i'd like to give you
what i think of as the great spiritual
teachings
of many various
persuasions
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there's a story that summarizes it it's
the story of what i call the four
philanthropists in a village
the
conquerors had come through and they had
taken all of the men or many of the men
who were warriors at the time and they
had placed them into this prisoner of
war camp right in the village
and many of the villagers knew that
their compatriots
were imprisoned
and the first philanthropist
was a person who had great wealth
and he went to the people who had the
prison
and were in charge of it and he said to
them
i understand the men are not able to
have fresh water and cold water i would
like to donate all of my earnings and
everything that i have to purifying the
water for them and making sure that all
of them will not be sick
and he was granted that and he felt like
he had fulfilled his destiny that he had
done what he was here for
the second philanthropist discovered
that the men were sleeping on rocks
and that they were cold at night they
didn't have blankets and he took all of
his puns and he said to them i would
like to provide bedding
and blankets for the people so that they
will be comfortable
when they sleep at night and he was
granted that right and he donated his
money for this purpose and again he felt
that he was fulfilling his destiny
the third philanthropist discovered that
the food that they were eating
was inadequate that they were just given
uh beans and and uh
and water
and some bread and so he said i own a
farm
and i'd like to grow all of my food and
i'd like to take this food to all of
these prisoners and he was granted that
right and all three of these great
philanthropists in the village felt that
they had really completed
their mission for why they were here
but the fourth philanthropist was a
saint
he was living not at ordinary human
awareness but at higher
consciousness levels
and he went and he found out where the
keys were
and he went to the prison at night
and he released
all of the prisoners
and this little metaphorical story
really tells us that
when we are living at ordinary human
awareness there's nothing wrong with
those who are out there who can help us
to suffer in comfort all right
and many of us have learned to do that
and accept that and say all right as
long as i'm comfortable even if i'm
suffering it's okay but there are those
who have keys
and those keys can open the prisons
one of the great teachers in my life was
carlos castaneda
and castaneda talked about his teacher
who was what they call inaugural
a
and a native american term that
refers to
all that is knowable
and
he
his teacher told him that your
life is like being born into a uh a room
a mansion if you will that has a
thousand rooms but you're born into one
room and this one room is called
daily human awareness and the only way
you can get in is through conception
and birth
you're in and the only way you can get
out
we are taught
is to die
so we spend our lives in this mansion in
one room even though there's 999 other
rooms we don't know how to get out into
those rooms unless we die so we wait to
die
and what his teacher told him is i can
teach you how to get out of the room of
daily awareness
and into the other 999 rooms
and if you stay with me
and learn all that i have to give you i
can teach you how to get out of the
house all together
without having to die
and what we have to do in order to get
to that place where we can take the keys
and
unlock the self-imposed prisons or the
prisons that we have given ourselves on
the basis of what we have come to
believe is our limitations what we can
and can't do
we have to let go of that and i call it
rewriting our agreement with reality we
literally have to make
a whole new contract with what it is
that i perceive to be what is possible
for me
and in order to do that we have to shift
out of the things that we have come to
believe in
and everything that you
came to this program watching tonight
that you believe in was handed to you
by someone else outside of you
was handed to you by the experiences or
testimony of someone in the past
and because it comes from outside of you
there is still an element of doubt
and this element of doubt isn't bad but
it keeps you
from reaching higher levels because what
you think about is what expands and if
you're thinking doubt then doubt is what
expands
william blake said if the sun and moon
should ever doubt they would immediately
go out
so how do we get past what we believe in
or what has been handed to us and still
honor it and be grateful for all of the
teachers and all of the people who have
come before us
so what we have to learn to do is let go
of that tribal consciousness and shift
to what i call a knowing now there's a
big difference between what you believe
and what you know
everything that you know
is something that you have made
conscious contact with
conscious
contact
so there's nobody out there watching
there's nobody in this world who knows
how to swim
who learned it by somebody else telling
them that you can swim
or by watching marked spits go through
the water
or by
observing other people doing it
you may remove some of the doubt but you
will never know how to swim
until you get in the water and blub
around a few times and then do it
and then you'll have a knowing and that
knowing is something that you'll never
lose just like riding a bicycle or
dancing the macarena or making a
lemon meringue pie or anything that you
know how to do it's because you've made
conscious contact
and i'd like to suggest that there's a
big difference between knowing about
a divine presence
knowing about a sacred awareness knowing
about god
