115 Hurry Sickness - Waiting To Feel Good? Live Q & A

Beneath thoughts and emotions are our "positions or postures" in life.  These are our unconscious assumptions.  They guide the emotions and thoughts that occur from them.  One posture is that I will feel good when I accomplish my goal.  By holding that posture one has to squelch their innate joy of Being which always feels good in order to wait until that task is fulfilled.  This can include spiritual practices.  " I will feel good after my meditation".  Implying I can't just feel good now.   Lots of implications and aspects come out in this live discussion.

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello everybody. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. This is our live session. My name is William Cooper, and this is a time when you can ask any questions that you might have about your path of awakening, meditation, anything that you'd like, India, anything that will deepen your practice. Maybe you've listened to some of my podcasts. There's about a hundred of them, a little over. And in those podcasts, we take it from podcast one forward and step by step, I talk about the things that I've found helpful on my path. And I've left out all the things that I haven't found helpful. Yes, you might have a different experience, but sometimes it's helpful to listen to others. And while we're waiting for perhaps a question to come or others to arrive, I want to talk a moment about what I found to be a big impediment to my awakening. And I was really very unaware of it. Our being, our core is causeless happiness. It's joy. Hi Yvonne. Hi Jennifer. Hi everybody. Good to see you all here. Our being is causeless joy and happiness. Well, how come we don't feel that all the time? And that's why we're on our spiritual practice to attempt to feel that more in our life. Perhaps feel it all the time because that is our natural state. That is awakening. But why not? Why not feel that all the time? What I discovered, because in our prior podcast, and maybe some in this podcast, we'll talk about how often thoughts cut us off from ourselves, emotions, cut us off from ourselves. But I found something even deeper than emotions, deeper than thoughts cut me off from myself. I had a perspective that I picked up at a very young age. I was raised in the military. I was in a military family, but I had a perspective and maybe you'll recognize this perspective. You can relax when you get your work done. Later I went to school. You can relax when you get your assignment done. You can relax when later in life you're in the right relationship. You can relax when you've got a good job. I'll work hard and then I'll take a break and I'll relax. I'll work hard and then I'll go on a vacation and I'll relax. This was an unconscious principle or perspective that I took on. I will relax later. So, I automatically, from the start, stopped feeling who I was. I cut off from myself because that was how I motivated myself. In a sense, I stopped feeling good until I accomplished my task. The problem is by the time I accomplished my task, there were usually two or three minutes more that popped up. So, I would feel good for a moment and then I would focus really hard on the next task at hand and I would cut myself off. I would suppress my well-being, my feeling of well-being until I accomplished the next task. Sort of a reverse way of saying it in a way is I will feel good whenever I'm in the right relationship. I'll feel good when I have the right outcome. I'll feel good when I get a nice car. I'll feel good when I have so much money in the bank. Now, this is a posture. It's a fundamental posture. So, everything we've talked about in the past, we're not our thoughts. We hallucinate our thoughts. They're helpful hallucinations. We create them. We're the creator of our thoughts. If our thoughts disappeared for a minute, we'd still be here. So, we're not our thoughts. Process of elimination. Same with our emotions. But one thing, and those will take us away from ourselves. We get lost in our fantasies and our thoughts. We get lost in our emotions. They're dramatic. We get lost in them. But more fundamental is when I start off my life with my foot on the brake. Like, no, I'm not going to feel good until I accomplish something. It's like I have my foot on the brake and my foot on the gas, perhaps at the same time. But if my foot is on the brake and I don't realize it, because at some point it becomes unconscious. It's just the way I am. It's the way I carry myself. It's the tension I have in my body that I just feel. That's how I feel. That's just who I am. Perhaps it's the illnesses that I display later in life due to this posture of cutting myself off from myself. So, it's below emotions. It's below thoughts. And I can sit and meditate all I want. But until I take my foot off the brake, I'm not going too far. And I'll do this exercise that we've done before. It's very simple, but I think it gets the point across. If you take your hand and you put it into a fist, and