my job," or "My relationship isn't what I want it to be," or "I'm not earning enough money," or "I don't have enough freedom." But first, defeat is there. And then you find the reason for it - which will be the real reason, of course. But you will have to lay it on something, you will have to project it onto something. And of course, being logical, you will try to project it onto something in the present. Unless you have worked a bit on yourself, you will never assume that it might be a memory from birth.
You are going to notice that the feelings will be there first, and then you will find a reason for them, to justify the feelings from the present moment. Once you start seeing that the feelings are actually coming from memories, you are also going to see that the present moment is not threatening, is not producing tension, is not producing these negative feelings. You will just start watching the movie, and identifying with it less and less.
As you start noticing that all day long you are living in a kind of regressed state, this doesn't mean that you have to work with all of these things. Just watch. We will start out working with these memories - we will trace a feeling back to its roots. We will do this quite a few times, so that you start to recognize in your gut that this is true, that these feelings are coming from memories. But after you have done this a few times, it becomes less and less necessary to trace each thing back in that manner. Because you will know after a while that it is coming from the past.
As you watch this drama that is happening at the subconscious level, projecting itself onto the present, you will become more and more the watcher. It will be an interesting movie that you watch, just like you watch any other movie. Or you start watching yourself just the way you would watch someone else.
It doesn't mean that you have to work constantly at reprogramming or deprogramming. In the beginning, this is important. And in the beginning we will be doing this, we will be doing deprogramming, and sometimes reprogramming. But this is mainly so that your computer starts to understand that it is possible, and that the old movies are actually harmless. As you watch your own dream, or your own movie, more and more, it will become less and less necessary to work each thing through back to the roots, because you will already know what is going to happen. And just the awareness of that will start being enough after a while.
Be very careful and very aware, as aware as you can be, when you notice yourself having a strong emotion. It doesn't have to be negative; it can also be a positive emotion. When you have a strong emotion, use the pendulum and ask yourself, "How old am I right now?" or, "How old am I feeling?" And you just do this again and again during the day, and you are going to start seeing how much you are in memory, rather than the present.
This may sound very, very strange. It only sounds strange because everybody lives in the dream, and so it seems normal. And everybody in the dream is dreaming that they are awake and in the present. So then to hear that everyone is dreaming seems contradictory, because everyone has been dreaming that they are awake. When you start seeing how much you are coming from memory, you are also going to start becoming more and more quiet. And you are also going to start becoming more and more joyful. Because you will be more and more in the moment. And you are going to find that the moment is not creating much sadness, the moment is not creating anger, the moment is not creating frustration, the moment is not creating fear, the moment is not creating greed, the moment is not creating jealousy.
All of these things are coming from memory, from memories of a time when we were helpless. And this is the key. All of these feelings are feelings of helplessness and dependency, or as I said before, feelings of fear - fear of not surviving, due to the fact that we were all born in a helpless body. So as we start tracing these things back, we are going to see that they are based on helplessness, on dependency, on fear of not surviving. And at the same time we are going to start seeing that these things are irrelevant. Not wrong, but irrelevant.
If you have ever worked on past lives, one of the most beautiful things about using past lives as a way to get clear, is that if something happened in a lifetime when you lived in 1810, you realize that there is nothing you can do now about that life. You are ready to drop it, because it's gone. It's irrelevant. You realize that it is irrelevant because you are now living in a different life. It is very easy to let go of things that come up during past life sessions, for that reason. Because you realize that there is nothing you can do about it. You hated your mother in that life - well, what to do? What can you do about it? That life is gone, you in that life is gone, your mother in that life is gone. There is nothing to do, it's irrelevant now. You can let go of it.
The memory of your birth is just as past as a past life memory is. The you that existed at your birth doesn't exist any longer. The mother that existed at your birth doesn't exist any longer. The world that existed at your birth doesn't exist any longer. So we also need to see that that too is irrelevant, memories of our birth are now irrelevant. Memories of this life are just as irrelevant, and as dead, and as past, as memories from a past life. If we can start seeing everything that is not this moment as a past life, it would be easier. See yesterday is a past life - it's past. See last week as a past life. Don't identify with it anymore. Say, "I don't know who that guy was last week. That was a past life. What can I do about it?" Just let go of it.