and knowing god
there's a big difference
just like there's a big difference
between
knowing about the possibility of being
able to heal myself of something that is
bothering me perhaps a disease process i
perhaps may believe that it's possible
because i've read other people and i've
heard others say it
and i've read the testimony and i've
listened to the tapes and i've gone to
the seminars
but until you have made conscious
contact with it
you'll never know it
and i'd like to suggest there are
there's a wonderful poem
i'd like to share this poem with you
it's uh written by a wonderful woman
her name is valerie cox
and she lives up in seattle and she's
written quite a bit of poetry
this particular poem really speaks to me
to the difference between what you know
and what you believe in immerse yourself
in this in these words
a woman was waiting at an airport one
night
with several long hours
before her flight she hunted for a book
in the airport shop
bought a bag of cookies and found a
place to drop
she was engrossed in her book but
happened to see that the man beside her
as bold as could be grabbed a cookie or
two
from the bag between which she tried to
ignore to avoid a scene
she munched cookies and watched the
clock as this gutsy cookie thief
diminished her stock
she was getting more irritated as the
minutes ticked by thinking if i wasn't
so nice i'd blacken his eye with each
cookie she took he took one too
and when only one was left she wondered
what he'd do
with a smile on his face and a nervous
laugh he took the last cookie
and broke it in half
he offered her half as he ate the other
she snatched it from him and thought oh
brother this guy has some nerve and he's
also rude why he didn't even show any
gratitude
she had never known when she had been so
galled and sighed with relief when her
flight was called she gathered her
belongings and headed to the gate
refusing to look back
at the thieving in-grade
she boarded the plane and sank in her
seat then sought her book which was
almost complete
as she reached in her baggage she gasped
with surprise
there was her bag of cookies
in front of her eyes
i love that
i love that
if mine are here she moaned with despair
then the others were his and he tried to
share
too late to apologize she realized with
grief that she was the rude one
the ingrate
the thief
the cookie thief
and all of us in some ways are cookie
thieves
i have eight beautiful children
our youngest little girls
eight years old one of the things that
you do when you become enlightened and
become a guru
like me
that'll be the day
is when we
place something that is important to
know where it is we practice mindfulness
so that we never misplace anything
so obviously having reached this exalted
level of awareness
in my home with my eight children i
never misplace anything
so i place my keys right here in a
certain spot
but my little girl has this wonderful
habit
of taking my keys and hiding them
on daddy in the morning
so that she can watch me
flip out
as i look for
the keys and i'll say sage how many
times has daddy told you don't hide my
keys in the morning daddy you told me
not to do it i don't hide your keys
anymore come on where'd you put my keys
the last time they were in your
dollhouse where did you put daddy you
told me not to do it and then of course
my 12 year old daughter serena loves to
just assume this stance
she's watching me raise my voice he'll
say i wonder what all those people would
think of mr positive if they could see
him right now
get lots of reminders
so i give up i said look when i come
back out here i want those keys here and
i go back and i get my clothes on and i
reach in my back pocket
and there are my keys
right where i had left them the night
before in my pocket
and there's a fine line i think between
being a guru
and being a jerk all right
and i probably crossed that line more
times than i should be admitting here on
television
but this idea of being a cookie thief
and creating a knowing a knowing is
something
i did a benefit uh along with my wife a
couple of years ago with a man uh on
maui
whose name is michael kanoff who had
been uh injured uh in a uh
in an accident he's a
quadriplegic or a paraplegic and at that
meeting when it was over there was a man
who lived on another one of the islands
who was known as a
kahuna a healer an ancient healer from
polynesia and he was introduced to me
and he said that was a nice talk and so
on and i said
how do you get to be a kahuna you know
did you take kahuna 101 i mean what
courses do you take how does this work
out and he said no he said kahunas are
raised to have no doubt
to have no doubt
to have a knowing
and he said when a when a knowing
confronts a belief in a disease process
the knowing will always triumph and that
knowing is something in which you say
you are healed and healing takes place
one of the great stories of knowing is
again with our little girl sage who uh
we were
spending the summer
in our summer home and we went to visit
this dermatologist
and
sage has had this thing called flatwarts
for the last well since she was two and
a half years old from two and a half
until seven
which is over four years she had these
flat words and not only did she have
them around her face around her uh mouth
and around her nose but they were
getting worse they were moving up and
they were getting up around her eyes and
so on and would notice that that they
were getting progressively worse even
though all of the places that we had
taken her had said they will go away
she'll outgrow them
but it didn't seem to be that way and
they always said it would be a few
months well years had gone by and she
still hadn't so we were over my friends
uh this dermatologist on in kihei and he
um
i said uh kenny as long as we're here