let's say you have a pocket that it fits easily in and you stick your hand in that pocket. Now you could meditate all you want, but after the meditation, your hand is still in that fist position. If you haven't moved it, it is. You could awaken and your hand is still in that fist position. You could have a hundred gurus and they could pump you off full of awakening energy and your hand would still be in that fist position. You could pray, fist position. It'll stay that way until I open my fist, open my hand. Well, when I have my foot on my brakes, hey, I'm not going to relax. I'm not going to feel causeless joy and happiness until I get this task done, until I get A's this semester, until I get the yard done, until I meet the right person, until I get the right car, until whatever your thing is. And then as soon as I get to that, as we talked about before, there's, as Jennifer said, there's another task or thing after that. Until I stop that, how am I going to feel causeless happiness? It's possible, but it's hard to go through life because you can be awake and you can have a closed personality. That can happen. But by being awake, you know who you are. You experience yourself as awareness. The problem that happens if you have your foot on the brake is when that awareness and being, when you come down through your body, your body's so closed that it doesn't feel good. And that's not normally how we want to experience being awake, not feeling good. It can happen. That's called inauspicious awakening. There's auspicious and inauspicious. Often that's why the Buddhists will go through a lot of training before they awaken while they're waiting to awaken, learning right action, uh, skillful means all these different things so that their personality is more open and healed so that they can flow through a open and healed personality when, and if they do awaken, but you don't have to do that. They can have an auspicious awakening. If they do that, we might not, we could work on it later because it doesn't feel good. So that motivates us to look at, Hey, what's going on here? Anyway, at the fundamental level, when I had my foot on the brake, I will relax later. I always found myself hurrying to the next task. It's like a carrot in front of my, in front of a donkey or something. You keep lunging at it. Like I'll be okay. Once I get this done now, I'll be okay. Once I get this done and now I'll be okay. Once I get this done, it becomes a habit. It's a posture. So you hurry through life. There's no need to hurry. There's no need to accomplish so that you can feel happy. If you are already are happy. And by the way, there's no law that says you can't be happy and then accomplish things. You don't have to be cut off from yourself and unhappy in order to motivate yourself out of pain to accomplish things. That's not a requirement. That's what I did. That's what a lot of people I know have done, but it's not required. We are happy. Now, once I started taking my foot off the brake, Hey, I can be happy now. I don't have to do anything. That includes spiritual practices. By the way, spiritual practices are excellent. I would never recommend don't do them, but I noticed that sometimes I had a posture of, Oh, I will feel happier after I do this practice. I will feel better after I do this practice, which begs the question. Why? Why am I blocking myself right at the beginning automatically and unconsciously so that I can't relax and feel good now before my practice, I must be otherwise it doesn't make any sense. And that indeed is what I was doing. So then I started practicing or I don't know, practicing being aware. Hey, I can feel good now. Now, when you have a posture that is closed, you've got your foot on the brake really hard. Like I'm describing in my life. Uh, that posture, it's a made up thing. I, I created it. There's only one person inside of me and that's me. I did it, but it's a tension, isn't it? It's it feels you can feel it. It's tense. You hold it in your body. It's tense for it to relax. It's helpful to do what we've talked about doing with PTSD and the, um, podcast 27 through 31, I think it is, uh, or 30, uh, or so many of the other podcasts where we talk about, you see it, you bring awareness to what's going on. You notice that you're not this, that you're, you're, you're watching. You're the one that's doing the watching. You're not the thing you are watching. You're not the tension. You're not the, um, posture of saying, no, I'm not going to feel good until I accomplish my goal. You're not that that's just the posture. But the way you loosen that posture is you bring awareness to it. You're connected to that, which is watching. So you notice, Hey, fundamentally I'm fine, but I sure am not acting like it in word or deed. So let me watch this. And as you bring awareness to it, awareness is curative. It begins to unwind and exude some of its pent up blocking energy. And then very importantly, it can breathe in for something that's tense for a block to dissolve. It, it re it is, it has to