The Good in Me
From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993
Seeing with clarity is the first mode of my intelligence as a human being. The second mode of my intelligence is feeling. That is how I register my whole existence - either by clarity of intelligence or clarity of feeling. So I ask you now: Can I, in the body hearing these words, feel any good in me?
This good has no opposite. It is naturally there as the feeling of wellbeing. For as I am alive and well, there is without question the feeling of wellbeing in me. I am asking you to just connect with that consciously. For it is a joy to be able to put aside all my feelings of myself and just to simply feel the natural feeling of wellbeing that is in my natural body, that is in me. Ah, what a relief it is! Can you feel it?
Can I feel it? Of course I can. I am alive and I love my life. If anyone tried to take it from me, I would be most disturbed. I love my life, so I can immediately, directly, feel the sweet feeling of my life inside of me. It never changes. It’s just the feeling of wellbeing that has no opposite. For even when I am sick, or whatever’s happening, if only I can go deep enough and still enough, I am aware that underneath the pain or whatever it is, even if it kills me, there is the knowledge of wellbeing - that all is well.
This, of course, is said to be a mystical state and by calling it that we put it out of reach of you and I, the ordinary people of the earth. So the religions are able to claim some exclusive right to it. But I tell you that’s religious nonsense: the seeking of power by one group over another.
Feel the sweetness in ‘me’ - in the life inside your body now. Sometimes that feeling of life will change to love. Sometimes – perhaps now – it may be a very subtle joy. Sometimes it may be a feeling of rightness that I cannot describe, except to say, ‘This is good. It is right to be here.’ For my intelligence is focused on the unchanging reality that is me: the most subtle of the subtle, the deepest of the deep, and yet, amazingly, 'me’.
My intelligence is not thinking about it. My intelligence is looking into this nothing, into this extraordinary place in me, and the immediate knowledge is there without any thought or any opinion: This is good.
Me and Myself