Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
think that's what I have to do. I have to accept everything. Why?
I thought that will lead to my enlightenment that would take me
somewhere. So I used to practice acceptance, and I've met a lot of
people over the past few years, and that's what they're doing, they
think they need to accept everything all the time.
So what happens of course is we try to accept thoughts appear,
pain appears, fear appears, and we try to accept. What I found
years ago was that I would try to accept, say for example pain
would appear, and I'd heard it was important to accept, we should
accept, and then I had this idea that enlightened people can accept
everything, so I'm going to try to accept everything. So I would try
to accept pain, and sometimes I felt I could accept it, but then
there were others times [Laughing] where I really felt that I could
not accept. I would try so hard, I would try so hard to accept, and
I just couldn't, and I felt terrible. What is wrong with me? I'm
failing, I am failing to accept, and I am failing. I'm a failed seeker;
I'll never become enlightened, what's wrong with me, why can't I
accept, everyone else can accept, why can't I accept? And then I
would really punish myself in a way for not being able to accept,
because I had this image that I should be able to accept everything.
So what I hadn’t discovered back then was this deeper acceptance
that I talk about now. A really helpful metaphor for this is go back
to the ocean and the waves, I just think this is such a beautiful
metaphor, I use it so much now. So you could say that on the
deepest level the ocean accepts all of its waves. Why? The ocean is
all of the waves. If the ocean doesn't decide to accept all of the
waves, in a way it has no choice, it has no choice, it is the waves, it
is the waves. That is the acceptance, so it's the inseparability, the
total lack of division between the ocean and the waves, that's the
deeper acceptance, that's the deeper acceptance. But the ocean
doesn't accept some waves and not accept others; it accepts all of
the waves. So again if you bring that back to present experience,
that's a beautiful metaphor but what does it mean in present
experience? So again if you come back to present experience right
Now, if you see that every thought, every sensation, every feeling,
everything appearing in personal experience is a wave, so what
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