breathe in and melt into goodness, into beingness has to breathe it in and has to soak it up and receive it. Because what it is, is the opposite of that. It's not soaking up goodness. If it was soaking up goodness there, it wouldn't be there, right? What is relaxation? Relaxation is just soaking up goodness. And then that, which was blocking, let's go. It dissolves. Ah, it's gone. Nothing to work with anymore. It's gone. So you work with a fundamental posture of life. And some of these postures are fundamental before emotions and before thoughts. Notice how you hold yourself, put your attention there. Notice. Is there a tension in you? Are you feeling causeless joy all the time? If not, what's going on? It's for you to look at what, what is that? Assuming you want to be your whole self and awakened, awaken is just another word for you without problems. Problems is just another word from being cut off from yourself, being tense and stressed and hurt and angry and fearful. Who wants that? We don't want that. Nobody wants that. Awakened is just another word for being yourself, causeless joy, peace, wellbeing. Anyway, I'm simply pointing to, sometimes we have these postures underneath it all. So put your attention there too. It's not only, Hey, I'm not my thoughts. That's a big revelation or Hey, I'm not my emotions. That's a big revelation. Let me let them melt and dissipate. That's a huge opening. But now even deeper, how do I hold myself? What's my posture in life? It's almost like the lenses, uh, what do you call it? Um, assumptions that I start my day with. See, I started my day with, I'm not going to relax until I, I, it could, I didn't, maybe I didn't know what the Intel was, but I'd find one. Anyway, you know, and this plays, if, if any of you, by the way, have any thoughts or questions on anything, this or anything else, please type them in and let's talk about them. And while you are thinking about that, um, I did notice in today's, uh, insight timer, uh, little saying they have every day. They had one by Eckhart Tolle, a comment of his, and I like him very much, of course. And he says in today's rush, we all think too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just being that rang true to me, especially in light of what we're talking about today. When I cut myself off from myself, I squelch myself until I accomplish something. Then I forget about the joy of just being, that's what we're talking about. Why not just feel the joy of just being. And when I don't feel the joy of just being, I think too much. I fantasize because I'm in pain. I think, I think, I think I try to solve a problem so that I can accomplish my goal and feel good. Or so I tell myself I'll feel good, but really I'm off onto another goal. I want too much because when you're cut off from your being, your causeless joy, you want stuff because you're not happy. Well, I don't feel good, so I want, I want something to eat. I want a chocolate. I want a nicer car. I want a nicer this. I want a better this. I want that. I want this. I want too much. It's okay to want things, but like Eckhart Tolle says, I want too much because I don't feel my natural goodness. And then he starts his phrase in today's rush. Well, of course I'm rushing to accomplish the next goal, the next goal, the next goal. It's a fundamental sickness. I had a friend, he called it hurry sickness. When you cut yourself off like that, I've got to hurry to accomplish a goal so that I can feel good. There's no end to it. So any thoughts? Oh, Liz says we seek a distraction from our emotions. Yes. When we're in pain, so true, Liz. I guess we all relate to that. When we're in pain and we're cut off from ourselves, we look for a distraction either in our thoughts. We can hallucinate a whole TV show in our thoughts, a whole drama or in our emotions. We can feel that drama or have a beer, have a, have some wine. Nothing wrong with those, but maybe I'll have too much because I'm in too much pain. It's possible. Brooke says, I say, hurry up and wait. Yep. Hurry up and wait. I like waiting, especially when, you know, when I noticed this block, this perspective, this posture, I'm not going to let myself enjoy things until I accomplish a task. What does that feel like? What does that posture feels like to me? It's a tightness. It's a tension. It's got an inner, I've compressed energy and shaped it into this fundamental posture that I hold in my, my actual posture and the way I walk and the way I relate to life. When I just look at that, I noticed that which is looking feels just fine. And it's screaming at me, the posture. No, do this, do that. Hurry up. And it sounds very urgent, but really it's just a lot of noise. Um, the Tibetan book of the dead, basically after you die, they say that you're confronted with a lot of these false choices, these delusions or illusions that seem very real. And the secret is to just keep going and not let them knock you off course, keep going to your center. That's exactly what's going on in life, right? It's no different, no