We need to get into not identifying with that which has gone on before. We need to free ourselves from memories, and put them in their proper perspective, so that we can be available to this moment. As long as we are caught up in the dream, as long as we are dreaming, we are not available to reality. And as I said before, this dream is happening at the subconscious level, which we then project onto reality and onto the conscious level, so that we think we are awake.
But in reality we are dreaming. Of course we see the trees, we see the rain, but we project onto that rain memories of other rains. We project onto that rain attitudes from earlier times. We project onto that rain our desires and fears coming from earlier memories, older memories. We don't really and truly experience the rain as it is, in an innocent way, but we experience the rain through past experiences.
We want to watch this. And as we watch this, we are going to find that we become more and more available to the present, and to people as they really are. You will also start seeing other people's dreams. As you become aware that you are dreaming, you are also going to find it easier and easier to know what other people are dreaming. And this is helpful, because it helps you see that there is no need for you to be afraid of other people, because they are going through almost the same thing that you are going through - with different variations, but still basically the same. They are also worried about their survival. They are also feeling weak and helpless and dependent. It's just that everyone has a different way to compensate for that.
Try to shift your thinking. Try to shift your way of looking at things. And be open to this dream that is happening at the subconscious level. Whenever anything strong happens to you during the day, or even something that's not so strong, whenever you think of it, just ask yourself, using the pendulum, "How old are you right now?" And you are going to see how much you are coming from memory. And then you will see that these memories are irrelevant, and it's okay to let go of them, and you are going to be more and more in the here and now.
Question: "I see myself being in a memory in the past a lot, and it was an incredible fear of being empty."
Jeru: See that this fear of being empty is not coming from the here and now. It is also coming from a memory. And it is understandable. Let's say that when you were born, they put some long underwear on you, and as you grow bigger, the long underwear gets more and more frazzled, and yet you are so attatched to it, you have lived with it so long, that you want to keep it. So while you are a child, and as you grow older and become an adult, you are totally identified with this. You are constantly patching it up, holding on to it, and even though it's a mess, it's dirty, it stinks, it's uncomfortable, still you are so identified with it, that you think if you give it up, you will die. You have forgotten that it's not you. You have forgotten that this piece was given to you, it was put on you. If someone says to you, "Well, your problem is just old, dirty long underwear," a part of you is going to say, "Yes, but I can't give that up. What will I be if I give that up? Who will I be if I give that up? What will happen to me if I give it up? I might disappear. Maybe it's this long underwear that is keeping me together."
This feeling is very natural, and very logical, and certainly very understandable. Yet you need to see where the feeling is actually coming from. It's certainly not coming from truth. It's not coming from reality. If somebody else were to give up their defenses, do you think they would literally disappear? But something in you thinks you might disappear. That's the way it is.
Yet this is the way it is. We can see where it's okay for other people to give up their old defense mechanisms, and that they won't physically disappear if they do give them up. But our subconscious insists on feeling that if I do that, I will disappear, because who will I be if I give up my armor? What will be there if I give up the armor? Of course it's also a very good question. But this is part of the fun, to find out who we will be when we give up the armor.
Once you start dropping the idea that, "I can't take care of myself," and you see that you are taking care of yourself. From this space of relaxation you are more able to look around you and see nature and Existence. Then when you do that, you will see that it's very benevolent. You will see how the universe is supporting everything in it, including you. Then you start to trust more and more. You can start to trust that if you relax, somehow everything will be okay.
This can come from looking, from intelligent looking. Not convincing yourself of something, but just from intelligent looking. Recognizing that already existence is beating your heart, which is very important, more important than money in the bank. You can have money in the bank, and if your heart isn't beating, it doesn't do you alot of good. If you look, you will see that Existence is breathing for you, even when you are asleep at night. It digests your food for you, it creates energy for you, it has given you intelligence. You start seeing how much Existence is already taking care of you.