would you mind taking a look at uh at
sage my wife was there and he took this
big white light and he put it in her
face and he said
you've got flat warts
she hates that term
she never wanted to call them flat wood
she calls them her bumps
all right she just called them her bums
so
he said to her but the good news is that
when you get married you won't have them
when she's seven and a half going who's
this dork you've got me talking to now
and then he said to her something he
said you know we can't burn them off and
there's no medicine that we can give
them but he did say something to the
effect that the ability to rid yourself
of these things is within yourself
and that if you can call upon that
healing capacity in you and begin to
talk to these bumps
in a way in which you ask them to leave
that you have a much greater chance of
getting rid of them faster than anything
that i could give you and we certainly
can't burn them off because we might
scar your pretty face and that's
basically the message that he gave us
i'm paraphrasing it
so we went back that night to where we
were staying and there was a whole bunch
of kids there as there always are when
uh when we're saying all their friends
were there and we walked into the
bedroom and it was late at night and
over in the corner in a uh on her air
mattress was sage
and she had the blankets pulled up over
her head
and she had a flashlight
underneath the blankets
and i
went over and i lifted up the blanket i
said honey is everything all right she
said shh
i'm talking to my bumps
and i left the moon i came in to my wife
were in the other bedroom i said honey
you're not going to believe this but
sage is in there talking to her bumps
isn't that great
the next night we did the same thing
that was the second night the third
night the same thing now that was thurs
on friday this happened on monday on
friday
as god is my witness
on television
every single one of those bumps was gone
and has never reappeared since
unknowing you see there is a stream of
healing
that is
something that we can plug into it's
very much like electricity people say
well in ancient greece there was no
electricity there was electricity
we just didn't plug into it that's all
and there's a stream of healing and when
we go into that stream of healing with a
knowing we go to a higher level within
ourselves and we don't allow
any doubt in
basically
in every single one of us every human
being out there there are two of us
there's two people
the first person in each person
is called the ego or i call it the ego
e-g-o
earth guide only all right
this is the part of us
that says who i am is separate from you
separate from god separate from my
environment and therefore i'm in
competition with and my value is based
upon how much i get
how much my stuff is worth how much
better looking i might be or how much
more attractive i might be
how much more money i might have the
value of my possessions and so on what
is mine
so it's not mystical awareness which
says i am connected it is
that individual lower level of awareness
which says
my ego
this is mine
also in each and every one of us there's
another person
and this other person
is called what i call the sacred self or
the higher self and this sacred or
higher self really doesn't care how much
you get it doesn't care who you're
better than it doesn't care how much
stuff you have it's not interested in
any of that
the problem is that we very seldom
listen to it we pay very little
attention to it this higher or sacred
part of us wants only one thing
it wants us to be
at peace
at peace
whatever choice you make in every
interaction you have make the choice to
be at peace your sacred or higher self
says whereas your ego says oh no no no
it's much more important to be right
and so we find people in relationships
struggling struggling a lot and one of
the things that they struggle about is
who's right and who's wrong
most of the fights that you have in your
relationships really basically when you
is oftentimes you forget the details
but it's basically about who's right and
who's wrong so that if you want to have
your higher or your sacred part of you
ruling in your life i suggest this to
you
practice being kind
rather than right
when you have the choice and you have
the choice in your relationships with
your spouse and your ex-spouse with your
parents with your grandparents with your
in-laws
with strangers on the freeway with
flight attendants with waiters with
whomever you interact if you can just
subdue this ego part of you which says
it's important for me to be right which
will introduce you to stress and anxiety
and fear and so much of the stuff that i
talked about earlier
and instead say
how can i suspend this part of me
and allow
the
allow the part of me that wants to be at
peace that wants to be happy that wants
to be fulfilled and if i said to you i'm
going to give you a magic wand and with
this magic wand i am going to allow you
to just wave it and get anything that
you want whatever you want you can have
this you can have this car you can have
this these the nice clothes over here
you can have this home whatever it is or
i said to you in lieu of that i'm going
to give you another one and you can wave
this and for every moment for the rest
of your life
you'll be at peace
whatever comes along you'll be able to
choose peace
and basically we know that we're only
here for a very short time
and being able to choose peace which is
what the sacred part of you begs you
the higher self
once you get that you begin to shift
away and you stop telling yourself that
the people who are close to me in
relationship with me are the people who
don't belong there
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