different in life as it is in death. It's all the same thing. So my posture is screaming at me. I'm real. You need to do this or do that. But what I like is to wait, just look, feel myself, my real self, my being and enjoy, Hey, get used to enjoying me when I'm not. I will say when I'm not used to enjoying me, my being, it's a strange thing. And I think external things are more, um, desirable because that's what I'm used to. I think eating a pie is going to make me happier than causes joy. I think having a drink is going to make me happier. I think getting this goal accomplished is going to make me happier. I really think that I crave that ice cream. Yes, but it's not true. It really isn't. The problem is there's this interim time as I get used to my being before I get used to it, that I'm not, I, it, I haven't quite opened up to my true self. I'm used to living a false life, a separated life. So I don't even know what causeless joy feels like at first I have to stay there. And the reason why it's hard to stay there is why didn't I stay there from the beginning? Because there's a layer of pain in there somewhere. And often when I stop, I'll feel all that repressed pain. So I don't want to stay there. I'd rather eat a pie, frankly, but ultimately there's no way out through pleasure. Pleasure is fine. Especially if you enjoy life, what did Jesus say? Be in this world, but not of enjoy life, but don't, you don't have to be addicted to it and cling to it. Eat that pie, but put it down when you're full. You don't have to keep eating because you're fine. Jennifer says, is this worse in Western culture and our experience? That's such a good question, Jennifer. I, you know, in Western culture, it's yes, it's all about getting the next job, getting a promotion, running, running. You know, I, I read when they look at people's diaries way back when they talk about a second sleep, people would sleep and then they would naturally wake up in the middle of the night and they would do things. Maybe they would read or they would do chores or they would talk. And then after a while they would go back to sleep and they would have the second sleep. That is a natural human posture rhythm, but we've been trained out of it in the West because it didn't fit the industrial cycle. You know, if I'm going to make automobiles, they can't have me falling asleep and taking a nap in the middle of my shift. I've got to stay awake. So best if I sleep a certain amount of time and I get up and I function and I make whatever I make, automobiles or screwdrivers, or I provide a service. It's good for my employer. It's not so good for me. So yes, in Western culture, we went through an industrial revolution and we changed our patterns so that we could fit in the structure, fit in at the factory, fit in at the job. That's just the way it is. That's where we are. I mean, it has its benefits as well, but in our Western culture, isn't that how we're trained? We go to school, study hard. You need A's so that you can get into a good. Now people are going to preschool and those kids have to perform, read to them every day, teach them to speak another language so they can get into first grade in a good first grade. Isn't that? Yeah. And then, hey, I want to get into high school, a good high school. And I want to, oh, what if I want to go to private school, private high school, college. Oh yeah. I better get good grades. Graduate school, good grades, better have them. Ooh. What if I want to get into a good company? You know, it just keeps going. Doesn't it? Yeah. Western culture, it's pretty profound. Now in the East, they have the same thing because in a sense, but it's different. What I found in India, for instance, and I've been 14 times, uh, so for three months at a time and I've just soaked it up. I'm not an expert, but I know something. And what I would say is the main difference there is in their culture. They've been so connected, even if they themselves, each individual themselves isn't connected to deep truth. They kind of are because they grew up that way culturally in their family. It's in the air. It's in the vibration. Even the words they speak have a vibration that can bring you closer to awakening. The way they look at the world can bring them closer to awakening. Yet they're grappling with these same business pressures and trying to fit in to an industrial age because we've exported it over there and they want to get wealthy. They want to have the same number of iPhones that we have over here, the same number of cars. They'd like that because they see in the movies that that's what makes people happy. Not everybody over in the East feels that way, but some do. But even so they're coming from a more grounded background, at least the first generation or perhaps the second. Once they come over here for quite some time, I suppose after the second generation or so they'll, they'll be like us. So, but in the East, the ones that stay there, they do have that support. I remember listening to my guru. I, I kind of snuck a listen. He