Once you start seeing these facts, it's easier to trust more and more, to relax more and more with what is. You can gradually let go of these defense mechanisms, realizing after a while that they are not helping you. These defense mechanisms are not helping you, they are actually hindering you. Holding on to them would be like trying to swim when you are wearing a heavy coat of armor on. Or like trying to dance and be beautiful and elegant, loaded down with eighty pounds of iron.
As we look at these things more and more, letting go gets easier. It's not something you have to make an effort at. The only real effort required is awareness, just watching what is going on. That's the only thing that really requires any kind of effort. Change can come just from watching.
Question: "What if you are addicted to excitement, and learn to see the silence that is slowly coming on everybody here. I walk into the dining room and everybody is silent. It makes me nervous. In other words, I like excitement. How do you be in the program?"
Jeru: Well, first trace this need for excitement back to its roots. That's the most important thing. Where did you get the idea that you need excitement? You see, you need to find out how old you were, and what was going on then. You are going to find that in whatever was going on, a key element was your helplessness and your dependency at that time. Maybe you felt safest when there was something exciting going on in the family, because maybe that was the only time that there were people around you. Or that was the only time that someone was really there taking care of you, when there was excitement happening. There are all kinds of different reasons. But the important thing is for you to look at that yourself and find out what dream you are dreaming. Trying to deal with this at a rational, conscious level won't work. It doesn’t help just to say, "I am addicted to excitement." You have to find out why your system thinks you need excitement. There will be a good reason for it to be found in your infancy.
Question:"Do you start by asking what age you are, and then ask what is happening?"
Jeru: Well, that is the technique that we are going to show you today, the intuitive regression technique. You can use that anytime you feel that you need excitement in order to feel alive. There are a lot of people like this; this is quite common. It's not so unusual at all. Simply find out how old you were when this idea got started, what the circumstances were, and why you felt it was necessary. Certainly you will find that it made good sense at that time. You will also find that the key elements that were present there no longer exist. Actually everything about that experience no longer exists. Even the world that it existed in doesn't exist any longer, it's a different world today.
Question: "I know this is my rational mind saying this, but it's like I’m seeing it as zombies versus life."
Jeru:You will just have to look back at what your experience was. I can imagine that that's the way you see it. Look back at your own experience.
I would like to share something with you this morning which will be very fundamental for our work together, perhaps the most fundamental thing that I will be sharing with you. It's something that is very, very simple and yet very, very difficult. And if you get it, then you will have gotten a lot. If you don't get it totally, if you get it partially, that is also wonderful. When I tell you what it is, you are going to say, "Oh yeah, I know that. I have heard that before." Yet I know that you don't know it, and that is why I am going to share it with you again. Even though you have heard the words before. Now that very, very simple fact is that there is no past. I know you have heard these words before, but I also realize that they don't have any meaning for you, so I am going to see if I can help you to add a little meaning to the words.
We all talk about a past, or the past. It's one of those things that we talk about, even though we have never experienced it. None of us here have ever seen a past, never sat on a past, never have eaten a past, never photographed a past. It's so very simple, because there is no past. It's not possible. You have never done anything in the past. Everything that you have ever done, you have done in the present, and the present is all there is. Only NOW is.
It is really important for us to understand the difference between what we call the past and the present. Because in general we live in what we think is the past. We have to come to understand that there is no past, and there is only now. Everything that exists, exists in the present. Everything that has ever existed, has existed in the present - not this present, but in the present. This building, as old as it is, has existed always in the present. Right now it exists in the present. Tomorrow, if we look at it again, and ask ourselves when it exists, we will say the same thing. It exists in the present. You have existed in the present. Since you were born, you have existed in the present, a present which is constantly changing, constantly renewing itself, but always the present.
Our fears come from what we call the past. Therefore, if we can start understanding that there is no past, we will also start understanding that there is no justification for our fear. If we can start understanding that there is only now, then we only have to live for now, and live in the now. Which doesn't mean that we may not plan, but the planning itself will be taking place in the now, with the awareness that we are in the present.
