8 Rs Net

If practitioners are doing it from their heart, if they’re creating with what they feel, then it is effortless. If they’re intellectually trying to make something happen, intellectually trying to say, “Well, okay, this particular Deity is the one I ’should’ be,”again, hear that value judgment there? “I should be doing, this is the color that should be there.” That’s going to exhaust them, that’s going to be very exhausting. That’s what happens as you get exhausted because you’re trying to force things, and the whole idea in this type of practice is to be at ease. We began this talk with the idea of the Divine Alchemist….

As I begin to have the continuity of expression flowing from the Heart of my Being, and I’m no longer attached to circumstances outside of myself telling me whether I have value or not; then I begin to act in the world, in this milieu of interpenetrating karmic patterns of everybody else and myselfand because I don’t have a value judgmentI begin in my actions to offer options, to offer possibilities, both for myself and for those who are interacting with me that are beyond the patterns that we all were working with. And so, in essence, we’re adding an alchemical quality. The old alchemist would bring in a quality into the solution, into the dance of molecules. And in bringing this quality in, it would enable the molecules to do something that they wouldn’t do normally. And lead would become gold.

And this has always been a symbolic or figurative notion, turning lead into gold. It’s almost like turning the defended personality or the old super-structure that was formed in childhood into a vessel, a holding environment of change.

Basically the analogy of lead into gold is that I can offer into the mix a quality of being that not only creates wholly new possibilities for me, beyond my fate, but alsobecause I’m doing it without any value judgmentit also creates new possibilities for those who are interacting with me. Now that’s pretty far-out.

Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation, The Everyday Sanyasin, and Experiments in Awareness, a workbook for yogis.