Creating A Peaceful Mind – An Interview With Nirmala

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Having a peaceful mind and finding inner peace, stillness, and calmness in our lives takes a lot of acceptance of how things are. We have to learn that whatever experiences we have, what’s important is to find peace and allow space and awareness.

Nirmala talks about how we can learn to find peace and acceptance in ourselves so that we can also become better to other people. He teaches us how to deal with love, acceptance of how things happen, and how we can teach ourselves to find beauty and have a peaceful mind even in things that we are uncertain of.

Key Takeaways

• It doesn’t matter what you experience; what matters is where you experience it.
• You can be aware from anywhere. A good starting point is to become aware of your heart. Look from your own heart out at the world.
• When you start focusing on and opening the heart, everything becomes a vibrant living experience.
• It’s also possible to drop your awareness back into the source or at least close to it. If you drop it all the way into the source of awareness, the world disappears.
• The idea is to have total flexibility in our lives. If there is frustration or sadness, the ideal isn’t to move out of it but to avoid getting stuck in it.
• The only reason anger is uncomfortable or difficult is that we try to contain it. Let the anger be as big as it needs to be.
• You can give love to others, but the most important effect is that it fills you with love. And the only way anybody else is ever going to be filled with love is when they get it. It’s not your job to fill people with that experience. But by giving it, first of all, you get filled with it.
• You can be really present to other people and also present to this hot energy inside yourself.
• If it’s a limiting contracted condition part of yourself that is being triggered, the best thing you can do is to be really, really aware of it. Awareness and love are the most healing things in the universe.
• Love is not only a beautiful experience in and of itself, but it also happens to be the thing that transforms, the thing that heals, whatever is happening to us.
• In the process of abandoning ourselves, we develop a peaceful mind and the capacity for a certain kind of conscious awareness
• If something is happening, if something is present, there’s space for it.
• Failure is natural. It’s normal. It’s like we all lose it. But true total failure would be if you could somehow lose that more spacious perspective and then never be able to even have a glimpse of it.
• The one truth about karma is that it all gets worked out in the end.
• There’s absolutely no formula to having the best life. There’s no specific way it happens or unfolds. You don’t get the answer beforehand because the answer hasn’t happened.

Transcription: Finding The Peaceful Mind – An Interview With Nirmala

Luis Congdon

Do you want to have a peaceful mind, stillness, and calmness in your life? Well, I’m bringing Nirmala on today’s Lasting Love Connection podcast, the leading resource for relationship tips, advice, and interviews.

He’s one of the best teachers I know, helping people find a lasting sense of presence and stillness. Nirmala is the author of Living From The Heart, Nothing Personal, and Gifts With No Giver. So, without further ado, let’s get started with the interview. I wanted to start the interview by asking you about this quote from you.

So may I read something that I got from you?

Nirmala

Yes, please.

Luis Congdon

It turns out it doesn’t matter what you experience. What matters is where you experience it from.

Nirmala

Yes.

Luis Congdon

What does that mean?

Nirmala

The best answer, of course, would be experiential. When you drop your awareness somewhere else than where you normally look. I often suggest dropping it into the heart because that’s a profoundly transformative way of looking at the world. But I’ve had a few people say, “What? Drop my awareness? What do you mean? How can I move my awareness if my awareness is where my awareness is?”

But it turns out that you can be aware from anywhere. Actually, someone has suggested that what is happening to people with dyslexia is that they have this incredible flexibility in their awareness.

So, they see the words not only from here, from the front, but they go around. I don’t know if I can do this on the camera. They go around behind the words and see the words from the other side, where the letters are all reversed.

Like looking in a mirror. The net effect is that they don’t have a fixed perspective that tells them which letter comes before which. They already naturally have this flexibility of their awareness to move it wherever it goes. They need to learn to fix their awareness, and the rest of us can benefit from allowing it to move.

Specifically, when you drop it into the heart and move it, another possibility is to move it back, take half a step or a big step back. This opens up perspective and gives you a much wider, fuller, more complete view of reality.