was talking to about 500 Indians and it was a private talk and I had to actually put my ear against the wall because it was a talk from him to them. And he said one thing I overheard that kind of shocked me. He said, now when you go to the West and you take on a job, that's a good thing. Go to the West, enjoy yourself, but don't stay there for more than two years because the karma is so thick and negative. It will hurt you. You can survive for two years, but then you need to come back to India for a little while for a vacation or something and clear out all that negative Western karma. Because, you know, there is country karma, there's city karma, there's cultural karma, there's personal karma. And by karma, I just mean, we're affected by our surroundings. So if our country has been acting a certain way, it affects everybody in it. It affects everybody outside too. If they're doing bad things, which, sorry to say, my country has done sometimes. We've done good things, but all countries have done both. So yeah, I think the West, it's tough. Leanne says, it sometimes feels like society, the system is against spiritual awakening. How does one manage that? Yes, it does feel that way. But in the end, Leanne, you're, there's only one person inside of you, that's you. And you're doing things. You're listening to this podcast. I imagine you listen to lots of other good podcasts. You can meditate every day. I used to get up at five in the, I still get up about five in the morning and I meditate. I did that. I've been doing that for a while. We can take charge. We can turn down a job that we don't like, that's hurting us. Maybe we can't do it today, but we can plan to do that. We can plan to get into a field that better supports us. That's what I did. I started off, you know, I went to theological school for years. And then just to make a long story short, I ended up as a financial analyst, don't ask, a certified financial planner, became a partner of that company. It was exciting. It was fun. I'd never earned money and I started earning lots of money, but it wasn't good for me in the end. For the first five or six years, it was great. But at some point I was just getting sick at work. I felt bad. So I got out and I had no guarantee. I didn't have another job. I had no guarantee of ever earning what I was earning then. And I, my trajectory was only up. So I made a decision and I got into a healthier field. I became a psychotherapist. And then after a while, even that, I still do a little bit, but I'm not looking for clients and I'm not trying and I still keep my license. But even that was too much. So I phased out of that. But all the while I had been saving vigorously and using my financial planning skills to grow money so that I could take care of myself and go to India a lot and things like that. So we all have our own different worlds and we can influence them ourselves. Even stopping and doing meditation, even letting some thoughts go that don't serve us, even reading good books. Anybody can do that. We can do that. But that's a very good question. It can seem overwhelming in the West. Some people move to the East, but that's an extreme. I'd go a little bit and see if you like it. It can be rough physically over there, but it's beautiful spiritually. Leanne says, Hi, William. Great talk. Hi, Leanne. Thank you. Brooke talks, says influence. Yes, karma is influence. Liz says, Hmm. So we're purifying our karma here in the West. Yes, we are. There's not an accident that we're here in the West, like, Oh, we've got no troubles and we just landed in the West. No, we pop up based on the things we have to work on. We pop up in the exact perfect place to show us the things we have to work on. So yes, we're purifying our karma in the West. We are lucky to be in the system because it shows us our pain. It shows it to us, right? We can feel it. I've had quite a deepening over my lifetime because I've had quite a substantial amount of pain and it was so painful. I just, I didn't even know where to begin. I just began with where I could begin, whatever that happened to be on each day. You'll hear me talk a lot about baby steps. I just baby stepped my way through my life. And I've had some profound experiences as you've heard about in the podcasts. They're all true. I have had these. I've baby stepped my way through because of my suffering, because I lived in the West and I've made some hard decisions and not always the right one. But you know what? You can try again. You can try again. So what else do you have on your mind? More about this or something else? You know, while you're thinking, and I love it when you make comments and ask questions, but while you're thinking, um, I, maybe you remember a podcast when I was with an awakened English man, Tony Parsons, and he was giving a seminar. I was there and another man was there and he, an older man. And he said to, he said, Tony, and so sincere, this man, so sincere. He really wanted to know. He said, Tony, I have stopped all my thoughts. I have worked at