Why Not?

Question: Looking at your boundaries

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

Transcript

Welcome. This is Sananda. 

‘Why not?’ A very short question, and it's not really that question that we're answering. After all, if you ask of yourself ‘why not?’ then depending on what you are asking that question about, there can be so many different answers ranging from, ‘why not - it's a brilliant idea’ or why not - that sounds a terrible idea.’ So it's not those kind of answers that we're exploring. It’s more the nature of the question itself, what it's doing, what it is for you, what it does for you, how you use it, how you might evolve it. Broadly then, when you ask ‘why not?’ you are looking at boundaries, your boundaries. You're testing those boundaries. You're asking yourself whether it's sensible to stay within the boundaries that you have an awareness of or whether this is an occasion to, in some way or other, move through those boundaries to something beyond. So this model, then, is you existing here on Earth. One kind of boundary obviously is your physical body. You experience that as to a very considerable degree, distinct from the world around you. There can be a kind of continuous or continual overlap. You absorb air and food and liquid from the world around you, and it moves from being other than you to becoming part of you.

2:11

But nevertheless, that physical boundary, the surface of your physical body gives you very clearly from a very early age, a sense of you having a distinct boundary in the world. But then if we look at you through different eyes or from different levels, if you look at yourself in different ways, you can find that ‘boundary’ is not quite so simply defined. And even that definition I've given already is blurred by the relationship you have with the world around you. If we take a simple, but very beautiful, aspect of what it is to be human, your imagination, we might say that your imagination knows no boundaries or you might like to think that that is true, though in fact you're probably going to find, as best you can tell, that it feels to you that there are probably states and places and ways of exploring the Universe that are currently beyond the limits of your imagination. Nevertheless, your imagination has a very considerable reach.

3:33

And so when you ask of yourself, ‘why not?’ and you're looking at what you might imagine, that movement beyond the boundary of your imagination or the exploration of that as a possibility can already take you a long way out from your immediate sense of being a physical human being on planet Earth. If we bring it back to a more local sense of your presence, if we consider the influence of your energy, for example, your physical energy to begin with, then your physical energy has an impact well beyond the immediate reach of your limbs. You can project energy through all sorts of mechanisms, all sorts of mediums very far from this immediate physical presence. Your emotions can travel around the world in a split second and come back to you within the compass of that same second. 

4:45

So what I'm encouraging here is an appreciation that you as a being, experiencing some kind of limitation or boundary can benefit from recognising that that boundary is by no means something like a simple bubble with a solid spherical surface, but actually is in a state of flux and different aspects of your energy or who you experience yourself as being can have very different kinds of reach, very different kinds of flow, of motion, very different kinds of ways of being in relationship to the world around you.

5:32

And all of this adds up to the overall experience of being you now and asking as you look at some particular issue that comes up, ‘why not?’ And you asking that question then are, yes, looking at those boundaries, but know that those boundaries are not, as I've said, simply defined. In saying this I am encouraging something else. I'm encouraging a recognition that you are in a state of flux. You are in a state of change, that you are not who you were a moment ago and the ‘why not?’ you asked yesterday and decided, ‘well, actually it's because it's beyond my capabilities’ might have a different answer today.

6:31

Here we move to looking at this question in a slightly different way. So, so far I'm using it in a familiar sense of a literal question that you ask yourself using those two simple words, ‘why not?’, six letters in all, question mark at the end, a familiar element of thought patterns. I've suggested ways in which that question takes you to the multiple surfaces of your boundaries. But now let's look at the energy of the question itself. It can be seen certainly as a movement outwards from some core presence. In some way or other, you’re sending that question, or the energy of that question, out into your world and it's having to move through the medium of your presence, all of these different kinds of energy that make up your presence - your physical body, your physical energy, your mental body, that reach, which is again very considerable, the flow of your emotions, the leap of your imagination, the soaring of your spirit are a large being, and yet there can be, you can find, this question arising within you.

8:08

So leaving the words behind now, just imagine yourself able to feel, as those words form themselves, to feel beyond or beneath or within or above that brief arrangement of letters, those two words, what is your energy doing? At core, because it can manifest in lots of different ways, let it be for you that the energy of that question is beautiful, it's expansive, it's you growing, it's you exploring how you can grow. It's you, if we now bring in an element of time, it's you in this moment inquiring what might open up from this moment, what new moment might come into being. What is my relationship with the new moment? What energy do I choose to send into that new moment?

9:22

Now, there's another area to all of this subject that have not yet paid attention. So far, I've spoken of you as an individual presence for all that your relationship with the world around you is complex, subtle, and to some degree blurred. But of course you experience yourself in a context. You're not birthed into this world like some miraculous apparition. Your appearance in the world is indeed miraculous in many ways. But you came into this world thanks to the presence of two parents before you, and their parents before them, and so on. So you come into a humanity that is rich in context, rich in history, and you do not emerge solo with the single unit of your family either. Almost certainly you've been part of a very considerable network of acquaintance, of connection. You've interacted within the context of a society. 