Spirituality and Awareness

Luis Congdon

So when you say awareness, I think about some people that I work with who don’t have experience in spirituality. They’re completely brand new to this stuff, and that’s really where I like to start with people like; this is brand new for you.

What does that mean? Do you drop your awareness? Do you put your attention into the heart, try to feel and experience from the physical chest, the heart area?

Nirmala

that’s a that’s a good starting point to at first just become aware of your heart. What happens in your heart when someone criticizes you? What happens in your heart when you’re looking at something beautiful? So that’s just directing awareness to the heart, and there’s much that can be discovered in it.

The other possibility that I’m speaking about is, in a sense, moving the source of awareness. Looking from the heart out at the world. Looking from the heart at your thoughts. Listening to these words from down here. And the reason I use the word ‘the heart’ and that I point to the chest is just because they’re there’s a kind of energetic center there that we drop into that has this effect of opening things up, softening things.

It’s a more open, vulnerable, spacious, energetic center often than the peaceful mind. The peaceful mind’s purpose, its function, is to narrowly focus. The heart has a whole different purpose. It’s like zooming out with a camera lens. The heart hits in the hole and kicks in the big picture. Ultimately, the actual source of awareness is not located anywhere.

It comes out of nothing, out of nowhere. And so moving it anywhere from your head to your heart and back behind your head or on the other side of the word so you can change the order of the letters. That just shows the flexibility it has and, in a sense, demonstrates that it doesn’t actually have a source in here. It uses this. It is aware of the activity of the mind, but the source of awareness itself isn’t located there.

Dropping Into Our Heart

Luis Congdon

It makes me think of what somebody once told me: Nobody’s ever really seen their own head. If you look in the mirror, that’s not really your head you’re looking at. You’re looking at a reversed image of your head.

Nirmala

Sure. And, yeah, it’s actually just reflected light. It’s not that you’re not actually seeing the original object.

Luis Congdon

Something really interesting to me is when I read that and listen to you talk about it more, it really brings it to life. As you were speaking, I felt myself really bringing my attention to my body and really feeling the vibrancy of being alive. there’s this kind of, I like it.

This one teacher, Gay Hendricks, who I really love, says it’s kind of like the orgasmic experience. It’s really like when you’re really feeling that full tingling sensation in your whole bod. It is really just this wonderful, pure experience.

But it’s not like, “Oh, this is joy, this is sadness.” It’s just a very beautiful experience. And what I’m getting from you is that when you start dropping your attention into the heart, out of maybe that centered focus mental mechanism. You open it, then it’s almost like everything just becomes this kind of vibrant living experience.

Nirmala

Yeah. You can drop your awareness into your belly by dropping into the heart, which is a whole other wavelength. It’s sort of like switching channels on the TV. It takes things to a whole other level. So it both changes your experience of the outer world and, in a sense, puts you more in touch directly with that vibrancy.

There’s less filtering. With a positive mindset, there’s so much activity in the mind itself that it’s kinda like you’re trying to see through all of that stuff or sense through all of that stuff to the actual direct experience of that aliveness. It’s also possible to drop your awareness right back into the source or at least close to the source. If you drop it all the way into the source of awareness, the world disappears.

Because it’s like the awareness. It’s almost like turning the switch off on a flashlight. The awareness is back in its source. And so there’s not an experience to report. But just shy of that, then you are that aliveness.

You are fully unfiltered. It’s like you’re plugged directly into the wall socket. 120 volts of aliveness going through your mic.

Total Flexibility and Awareness

Luis Congdon

And, I think about some of the pitfalls that sometimes or the ideas that people have about this experience that you’re talking about because oftentimes there’s a tendency for people to think, well, if I’m really connected to that, then I won’t experience frustration. I won’t experience anxiety. Is that true, or do you experience it without judgment?

I mean, what happens to some of our negative human experiences when we become aware?

Nirmala

But as you drop into the heart or drop further back into the source of awareness, it’s like the zoom lens zooms out. And so you’re seeing, feeling, hearing, experiencing, sensing, and knowing much, much more of what’s here. And then, if there is frustration, it can be really strong. And yet, if what you’re experiencing is this big open space, then it’s fine.