Just to give you a little example of this, I would like you all to take a deep breath and then hold it.... now let it out. Now take another deep breath and hold it.... And now let it out. Now let me ask you a simple question - where is the first breath?
"It's in the past." Where has it gone to? "A black hole in space." How do you know? Do you realize that that first breath is simply gone? It only exists as a memory. But the breath itself, the experience of the breath, is gone. Do you get that?
You can not change that breath. You can't improve on it. If that first breath were a threat to you, a danger to you, do you realize that it is gone and it can't harm you? Can you feel in your bones that that first breath is gone forever? Can you let that come in, that it is gone forever? You can't change it. You can't do it again. You can do a different breath, but you can't do that breath again. It can't touch you. If it's dangerous it can't harm you, because it just doesn't exist. If it was beautiful, it can't help you, because it just doesn't exist. You are not going to get any oxygen from remembering it, either. If you are depending on that first breath to live, in order to get oxygen, you are going to die very soon. You have to get oxygen from the present.
In the same way you look to the present for oxygen, you need to look to the present for life. You need to look to the present for happiness, for fulfillment, for satisfaction, for self-realization. You have to learn that it is actually stupid to deal with your past. Because it doesn't exist. You can't do anything about it.
You might ask how can we even talk about this first breath if there is no past? It's because of memory. But memory and the past are two separate things. Past is an abstract which doesn't exist. There is no past. Memory does exist. And memory exists in the present, as does everything else that exists. If it doesn't exist in the present - it's very simple - it doesn't exist. Because the present is the only place there is.
Now when we are talking about this first breath, we are talking about memory, not about the event. It is as if you took a photograph of this first breath. And that's why I asked you to hold it. It is like you took a photograph of the first breath, to make you more aware of it, and now you are carrying this photograph in your mind. Yet your photograph of that breath is not a breath. Do you see that difference? When you think back on the experience of that breath, it is not the experience that you are experiencing, but the photograph of the experience.
Suppose we had a puppy right here, and I had a polaroid camera. And now I have a photograph of this puppy. The moment I go ‘click’, I have something on film which in a sense is dead. The puppy is already doing something different. The moment I go ‘click’ with the camera, the puppy has already moved to some other corner of the room. Yet I have this photograph now. I could enclose the photograph in plastic, and maybe a thousand years later, I will still have this photograph of this puppy. Now in the meantime, the puppy has grown into a big dog, and an old dog, and a dead dog. The old dog has gone back to mother earth. And still I have this photograph, looking just as young and alive as the moment I took it, a thousand years before.
Realize that the photograph of the puppy is not the puppy. This is very important for you to get. Whenever you go into memory and remember something, you are not experiencing the original event, you are experiencing the photograph. There is a substantial difference between a photograph of a puppy, and a puppy. If there was a fire, there is a substantial difference between a photograph of a fire, and a fire. You can get burned by a fire, but you can't get burned by a photograph of a fire. There is a difference between a photograph of the ocean, and the ocean. You can't drown in a photograph of the ocean, you can't swim in it. But you can drown in the ocean. There is a substantial difference, and you need to be aware of that difference. Realizing this on a subconscious level will change your life.
Because everything that you think is a problem is almost always a photograph. All of your fears are almost always photographs, and seldom the real thing. The tigers that you run from are almost always photographs of tigers, very seldom a real tiger - almost never. Yet you spend your whole life running from tigers. If you can learn the difference between a real tiger and a photograph of a tiger, you are going to stop running, because you are going to see that what is chasing you, or what you think is chasing you, is a photograph that you are dragging along behind you, and not a real tiger. And then on those very rare occasions when there might be a real tiger chasing you, you are going to know the difference and you are going to run, and you will have some energy to run. You won't be exhausted from constantly running from photographs. Notice how rare it is that you will experience a real problem - we will get into that later.