this for years. I have stopped everything inside, but I feel like a desert inside dry desert. And it's so painful. Am I doing something wrong? Tony looked at it and with great compassion. And he said, yes, completely wrong. It's not about suppressing thoughts. That's the Western way. It's not about stopping thoughts. It's not about stopping emotions, concentrating our way around them or through them. It's not about that. It's not about repressing more things. It's not, it's about letting everything go and be free. And when I stop and I feel this basic posture, you don't enjoy until you accomplish something. When I feel that I don't suppress it. I don't push it away. I just feel it and let it exude its energy. And more importantly, I flow from myself that is aware of this posture. I'm delighted that I'm aware of it. And that's vibrant. Awareness is vibrant. It's not dead. When you suppress something, it's dead. When you push something away, it's dead. When you repress it, it's dead. So you're a dry desert. And we've all done that. That's a bit of training. Sometimes positive thinking can tend in that direction. I don't believe the founders really meant it that way, but in the West, often how we utilize it, utilize a lot of Western tools that are very powerful, but often we use them to suppress and to avoid and to overcome rather than let go into become more vulnerable. Feel it. Feel the pain. That's the opposite of repression. Who wants to do that? If it felt so good, I wouldn't have repressed it in the first place, right? So I don't want to feel it anymore. But it's a poison. It's a poison. It's not going anywhere. You're going to have to feel it in the end. Sometime you'll feel it. This lifetime or another, you will feel it. You know, the Bible has a lot of, remember, I have my Master of Theology, and Jesus did appear to me and talk to me. So I do have an interest. And he is my friend. I'm also Buddhist and Hindu and everything else. So let's not get too carried away. But he did appear to me and the Bible has some good stuff in it, but it has a lot of weird stuff in there too. Really weird. So if you read it word for word and try to believe everything in there, you're in. Good luck. But it still has some good things. And like my friend, Bob said, he says, you know it when you read it because it resonates. And 2 Timothy 3.16, I'm going to lay a verse on you, says all scripture is God breathed. Often what church people say is that that proves that everything in the Bible is scripture. No, it doesn't. It just says the thing that vibrates to you is God breathed. Count that as scripture. Anything else that doesn't vibrate when you read it in the Bible, throw it away. Put a black mark through it. Just get rid of it. And many people, Thomas Jefferson made his own Bible. He just got rid of all the stuff he didn't like. A lot of people have done that. There's one called the gospel according to Jesus where they just got rid of all the stuff other than what Jesus said. And that words that you would vibrate with. But there are good things. And what one thing in the Bible, it talks about, it says on the last day, everything is going to come out into the light. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth. That sounds very threatening. Oh my God, that's terrible. God will be there. Oh, terrible. But no, no, no, no, no, no. It's just what we're talking about. Everything you repressed, when you come into the light, it's the same thing that Tibetan Book of the Dead says. It's there. You got to deal with it sooner or later, now or later. Nobody's going to do it for you. Guru can't take it. They can make you feel good. They can give you wisdom. They can give you the awakening experiences I had, but they can't awaken you. They can't unclamp your tight fist that you stuck in your pocket. Only you can open your fist. Only you can do. Okay, some people have written in some things, and I'll just jump in. Sorry if I missed some, but Liz says, this is a great topic, William. Thank you, Liz. Yvonne says, eye-opening subject for me. Thank you, Yvonne. Yvonne says about the Bible, I read it when I was 17, scared the hell out of me. Yeah, it should. It's not to be read that way. Mimi asks, is this being recorded? Great stuff and would love to re-listen. Yes, all of my podcasts are re-recorded, and I release them on every podcast platform. You can just Google William Cooper Awakening Podcast. It'll pop up 10 different ways, or you can wait on Insight Timer, and they will notify you when I publish it, but they have about a seven-day delay because they like to personally listen to every podcast that they post. They want to make sure they're good, so they always post my podcasts, but they listen to everyone's, so that's why there's a delay. You got to admire that, but it just delays it a bit. Oh boy, a lot of good questions coming fast. You guys always ask me great questions, but towards the end. By the way, if you like these podcasts and you find they help you find peace or wholeness, tell a friend. If you want