It’s like a thunderstorm in the open sky. If you’re flying in a jet airliner at 35,000 feet and way down there is a thunderstorm, it’s actually beautiful. It’s wonderful.

You can see that the ideal is not to be in this big, expanded, spaced-out place all the time. Right? My sense is that the ideal is to have total flexibility. There are times when you’re frustrated, and you might as well just go right into it. It’s sort of like those crazy things you did when you were younger and in the middle of a huge storm.

You would take off all your clothes, run outside, and dance in the rain because why not?

Fully Embodying Our Experiences and Not Getting Stuck

Luis Congdon

Right. It’s what’s there.

Nirmala

Yeah. There. It’s like where I grew up, on the coast, and there was a hurricane. And I still remember standing there, and I was standing like this at a 45-degree angle. And the wind was just keeping me up. It was so fun to just lean forward and not fall because there was so much wind coming and hitting my body. And so, if there’s frustration, if there’s sadness, then the ideal isn’t to move out of it. The ideal, of course, is not to get stuck out of it.

It’s when we have this flexibility to move in and out, in and out, then we we have, in a sense, we can hold both perspectives. Because there are perfectly valid, reasonable reasons to get frustrated.

So you might as well know you’re frustrated, know what’s causing it, and know what you can or can’t do about it. And then also be able to just kind of step out of it and say, “Yeah, that’s happening.” especially when there’s nothing you can do about it. Then you might as well not spend a lot of time there unless you have to clean the house that day.

Anger and frustration have a lot of energy, so you might want to bang your head against the wall a few times before you have to clean the house. But there’s nothing wrong with the energy. It’s like the energy of a thunderstorm or a hurricane.

Luis Congdon

It’s almost like what I’m hearing from you is that there’s this ability to go in and out of being the experience and fully embody an experience, and, like, “yes, this is what I’m experiencing right now,” and then zoom out and notice it as an experience that is happening in space.

We don’t look at the thunderstorm and go, “Oh my god. That’s me having a thunderstorm.” We’d go, “It’s a thunderstorm.” And it would be similar when we’re experiencing that: “Oh, it’s a thunderstorm, and yes, I have that experience.”

Nirmala

Another thing that’s specifically really helpful with anger. And with anger, it’s this really strong energy, almost like a volcano. Right? And a lot of times, the only reason that anger is in any way uncomfortable or difficult is because we try to hold it contained. And so, we either struggle to hold it in or sometimes we dump it on somebody else, to not have to hold it in anymore. But there’s another possibility, which is just to let the anger be as big as it needs to be.

Just like letting a thunderstorm or a hurricane take up as much of the sky as it needs to because there’s always more sky. And when you allow your anger to be as big as it naturally kinda wants to be as it naturally is, then it’s no longer like a bunch of heat and steam held inside a tiny little pressure cooker. It’s that same amount of energy just here. You’re moving more naturally, moving more freely. And there’s no longer any need really to suppress it or get rid of it, express it, to dump it on somebody else.

In fact, why waste it on somebody else?

Luis Congdon

You become the space where it can all happen, but it is not personal.

Nirmala

When there is a sense of big space available for it, there’s no reason to hold it in your body, to hold it in a kind of personal identity.

Love is Space & Awareness

Luis Congdon

And, Nirmala, in one of your books, you said love is space. That was one of the most wonderful ways of expressing what love is to me in such a succinct way.

I was going to ask you how we offer that love to family members. Or, we’re talking about being that space in which feelings or experiences happen. How do we become that space for others?

Nirmala

You can give it to others, but the most important effect is that it fills you with love. And the only way anybody else will ever be filled with love is when they get it.

It’s not your job to fill them with that experience. But by giving it, first of all, you get filled with it. You said the initial quote was, “Love is space.” That’s another word for it: simply acceptance or allowing.

I think there are actually two main qualities of love. Love is acceptance, allowing space, and then it’s awareness, contactfulness, and connection. And so it’s not like, “I’ll give you lots of space to be that way, but I’m I’m I’m out of here.” It’s also not like this kind of attention: “But I want you to do this. Can you stop being the way you are?”