For now - if you want to get clear, this is one of the most essential things that you have to get clear about - realizing that there is no past. There is only this moment. And in this moment, there are photographs, there are documents, there are records of events that no longer exist. The events don't exist, but the documents and the photographs, the evidence still remains - just like the photograph of the puppy. The photograph can still remain, but the event itself has disappeared long ago.
You may be really surprised to hear me say that you don't have a childhood. Yet you don't. You have photographs of a childhood, but you don't have a childhood. Most of you in this room don't have a mother right now. You have memories of a mother. The only way you can relate to your mother is through your memories, unless your mother happens to be present in this room. Even if your mother is in the next room, and you think of her, you are thinking of memories of her. This is all very simple, yet not very easy. Remember that the human race lives among its photographs and memories, thinking that it is living in reality. And if our photographs are full of fear, we live as if the world is full of fear.
Therefore one of the most important things that we are going to be doing is we are going to be looking at the difference between photographs and reality. We want to learn how to deal with reality, which is basically quite simple, and we also want to learn how to deal with the photographs, which is also simple, but not so easy. If you can start seeing the difference between memory and reality, you are going to start relaxing, because you are going to see that it is memory that is pushing you. It is memory that is frustrating you. It is memory that is making you afraid. It is memory that is saying you are not good enough as you are, that you need to change. It is not the present. It is not the here and now that is doing these things. It is your memory.
The unfortunate thing for us is that the subconscious can't tell the difference between photographs and reality. When we sleep at night, we dream. Obviously this is all memory - it is not of the present. The subconscious believes that what we are dreaming is actually happening. It doesn't matter how bizarre it is. The subconscious believes that what we are dreaming is true. And the dream gets registered as a true experience.
If, as a child, you had an experience where you almost drowned, it would be quite normal for you to dream about it at night. But while you are dreaming about the near-drowning experience, what you are dreaming about is a memory. It is not the experience itself, but the memory of the experience. So you dream about it the first night, but the subconscious can't tell the difference between a dream and reality. Therefore the subconscious thinks that you almost drowned again. And then that too gets registered as a photograph, and is filed away in your memory bank.
By now you have almost drowned twice, and it would be also normal for you to have a dream the next night about drowning. Because after all, you almost drowned twice in twenty-four hours. Then the next night you have a dream about drowning, and again the subconscious believes that it is real. Now you have three drowning experiences, and this could go on indefinitely, until it could be that you are absolutely petrified whenever you get close to water. All of this can happen because the subconscious is reacting to photographs as if they were reality.
And this dream that we have at night usually continues during the daytime. It's just that in the daytime, the conscious mind is now what we call awake, and this dream that is happening at the subconscious level isn't so obvious to us. It gets pushed down to a lower level, but it continues. So not only do we dream at night, but we also dream all day long, while the subconscious believes that what we are dreaming is real - it doesn't matter how bizarre it is.
This means that we can live our lives in a dream state, as we generally do. And it's this dream state happening at the subconscious level that decides whether we are happy, whether we are frustrated, whether we are relaxed, whether we are tense, because the subconscious is about 99.9 percent of your mind. As long as you identify with it as who you are, it's going to be 99.9 percent of your being. So if 99.9 percent of you is dreaming that you are weak and helpless, that's the way you are going to feel. If 99.9 percent of you believes that you are inadequate, that's the way you are going to feel that day. If 99.9 percent of you believes that you did something wrong, and you are feeling guilty, then that's the way it's going to be that day. Yet all of this can be coming from memory.
Now memory is, in a sense, fantasy. Because anything that is not real is fantasy. A photograph has a certain reality. It's real paper. It's real chemicals. But it's not real life. So if you look at a photograph of an apple, we can say that it's a fantasy apple, because it's not a real apple - we can't eat it. If it's a photograph of a storm, we can say that it's a fantasy storm, because it's not a real storm. It is fantasy, because it is not real, it's not happening right now. It's not the here and now, it's not the present.