world peace, that's how you get it, spread peace, and that's what they're for. If anybody ever gives a donation, which I always appreciate, they go straight to Feed the Orphans in Bali. That's it. I don't even see it. 100% goes to the orphans, but another way to donate is just tell a friend because really what I'm looking for is what was given to me, and that's some healing. I'm sort of paying it forward, what's been given to me, so that would be a great help to me. Leslie asked, what did Jesus say to you? Now, I'm going to give you two quick answers for that, Leslie. I've spoken about it in a podcast. I don't know the number, but it's in a title that says, and all these podcasts are free if it's any of your first time, and if you follow me, you'll be notified of them all, and you'll have a list of them all and all of that. But if you go back to a title that says something like Jesus and Archangel Michael, I go through it in great detail, but just to give you the quick version, I was jogging in the morning. I was filled with energy, and I fainted. I just was knocked out and fell, and I was stopped at a stream at the end of my jog, and I was knocked out, woke up in the stream, got up, knocked out again, got up, knocked out a third time. Next day, I didn't know what to make of that. Never happened before. It was crazy. I had no clue of anything. I just was wondering, what the heck was that? I'm just an ordinary person like anybody, because when somebody hears one of these stories, they think, oh my God, but no, just like you, jogging, and I get knocked out three times. Next day, I'm journaling. I was very impressed with that book, Artist's Way, and I would journal in the mornings, and I was journaling. I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired, and frustrated, and a number of other things that I was feeling, and suddenly my fingers took off, and no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not, and blah, blah, blah, and I said, yes, I am, and then it turns out that something was in my body at the same time as we were two of us sharing the same body, and we talked for a while, and I said, who are you? And he said, Michael, and I didn't know. I had really no clue to what was going on, and then we were talking, and talking, and talking, and he said, oh, Jesus said to say hi, and that was very strange, and it floored me, really. I just laughed. It was out of left field, and I said, what does Jesus have to do with any of this? And he said, well, he was your friend. You were his friend before he was famous, and that cracked me up, and then Michael, this Michael said, you have an office in your house. I want you to clear everything out of that. It's no longer an office. It's now a kind of a meditation shrine room or something. I don't know, and he was very specific. Put an oriental rug. It needs to be maroon. You need an altar, and that's all that is in there, and set it up, and it needs to be done in three weeks, so I get all this. This had never happened to me before, and this is very specific, so three weeks later, Michael comes by. Turns out he was Archangel Michael, and he says, can I bring Jesus? He wants to talk to you. I said, yes. Jesus comes. Now Jesus is in my body. Michael's out. Jesus is in, and I can feel everything Jesus is feeling. He can feel everything I'm feeling, and he's like a long-lost friend, and he's so happy to see me. He would be happy to see you, too. He just was in my body at the time, so he was happy to see me, and we had apparently a history. I apparently knew him a long time ago, and he, oh, what have you been doing? He asked about my life. My life went forward very fast. You know, once I fell through the ice ice skating when I was a kid in Romania, and my life, I could have drowned, and my life flashed in front of my eyes. Well, this is the only other time it did that. When Jesus asked me about my life, it flashed in front of my eyes, and that was fine, except he was very interested, and that felt good, but then things I was not happy about, I was ashamed of, flashed in front of my eyes as well, and he could see those, too, and he just started laughing. There was no judgment, only laughter. What were you thinking? That's so funny. I can't believe you did that. That's kind of how he was talking to me, and we just laughed together after a while. I relaxed. Hey, it's okay, and then he showed me his nervous system. This is another strange thing, but it was like in the old days you had overhead projectors, and you could put a transparency down. It was kind of like that where it was this giant transparency, and it was of his nervous system, and it was completely clear, and then over his nervous system, he put a transparency of mine, and it had four or five little tiny black dots the size of a pencil point, little dots, and he said that's the only difference between you and me are those four or five little black dots. It was very encouraging. Now, he never said what to do about those four or five black dots, and that's what all these podcasts