It’s when you’re right there, and it’s fine the way you are. It’s just the way you are. And I am totally here to experience that, not to change it in any way. And so it’s that flow of awareness again, right? But it’s that flow of spacious awareness, that flow of openness. Right? And when we give it, we just give it for no reason to be mentioned to other people.

Sometimes, it’s easier to start by practicing with inanimate objects. whatever’s right in front of you—your keyboard, your pencil, a pillow. And you discover you can be that present to an inanimate object.

There’s this flow of sweetness, this flow of love. And then, that’s nourishing, satisfying, fulfilling in and of itself. So if there’s a person in front of you, why would you, like, do anything else with that person? Why not give them that same space, that same attention for the way they are?

One thing that I think is helpful is that sometimes people hear that and forget that they can also give themselves that same amount of space and attention. And so if that person happens to be somebody who’s really annoying, is frustrating, you can be really present to them and this hot energy inside yourself. It’s just more stuff to love. The crazier they are, you get to love that.

The more scared or frightened or sad or confused or aroused or excited or repulsed or whatever it is. Whatever happens is happening inside of you, you can also give this same flowing attention space to that.

The Most Healing Thing in the Universe

Luis Congdon

Colin Tipping wrote a great book called Radical Forgiveness, and one little quote that I got out of it is that nothing happens to you. It happens to you. And this example that you’re giving of somebody getting angry, for example, and throwing that anger at you, then whatever response comes up is really they’re almost doing it for you so that you can get in touch with that response and really be a space for that response. To have love, to have acceptance.

Nirmala

Because if it’s a limiting, contracted condition part of yourself that is being triggered, the best thing you can do is to be really, really aware of it. Awareness and love are the most healing things in the universe. If it happens to be a really limited, contracted, conditioned part of them, that’s coming up. And it’s really obvious that it’s their thing—more their thing than it is your thing.

Then, what a remarkable opportunity to be there and provide that, in a sense, that awareness. That doesn’t look away; don’t reject them or deny what they’re experiencing. In fact, be really curious about it. I really want to know everything about “Oh, so you see it that way. That must be really painful.”

So, love is not only a beautiful experience in and of itself, but it also happens to be the thing that transforms, the thing that heals, whatever is happening to us.

“Abandoning” Ourselves To Develop the Peaceful Mind

Luis Congdon

What you’re talking about is really powerful, and it seems like such a difficult experience or place to be. In my previous work, I actually taught marriage education classes to low-income families.

I’ve personally sat with several hundred in couples therapy, and one of the things that I oftentimes watched and was amazed by is how simple healing can be. You might watch a wife come in, and she’s emoting very strongly about not feeling enough connection to her husband. And so she’s very amped up emotionally, and then he’s kind of like, “Oh, I don’t like it when you get that way.” He’s really resistant to her and she’s pushing even more like just, like you said, like this. Like no, listen to me.

And he’s pushing away, so she’s pushing forward. Or moving forward. And what oftentimes I really tried to get them to see is that it’s okay for you to have that experience for the wife and for the husband, what would it be like for you not to have to heal, move, or do anything about her experience, but just allow her to watch or allow yourself to almost watch her experience, to be present to it. And it’s such a magnificent thing to watch couples have that.

Yet, I find it extremely difficult to teach. I find it difficult, even in myself and my relationships, when someone has an experience that I don’t like. And what do you think created that? I mean, babies are just pure, innocent beings, right? They’re just having whatever experience is present.

But then, as we get older, what happens that makes us move away from that innocence, that pureness of being?

Nirmala

The first thing I would say is I don’t think it’s a mistake. I think that’s our consciousness. You mentioned a young child, right? And a young child is just too young to really get it that they can be the source of all the goodness within themselves. They’re just too young, and they’re physically dependent on the outside of themselves, on their parents, on whoever’s there to take care of them.

It’s like this dilemma that they need stuff from the outside in order to be okay. And so, in order to protect their source of comfort, nourishment, and safety, we all, in some sense, abandon ourselves. We all somehow leave that place of pure, simple self-awareness and become this image, this idea that we think is what our mom and dad want.

