Can One Really Say ‘there Is No Problem’?

Hello.

Hello.

I've been to several of your retreats, and my friend encouraged me to ask the question. And I've been thinking about it. And at one of the last retreat I went to for Helping Professionals in California, you answered part of the question. You had picked it and answered it. But both of my parents were Holocaust survivors. My mother was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945, and my father from Bergen Belsen, and I had a brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto there. And I have this identification with this collective kind of unconscious where I constantly try to think about what you're saying and how to apply the feeling of there is no problem in the present moment. And I go back, it doesn't happen all the time. But when you say that, I think about them and I think, how could they have done that? How could they have said in a state of terror, there's no problem right now? You know? And I think about it often. And I also just want to say that I find it really ironic that you have probably been the most influential person that in my life in terms of healing. And I go to many of your treats, listen to the tapes, and you're of German descent. And I often think to myself, there is a larger picture here. I mean, it's. It's irony, isn't it? Kind of. You know, I was a little nervous to ask the question, even to make the statement, but my friend was encouraging me to do it, so.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

Well, I can assure you my sense of self is not derived from any nationality. And there was a time. But I come to the main part of your question is how could they, at that time, have said. How could they have said there is no problem in the situation that they were in? That's your main question. I'll address that in a second. But first, interesting question about identifying with your national background or your family background. There was a time when I was still in my egoic identity, when there was some feelings of unease, when I realized what the country that I was born in had done. And so there was some suffering there at that time. Later, when I transcended that sense of self, the evaporated completely. But even at the suffering that had done, it had been worse. If my family background had. If they had been involved in any activity of that atrocious activity of that kind, it would have been far worse. But my dad was an outsider. He was actually imprisoned by the Nazis, not because of some deeply held political belief, simply because he couldn't keep his mouth shut.

My mother couldn't keep her mouth shut either.

And so one night he had been drinking and he just said this craziness, we have to. How can this guy so crazy he's going to take us to our doom? And the next day he got arrested. And there's a long story that one day I'll tell what happened to him after that. And my mom escaped the work service that every young woman had to go to to work on a farm or in a factory. So she was sent to a weapons factory to work. And she escaped after two days she ran away. She jumped on the back of a truck and escaped. And then she lived in hiding for two years with her aunt in another city. And police were coming to look for her. So that's the story of my parents. So that was a little bit of a relief for me at that time that they had absolutely no, not only not involvement, they were actually regarded as delinquents. But now the most important part in such extreme situations of such extreme suffering, concentration camp and so on. And even nowadays there are places on the planet where people are in these situations of extreme suffering where the death could come at any moment. They might only have whether if you've been captured by some terrorists and you know they're going to kill you, whatever it may be. Now there have been accounts of people who have, who were in concentration camps who have actually broken through to a very deep level of consciousness by being in that situation. So, and it doesn't happen in those cases by telling yourself that there is no problem in the present moment. That would be a very weak statement and not really wouldn't work. But what does work is the situation like that can drastically burn up your ego completely. So that there's complete self annihilation before the body dies. There's complete annihilation of the egoic sense of self. And all that remains is an intense presence of consciousness. You are not there as a person anymore. I know that there are a few individuals who have gone there who have later been able to speak about it. And I'm sure there are many others. A minority, yes, there are many others who never were able. They died there. They were never able to later on express what they actually went through. But I believe there is a considerable number of people who went through this, the deepest shift in consciousness that's possible in this impossibly painful situation. And she actually became totally awakened as consciousness and realize that there is no death. And others of course, went through terrible fear and died in terrible fear. But the essence of who you are is not subject to death. And there is a. When we see the dreadfulness of the situation which is not to be denied. So we also have to see on a deeper level there is no death and both exist. To knowing that there is no death to the essence of who you are. Knowing that from an inner realization does not mean that on another level the situation is not dreadful. So we do not. The one does not deny the other. And it has to be recognized in its dreadfulness. That's part in the same way that I sometimes speak of the how many people were actually killed by humans, killing, murdering other humans in the 20th century alone? And the figure is that I quoted a figure in the Power of Now, but I later found out it was far too low. Nobody knows the exact figure. 150 million, 200 million humans murdered by other natural catastrophes. And so are nothing compared to that what humans do to each other. And that's a form of collective madness. The Holocaust is one aspect of that. Another aspect of that would be what happened in Soviet Communism. Millions killed also in China. Millions killed within their own countries. Not even in the conflict between two countries. First World War, the madness of that. Second World War, the madness of that. The bombing of cities and entire civilian populations exterminated. Complete madness. So we have to see that what the. The madness that is in the ultimately the dysfunctional egoic mind and what it produces. And this is dreadful. You need to recognize the craziness of that, the madness of that. But at the same time, if we are able to go deep enough, we can realize that for moment, regard humanity as of consciousness. There's human consciousness, which is the collective of humanity. And every human being is an expression of the human collective human consciousness. And the collective human consciousness is an expression of the universal consciousness. It's one strand, one ray in the universal consciousness. So you have universal consciousness, then you have the collective human consciousness. On planet Earth. The collective human consciousness is evolving gradually through. Continuously through billions of manifestations. Humans, they're called human individuals. It's evolving gradually and it's. So another way of looking at it on the deeper level is the evolution of human consciousness is a very painful process. It's kind of. It goes through a nightmarish stage when humanity. When the history of humanity looks like the history of. It's a nightmare, but it is evolving. So we ourselves are expressions of the evolution of consciousness. And knowing that we can still recognize the madness of what happened and to some extent still happening. People often say, by the way, things are. Things are getting worse and worse. They say aren't they getting worse and worse? Well I say if you look at the history, just look at the first half of the 20th century, it can't be worse than that. We are not so far it's definitely not worse than that. But this is a long answer on two levels. No, they would not have said there's no problem in the present moment but perhaps the situation forced them into a state of consciousness that we call presence that they didn't have a name for and eliminated the person completely. That is always the possibility when it happens. And then for you it's important to derive your sense of self from the arising presence in you not from the historical past, your own historical past or the historical past of your family but to acknowledge it what happened but not derive your sense of identity from it. That is important. Otherwise you get trapped in that sense of identity.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Sam.