are about that I've done is what to do about them, but that's what he showed me, and we're all the same. We're all people. We all think we're so sick or far from awakening. We're only four or five little black dots away from complete wholeness. You can awaken with the four or five little black dots. You don't have to wait for those to clear up to awaken, but if you want auspicious awakening, if you want to flow through your body happily, yeah, you want to clear up a lot of those black dots, and then he just gave me a lot of love, and then he said it's time for him to go, and I was so worn out. I was, that's good. That's fine, and I was happy, and he talks to me anytime I want, but you know, we're one, so what's there to talk about? Same with every being out there in this world or beyond. We're one, so what's there to talk? I don't really feel motivated to talk to him as strange as, it's not a big deal. He is me. I am him. Same for you. You are him. You are me. It's not something about me. It's just what you realize. Okay, so that was, you can listen to it in greater detail on these other podcasts. Anything with the title Jesus in it, we'll probably have a little of that in there, but the one that says Jesus and Archangel Michael, that has a lot. Leanne says, do you think listening to podcasts like yours can contribute to distraction and illusions? Very good question. Yes and no. Uh, at some point, yes. When you just stop and feel your truth. If you just always have to listen to a podcast before you allow yourself to relax and feel yourself, then you want to look at that. Why is that? But on the other hand, podcasts can throw awareness, focus your awareness in areas that maybe it's good to look. Maybe it's good for you to look or not. You're the judge. You follow your heart. As long as you stay centered in your heart, you follow your heart. Then you know whether to listen to podcasts or not. You know which ones are helpful and you know when and you know why every spiritual practice is simply meant to help dissolve something that we are doing to stay separated from ourselves. They all bring light to some area. Different spiritual practices bring light all up and down the rainbow because we inhabit lots of different realities, physical, spiritual, emotional, lots of different realities, energetic, karmic, you know, so many. So different podcasts and different spiritual practices bring attention and we need it all up and down the line. We want to be clear all up and down the line, not just in just not just mentally, not just emotionally, not just physically eat the right things, have the right nutrition. All these are important, but not just that one reality. Um, so sometimes podcasts can be in the way, sometimes not. So you be the judge of that. Listen to yourself. Yvonne, the podcast have helped me to quietly and baby steps to let go. Yes. Thank you, Yvonne. That's what we're going for. That's what has happened in my life. Yes. I have a ways to go. There's what's the hurry. I remember, um, it was a bit startling. One man in India, he was a governor of a state. I think they're called governors. I'm not sure. Uh, India has lots of different states. They're like states in the United States. They're all their own little, they even have different languages. Each state has a different language. And he said he was really enjoying the prestige. And he said, I know I do not want to wake up. I want to stay in my illusion and day delusion because I'm enjoying this dream now. Yeah. What's the hurry? Enjoy your dream. The side effect though, is to the degree we're cut off and we're in a dream. There's always in separation. There's always pain. It's always painful not to be yourself. And that's what separation is. We're not ourselves. We're living a dream life, but it's not who we are. It's like building a beautiful house on somebody else's property. Okay. It's a beautiful house. It's our dream house, but you know, it's not our property. So let's not eventually we got to come back to reality. But, um, anyway, Leslie says that's beautiful. Thank you, Leslie. Yvonne says, first time here, just joining. What is the name of the podcast? It's awakening together, relaxing into happiness. Uh, you can look it up. And my name is William Cooper. You could just type in William Cooper. Probably if you Google William Cooper, awakening podcast should take you to my podcast, but yes, you can listen to it on every single platform. Uh, Oh, Christine says, and my website is awesome too. Thank you, Christine. It's also usually on every, uh, platform. When you find my podcast, when you look at the little blurb about the host, it's generally in there in the, um, biography. So you can find it that way. Okay, everybody. I look forward to it. If you follow me, you'll be notified when I do my next podcast. Great questions. Thank you, Yvonne. Thank you. Uh, Yvonne says, thank you so much for the eye opening. Thank you, Christine. Thank you. Okay, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Catherine hearts. Take care. Bye.