And then it’s like we’re just so powerfully reinforced. That actually crystallizes into what we call the ego. We become this being that is always looking outside of our selves. And so you said, it’s hard to go back to just the pure source of love. And I start off by saying it’s not a mistake.

Because when in the process of losing it and then finding it again, ultimately sooner or later, maybe this lifetime, maybe next lifetime, in the process of finding it again, we experience it in a whole new way. In the process of abandoning ourselves, we develop a peaceful mind and the capacity for a certain kind of conscious self-awareness, which you can obviously see in a slightly older child, right? But you can tell it isn’t there in a baby. Right?

There’s not that kind of conscious ability to consciously recognize what’s going on. And so ultimately, when you take that conscious ability and experience the love again, It’s now it’s now conscious love. I mean, if all that mattered was to be here, then we could all just have, like, frontal lobotomies when we were six weeks old. Right?

And we just stay here. We would be totally in the moment for the time on Earth. But by losing it and then finding it, there’s a depth to it. It’s kind of like anybody who’s been through something.

Being ‘Somebody” Before Becoming ‘Nobody’

Nirmala

I don’t care if it’s an ex-drug addict, ex-alcoholic, somebody who’s just been through a big relationship breakup, or their spouse faded away and died from cancer or something like that. When somebody’s been through something, and they kinda like given up resisting. They’ve kinda given up trying to fix it, and so they drop back into just being. There’s a depth, richness, and fullness in their wisdom, their discrimination, and their capacity to be present and to love. It includes all of the wounding that came with that whole experience.

But it’s like you can’t skip over that step. You can’t skip over being a crazy ego in the world. First, most people hearing this already realize at least we’re never gonna skip over that step because they’ve already taken it. But I think even if you ever had kids, it probably will break your heart to watch it happen, but you’re going to have to realize, “Hey, they have to be somebody before they can be nobody.”

Luis Congdon

I work with youth, actually. I manage two apartment buildings with youth who were formerly homeless, and we give them 1st month free rent, 2nd month is $20, 3rd month is $20, 4th is $50. And a lot of these guys and girls come from abusive backgrounds, drug addiction, you name it, just difficult pasts. It is a very rich opportunity for me to get in touch with the person I struggled with when I was a teenager and loved that part of myself that struggled to watch them.

It’s actually a real challenge sometimes because I just see so much beauty, but I see them struggling so much. And I just almost wish I could walk over to the corner, because they’re living in a room with the lights off. And I wish I could just walk into the room and turn the light switch on for them. And it’s what you’re talking about. I have to and get to watch them do it themselves.

Nirmala

And there’s no reason not to. You asked earlier about what we can do for others. Shining that love not only fills you but also creates a space where they can discover that for themselves. You can’t do it for them. But you can, in a sense, be in that place yourself. And that will affect them one way or the other.

Ultimately, it gives them the biggest opportunity to discover within themselves. The more it makes sense. I mean, you just look at the kids who were abused, the kids who were neglected, versus a kid who had some of that in their upbringing. They had parents who were loving in their maybe limited way, but they still were loving. Right?

And there’s a difference, as to how easy it is for the kid who had an easy time of it to open up that way. And so, the more time anybody spends in that space, whether it’s coming from them or coming from someone else, the more access there is to it. Though there’s a funny little thing, when you are in that expanded space, and the person you’re with is, like, very, very contracted. Right? By its nature, that’s still a very fairly comfortable thing for you.

By its nature, it’s comfortable to be expanded. But when you’re contracting, and someone else next to you, around you, or looking at you is expanded, it can actually make them very uncomfortable.

It’s kind of like shining a spotlight into the dark corners of their minds. And so it’s helpful to recognize that. Because often, what they first try to do is anything and everything they can to get you to contract. That actually makes them more comfortable. You contract, then now we’re both contracted. We can hang out together. There’s no pressure.

But if you’re open and they’re contracted, then it’s like, that makes them have a problem. And like I said, the first thing they’ll do is try to get you to contract. And if you can stay like this, then it becomes this opportunity for them to open. If you can stay open, it becomes an opportunity for them.