10:48

And so very often when that question arises for you, what you're asking is not so much about your own limitations as such, but more about limitations that you have adopted, that you've taken on board at some point the limitations of an agreed consensus. ‘We as humans cannot do these kind of things or should not do these kind of things however much we might wish to. It is not possible. This’, you may be told by the society in which you grow up, ‘is beyond the realms of what we are capable of in this age.’ 

11:42

‘It is not possible to live in a world without war,’ for instance, ‘however much we might wish to’. And you, little child hearing this may have said inside yourself, ‘why not?’ And so at that point, and very, very often as you move through life, not only in childhood, what is happening is not so much that you're exploring moving beyond your own natural boundaries, but you're questioning the boundaries you have adopted, that you've taken on board.

12:36

That word ‘natural’, as you heard, gave me pause because here too, the apparent distinction between you as an individual and the society in which you grow up, the family in which you grow up, that apparent distinction is less definite than you might imagine. And so the natural state of being is in many ways just you as you find yourself in this moment, that's natural to you just now. Nevertheless, there can be a sense that there is some free state of being that belongs more in the areas that I was speaking of earlier, this sense of your energy field having many different layers and levels and modes, but being free to expand in whatever way or whatever degree you find to be natural for you.

13:33

And then I bring in this other element that has a profound effect on your energy field as an individual human being, almost certainly, because part of the purpose in coming into this life is to share these ways of understanding the world, to take on the ideas of other people, to try them out for size. And so now we come to a very valuable, immensely precious function of that question ‘why not?’ It's you checking out whether what you have adopted from the world around you and taken on and perhaps even considered for a while to be part of you actually is - ‘is this a true boundary for the being that I am? Or is something else happening here? Am I allowing myself to be contained by notions that are not fundamentally mine?’ And it's perhaps this function of the question or the energy of ‘why not?’ that is at this time most useful to you. 

14:45

So let's come back to the energy of the question, the energy on which the words float or from which they're derived, or words that approximate to an energy. Because how you set this question up, how it relates to the energy behind the question, the nature of that energy is important. You can find yourself  - and perhaps you still find yourself and maybe you did in childhood sometimes find yourself - asking ‘why not?’ in an oppositional mode; you are fighting against a constraint that you do not approve of. ‘Why not? I want to do it, I want to do it now!’ That can be there.  In the kind of explorations I'm talking about. It's really helpful to let your energy move to a different kind of mode, where it's not bunching itself up to punch its way out beyond the boundary, whatever boundary it is that you are noticing.

15:58

Instead, it's in a state of flow and a particular kind of flow. We come back to the notion of you as a natural being. So consider this flow of the inquiry as being the flow of your own natural being, literally uninhibited, not knowing social constraints or moral constraints, not because you are antisocial or immoral or amoral, but simply because that is not the business of your inquiry. That comes way down the line, if it comes in at all. But that initial inquiry, ‘why not?’ is you letting your presence be known to you. Because if we come to presence now, those other aspects of your human presence, mind, emotions, physical body and so on, those, though they may be very expansive, might be said ultimately to have some kind of limitation or boundary. Your presence, no. Your presence is unlimited. You're choosing to focus your presence in this physical world, living this human life. But your presence as such is ubiquitous and timeless. It is an eternal presence.

17:38

It is the endless now, and it is not confined by space or time. Therefore, while you're able to, as you find yourself inquiring, for whatever reason, ‘why not?’ look for the energy that has brought that question into your mind and allow the energy to the energy of presence, the beautiful undulating limitless energy of your presence flowing into the vastness of all that is and inquiring in this moment, ‘What is true for me? What is real for me?’ Really even beyond what can be put into those words, into touching the Universe with your presence, finding an interface that is not boundaried, because your presence is everywhere. There is no boundary for your presence.

19:02

And so it's that sense of touching all that is with all that your presence is, that brings you the answer to that question. And that answer then is we might say more than, ‘Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing?’ those sorts of response. It's simply, ‘Is this for me now?’ And in that way, you're not only answering a specific question, you are also developing, in the way that you are already developing, you are evolving in the direction of knowing yourself more and more fully as the presence you are and trusting the wholeness of that presence to guide you so that as you look at those constrained notions of who and what you are, some of which you may have invented yourself, others of which you've borrowed from other people and adopted as your own, let that energy not smash through those, not leap over them, but simply flow through beyond. They're just a momentary shape of the all that is in a particular locality for a particular time span that is part of your experience and your energy is not in slightest bit required or needed to be interrupted in its flow by those brief momentary accumulations, aggregations of energy in particular forms for brief spells of time.

Enjoy. Thank you for listening. Go well.