Yet the subconscious can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The subconscious goes on believing the old memories. And the old memories are coming from your childhood, from your infancy, and from your birth. And that is the problem. The memories are of a time when you were weak and helpless, when you were defenseless, when you were vulnerable, when you were inadequate, when you were dependent. The memories are of a time when you knew that you couldn't survive unless someone took care of you. These are what the photographs in your life are about.
Let me emphasize: These are the big photographs in your life - the photographs taken at the time of your birth, around your birth, at times when you were helpless. And your subconscious believes that they are still true, that they are still happening right now. It's not that your subconscious believes that you were weak and helpless at birth, it believes that you are weak and helpless right now. Because it still believes in the photographs that were taken when you were born.
This is what you are actually dealing with. You are trying to overcome problems that your subconscious thinks it has because it thinks you are weak and helpless. You will have to take my word for this until we do some regression work. But once we start getting into regression work, you will see very quickly that it is true: Your subconscious believes that you are still weak and helpless, and is therefore trying to overcome this, trying to compensate for it, trying to get other people to somehow take care of you - either materially or psychologically.
If we can start separating memory from reality, we simplify life tremendously. Because reality is right here, right now. We can deal with reality, we can deal with it appropriately. If it's raining, we do whatever we need to do when it is raining. If the house is burning, we do what we need to do when the house is burning. If we are hungry, we do what we need to do when we are hungry. But we only deal with reality, which is simple, because it is happening right now.
If we are trying to deal with memory, we have a truckload of photographs to deal with. We have a truckload of tigers, and dangers, and problems, and inadequacies to deal with. But if we can start seeing that the whole truckload of photographs is all just fantasy, and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, we simplify our lives.
Let’s suppose you are going to go for a little walk in the woods, and you are trying to decide what to wear. Let's suppose that you have in the back room a stack of newspapers from the first year of your life, and in every newspaper there is a weather report for that day. Now, if you are going to go for a walk today, are you going to go back into that room, dig out those old newspapers, look at the weather report, and then decide whether to take your raincoat or not? No, you will do something very simple: You will look out the window. But with your real life, you don't do it that way. You go back into the back room, dig out the old newspapers, and look at the old weather reports, and then act according to these old weather reports, which is dumb. Because it's so simple - just look out the window. Just look at reality, and deal with that accordingly.
In the Carity Process this is what we want to start doing, trying to be clear about what is happening in the present, and separating the reality of the present from the photographs that we are carrying in the present. And if you can see that, you will also see how much you normally identify with the photographs, instead of with the present. It's like all your life you have been taking photographs, and now under your arm you have this photo album full of all your photographs. If someone says, "Who are you," you say, "Just a minute," and open up your photograph album and say, "Oh yes, here is a photograph of my name. Here is a photograph of the place I was born. Here is my mother. Here is my father. Here is where I went to school. Here is my first girlfriend. Here is where I went to college. Here is my first job. Here are my children. Here is a photograph of what I like, and here is a photograph of what I don't like." But when you talk about yourself, you are basically talking about the photographs that you are carrying in your photo album.
As you sit here this morning, you consist of two things: You consist of your physical body and whatever else belongs to that reality - the different layers of your body, and your photo album, this invisible photo album that you are carrying under your arm. That is all. You think you have a car. How many of you think you have a car? Do you understand that this idea that you have a car is only coming from your photo album? Just to prove the point, we have taken all your cars away and blown them up. What you have right now is a memory of a car. Even the payments you have to make on it are memories. Now isn't that comforting?
Again, as you sit here this morning, you consist of your physical reality, whatever that is and whatever layers there are, and your photo album, and that is all. So if you can start separating real problems from the problems that are in your photo album, you will find that your life will become much more relaxing. This is what we want to help you to do. We want to help you see that what you think are problems are really just fantasies, not coming from this moment, but from memory. We want to help you see that ultimately, you are not going to change your childhood. You can't - it has disappeared forever. You can play with the photographs. You can shuffle them like you would shuffle cards, and you can even change the photographs, but you are not going to change your childhood. You are not going to change your birth. You are not going to change moments of unhappiness into happiness - you can't change them, you can't touch them, you can't do anything with them. They are gone.