Observing it in yourself is helpful because we’ve all been the ones who feel more contracted. And somebody’s just there, and they’re really in this beautiful spacious thing, and we’re having a problem. And it kind of bugs us that they’re so spacious at this moment. Misery loves company. Get down here with me.

Having Space For Everything

Nirmala

And so you can catch yourself doing this, trying to kinda needle the other person, tease them, overly praise them, out and out criticize attack. Do anything you can to take all of the feelings that you’re experiencing in that contracted state and blame it all on them to see if you can get them to contract. But of course, the real gift to anyone is to be present with that spaciousness. The real gift is to join. The real gift is to find out that you have love – is space and self-awareness.

The really good news is that you can’t run out of either one of those things. It’s just that if you start checking, no matter how many things you look at, you see that too when you look at something else. You haven’t run out. It’s not like you got to the 114th thing, and then all of a sudden, you ran out of awareness.

Luis Congdon

You can’t run out of it.

Nirmala

You can’t run out of it. It’s like you can’t even turn it off, really. And if you just really check out your direct experience of space right now, where does it end?

It doesn’t have to be some spiritual, subtle, essential thing that you haven’t ever experienced called space. No. We’re just talking about space. And there’s obviously the one thing you can be sure of is if something is happening, if something is present, there’s space for it. And so far, again, if you count everything you’ve ever experienced in your whole life, all of those things had space to happen. And even right now, everything you can experience is happening. There’s lots of space for it. Even simpler than giving something space is that is doing this, is just noticing it already has lots of space.

There’s an old story about a Zen monk living in this monastery, and he went to the abbot one time and said, “I don’t. I just don’t have enough space, and I’ve got my little corner with my roll where I sleep and stuff, but I need more space”. And the and the and the abbot said, “Really? Well, let’s find out”. And so he took him over to his little corner and said, “Okay, lay down on the ground.” Then the abbot took a piece of chalk and traced around the monk’s body and then had him get up and stand, come back and look and say, “I don’t know, looks to me like there’s enough space.”

So, there’s no reason not to join someone in that more spacious place.

Awareness is Made to Be Contracted and Expanded

Luis Congdon

When you were talking, I remember I recalled a conversation that I had with a friend. We were talking about that spaciousness, that sense of just being really present with whatever is arising and just being that space of pure love, of pure openness. And he said, “the difficulty for me, Luis, is that if I’m there and then I fail, then I’ve I’ve I’ve completely failed”. So the sense of “I’m this open, loving space,” is why I’m alive. Right?

You have these moments, everybody has these moments where quietness, stillness just kinda takes over, and you don’t completely forget yourself because you’re still there, but you forget all the drama that you have in your life. You’re just kinda like, “Wow, it’s perfect”. But nothing’s changed. It’s just perfect for some reason. And then, boom, something happens, and it’s like, “Oh, no. I gotta get that goal. I gotta do this. I gotta do that. Something’s wrong. I gotta fix it.”

And my friend, what he was saying is that when I get there, it’s like I’ve completely failed. I’ve just failed.

Nirmala

Yes. So you failed. Is there is there a space for that? No. Failure is natural. It’s normal. It’s like we all we all lose it. We all find it and lose it 1000000 times. That is the experience. You have lost it. And yet I would ask, have you broken it?

True, utter, total failure would be if you could somehow lose that more spacious perspective and then never ever ever, I mean, for eternity, never ever again be able to even have a glimpse of it. And you could ask your friend, “Is that is that your experience? That every time you fail, then it’s somehow broken?” And I mean, of course, it would only be one time.

If you could fail that bad and break it somehow so that you could never ever again expand, then yeah, I think you have a problem. But the truth is this awareness that you are is made to be contracted and expanded. Remember Silly Putty? No matter how far you stretched it, you never ruined it. It was the one thing you couldn’t break.

Even if you pull it apart, you just smush it back together again, and it’s back to being fine. It’s like unharmable. And that’s just the truth of this spaciousness, this spacious awareness that you are. No matter how many times you lose it, you never break it.

You never harm it, and you never damage it in a way that prevents it from coming back. So it’s good news.

Karma and How Everything Works Out In The End

Luis Congdon

It’s the best news. That is the good news.

Nirmala

It’s kind of like Silly Putty. You can do all kinds of things with it without worrying.

Luis Congdon

And it stays the same. It’s always going to be Silly Putty, and it can always come back; it’s just not going to change.

Nirmala

Yeah. To be fair, to be honest about it, it does affect you. Whatever is happening affects your consciousness, which affects your awareness. Everything affects your awareness, just like Silly Putty.

Everything you do to it does affect it. It’s just that nothing damages it. So this awareness, it’s natural. I mean, the reason we call it awareness is because it’s affected by everything. So it’s meant to be affected. It’s meant to get stirred up and push this way and push that way and pull this way and pull that way. It’s meant to be affected. That was the purpose of it in the first place was to have this limitless variety of experiences and be affected by them all. But even the most horrible effects, the most painful, difficult effects, they don’t last forever.

Even if you take a total reincarnational perspective with all this terrible karma. Well, the one truth about karma is that it all gets worked out in the end. I mean, whoever, whatever, Hitler. Talk about a boatload of karma. Right? Well, eventually, it wears off. Eventually, he works it out. Eventually, the effect of what he did on his soul, on his being, is gonna be is gonna be worked through and healed. Because it’s, the ultimate it’s I think it’s the ultimate nature of even Hitler is silly putty.

Luis Congdon

Right. He is silly putty.

Nirmala

He was pretty silly, that’s for sure. To do what he did, there’s no escaping the effects. But that’s okay because, in the end, it was all worth it. Ultimately, no harm was done.

There’s No Formula To Know How Life Unfolds

Luis Congdon

For some reason, I just keep thinking of this question that people sometimes ask or that I’ve read in books that students ask teachers, and they say, well, once you realize this, what happens? Like, what happens to me? Like, what will my life look like?

Nirmala

For the last 15 years, I’ve been exploring that question with hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. And the one thing I can say, the one conclusion I can come to, is that there’s absolutely no formula. There’s no specific way it looks, happens, or unfolds.

What happens after that? It’s different for everybody anyway, so the aftereffects will be different. Experience just seems to suggest that’s what we’re here to discover.

What’s it gonna be like? I don’t know. There’s only one way to find out. I once asked an old Vermont farmer. I asked him, “Is it gonna be a snowy winter?” And he said, “Ask me in the spring”. And the terrain has changed even more. So it’s, like, the right question, but you don’t you don’t get the answer beforehand because the answer hasn’t happened yet, hasn’t been created yet. So how could you how could you know in advance?

My wife has been an astrologer for many years. She still sometimes looks into what’s happening or when somebody wants her to tell them something. People are always, in a sense, wanting to know what’s going to happen.

And what I found after being around her all this time is that isn’t the purpose of astrology at all. There’s no way that even if you were the best astrologer, calculate every tiny little aspect and progression. I mean, it gets very complicated. Like this incredible science. And then you get to this place where all of the influences, all of the likelihoods, and then you get to still get to this place where you don’t know exactly what that’s gonna be. How it’s gonna look.

Nirmala

What astrology is helpful for is to either look at what is happening, what just happened, or what happened last year and say, “Oh, right. Of course.” That was perfect. It just had to happen that way because Jupiter was doing this, and Pluto was doing that, and now it makes perfect sense. It gives you this appreciation for how perfect the mechanisms are.

There was a guy he was at, Esolen. The only guy there who could predict how people’s LSD trips would go was the astrologer. And so this guy didn’t believe in astrology. But everybody else had all these theories, and the astrologer was always right.

So this guy did this many, many years of study. He wrote this great, big, sick book called Cosmos and Psyche. He decided to check out astrology by looking at the astrology of world events over the past, like through recorded history back to the time of the Buddha.

And this big book, halfway through your jaw, is on the floor because, again, of its perfection of accuracy in telling you. I’ll just give you a simple example. The time around the French Revolution and the 1960s were very similar astrologically. They were both times of upheaval, revolution, and dramatic change.

It’s interesting that I mentioned that example because we’re actually in a similar time now. This time is very similar to the 1960s in terms of the astrology of the whole world. So what does that mean? what stock should you buy? Or should you be storing canned food in your basement? I don’t know.

Luis Congdon

Astrology gives us a perspective that really zooms out and says all these things were happening with the planets. So, yeah, consciousness for humans was being affected in this way. And now, you’re looking back, and you’re saying, “Okay. It’s very similar once again. So there’s gonna be some huge shift,” but we don’t know what that’s really going to look like. I’ll tell you about it in spring.

Nirmala

Yes, exactly. And so, back to your original question, when people want to know what is happening now, let’s find out. There’s only one way to find out.

Acceptance in Space

Luis Congdon

There’s a story about a student asking Ramana Maharishi what happens to people when they realize this. Say a homeless man living in the streets realizes this truth that you’re talking about. What will happen to him? And Ramada said, “He might just continue being a homeless man, but he might not have a fight with that with being homeless. He might just be there as a homeless man, but yet as consciousness living as a homeless man.”

It’s not the sense of, “Oh, poor me. Oh, I’m homeless. I better change my life.” It’s just consciousness having that experience. Right. The space is having that.

Nirmala

If he’s lucky enough to be a homeless person in India, then they’ll they’ll build a big ashram around him. Beating him every day. If he happens to be a homeless person in New York City, he might end up in a mental hospital instead.

Luis Congdon

It’s like the fight to have the best life. It stops. There isn’t a sense of strife and struggle. There’s a sense of joining life wherever it’s at. However, that joining looks like it can look like Nirmala on Skype talking to Luis, or it can look like later Luis going for a walk. It doesn’t have a particular flavor or look to it.

Nirmala

I think it moves you closer to those fundamental qualities of your being. So there’s more—the externals, who knows? That’s the hardest to predict.

But there would just be, as you said, less fight. Back to what I said earlier, the words I used were acceptance in space. There would be more of that. There would tend to be more awareness. But how that affects other people, your life, and the people sending you bills is probably not going to have much effect on them. they’re gonna still send the bills. I used to joke that even when you realize there’s nobody, the credit card company still thinks there is somebody.

Luis Congdon

They still wanna get their money from you.

Nirmala

They still want it from somebody, right? And they keep addressing those bills to the same somebody that they’ve had in file all along.

Luis Congdon

It’s really powerful stuff, Nirmala. You’re really offering a gift to a lot of people. I really appreciated listening to your work on your website, the few MP3s that you have, and the free books that you have. I’m really touched by the fact that you have three free books. People just download them off of Amazon, and it’s a free book.

Nirmala

Yeah. There’s a page on my website where you can link to Amazon iBooks or Nook, any of the bookstores out there, and download them.

Endless Truth

Luis Congdon

Do you want to tell people about your website? I’ll leave it in a little blurb, but if you want to just tell people what your website is, you can do that.

Nirmala

the name just came to me once. Remember, I don’t again; I don’t know if you came across this because you’re a little younger, but Endless Summer. There was a movie, Endless Summer. No. It was it was a movie about surfing. And I actually never even saw the movie. Growing up, I just loved that title, Endless Summer. Oh, especially when you were still going to school. Endless summer, wow.

Endless Summer. So, the title and the name of my website is Endless Satsang. Endless dash Satsang. Satsang is just being in truth, resting in truth. So even better than endless summer is endless truth, endless be.

Luis Congdon

There you go. I personally really enjoy the website. There are a lot of freebies. I just want to direct people there if they want more of what we talked about and really get in touch with more of this experience.

They’re already in touch with this experience, that’s the thing, but if they’re looking to get some free books and materials, or if they want to do some counseling or talk with you, they can go to that website. Thank you so much for your time, Nirmala. It’s been really powerful. I really enjoy it, and I’m looking forward to passing this on to some of the kids I work with and clients I have personally. So thank you so much.

Nirmala

Yeah. Thank you.