You are the Celebration

Beyond nihilism and attachment, Georgi explores the Nondual aspect of celebration. How does it feel when we celebrate our lives, this space, this moment? What effect does it have on the sensory experience of being here in freedom?

Transcript

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The celebration in us greets the celebration in you. So today we're going to talk about non-dual celebration. And as usual, it will not be as it seems. The original meaning of the word celebrate is to perform a ritual of honour. Like to perform a service or a sacred ritual, in a way to do a kind of bridging magic, where something of the essence of the heart flows into the world of form. And originally it was quite unconditional, it wasn't that the essence of the heart has to feel good. It has to be that nice, warm, fuzzy love. It's much more in the area of the light of the heart or the mystery of aliveness of the heart. One, it took on the meaning of celebrate the good stuff and ignore the bad. And later on after that in Amsterdam, it became something to do with partying. But the original sense of it is this bridging movement to celebrate life, to celebrate our being here. It's very, very beautiful because there are two parts of it. There is the one which is ready to celebrate, to open up, to honour from the heart of mystery and there is all of these forms of life, of living experience, all of these mysteries of aliveness, including areas where we suffer, which are allowed to be alive within this attitude of celebration. You see, from this point of view, a celebration is not a dictation. you to be here or I allow me to be here on condition that there is no pain, there is no absence, there is no mistakes. It's an unconditional allowance of the living quality And it's a party, it's really a party, because when we really move back unconditionally to the place where we are able to celebrate experience, the very nature of experience changes. If we experience pain or suffering, it can be quite a party, quite a marvel, quite a wonder, quite a mystery. How this moves, how this life, this aliveness, this livingness is moving through us, or how it is pulled within us, how much it hurts to be here, to feel. It changes everything because in a way when we are able to celebrate suffering, for example, or when things don't go our way or the way that we think they should go. And we allow the place where we hurt in sight. At first it might feel like we're celebrating pain, which is a bit sadomasochistic, but no, what we're actually doing is celebrating our ability to feel anything at all. It's a celebration of our feeling ability, of our aliveness, of the aliveness of our heart, which is able to experience, which includes the mind, to experience the wonder, this sensory ability, and of course when there's a lot going on it hurts. And this is the beautiful thing about the non-dual quality of celebration. It says give this space and time. Honour this. Sit down with this. Hold it. Let it have a life of its own. You see there's so much happening there and it's let it in a way come home. You know, we don't say to our child, I'm going to celebrate your birthday remotely from the other side of the planet and we'll meet at two distant corners of the earth and not talk to each other. No, celebration is a movement of reunion also. It's an outpouring but also it's a coming home. We take it home. Meaning we own what is being experienced here. We allow it to come home, to come in, to come to life, to be. Which is in a way allowing ourselves to be here. I wonder if you get a sense of the magic of celebration. The thing is that only when we're able to take this place of deeper responsibility, where we are ready to risk celebrating our life unconditionally to what might be there in the realm of pleasure and pain and joy and suffering, only then are we able to be in our life, can our essence actually participate. And only when our essence is allowed to participate here, are we really allowed to celebrate that essence showing up in a year-year suffering, but have space for, have curiosity for, have interest in what's happening in the mystery of another. And that's already out here, but we won't get there if we have no space on the inside. So so often we get caught. We get caught in a layer which is neither here nor there, in a kind of gluey field between self and other, where it seems there's nothing to celebrate, just a pool of misery, just a pool of circulating rejection, a pool of circulating poison. When we have a child, we give birth to a baby, or we meet a child, or we meet the child in ourselves. The very first thing that happens is there is a party. It's a celebration, a baby is born. You are born. It's one big celebration, a new baby, a new life. What happens to that? You know, I'm talking about the happiest thing, the moment of our birth, and you all look so very, very sad. So partly it's the beginning of the ritual of celebration, which is like a ritual which begins with birth and ends with death, and in between it is the whole field of experience of all that we feel, all that we meet, all that touches us, all that we touch, all that moves through this life which we are. But so often, shortly after birth, this celebration becomes conditional. Oh, I've seen it in maternity wards when we lie there as new mothers and in the neighbouring bed the in-laws come and everybody's an in-law. So the father's parents come and they start looking at the baby and looking for where the baby matches their agenda of their family, pulling out the genetic match of their side. And then in the afternoon the mother's parents come and they start looking at the baby and the conditions are beginning and they start doing things like, oh it's born on this date just like Uncle Joe. A battle begins over the innocence of being, over the freedom of true nature. And this is just the start. The unconscious agendas of the parents to avoid suffering inside themselves begin to project on the child. So certain experiences the child is not allowed to have. For example, if the parent is very much injured in the area of attachment, feeling that nobody is there for them, the child cannot be free to distance from the parent, because the pain of separation feels unbearable in the parent. But the attachment never becomes secure like that. Not in the parent and not in the child. Because there's something beneath the ability to attach, the ability to experience, also the suffering aspects of life, which is negated. Something gets lost. Something begins to struggle inside the skin. And this is very much in the area, because we are really working here with non-dual psychology or spiritual psychology, this is very much in the area of grasping and aversion, only more precise because it moves it very much to the dimension of the heart. So, when we negate something in our child, for example, our child must not be rejected, they must not feel the pain of rejection. And we move towards it and say, this cannot be here, this didn't happen, it's really okay, you're not really rejected. I'll bring you another friend, this friend will accept you and that means that this pain never was, this pain cannot be here. It cannot be here for me, it cannot be here for you, I cannot tolerate this pain, therefore I want to negate it. So what's happening is that we begin to move with a very strong energy of negation. So what is this energy of negation? You know we can say it's just a thought, it's a denial, it's like this cannot be here, it never happened, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. When somebody negates something that you feel, they don't just negate its possibility of happening in the future, they negate that it ever happened, which means that a certain energy is put like a very dark cloud over something that you feel directly. It's like redacted, blacked out, not to be celebrated. It never happened. It cannot be. I don't agree that it will be here, this pain of rejection, because I love you so much. So how is it possible to belong in a world which is full of rejection without experiencing the pain of rejection. So what is really being negated in that moment? What's being negated in the child when the child is not allowed to experience the pain of rejection? What is this dark energy, this annihilating energy that says this cannot be or else? What is it doing? Could it be that it's actually splitting the child from the quality of belonging in general? It's negating the quality of belonging because rejection now became a god. Because if rejection is here, the world ends. So there is an annihilation energy. It's absolutely not allowed. So rejection cannot be here without the quality of belonging being here beneath it. We cannot belong here, where rejection is one of the between people, whether through sport or through play or through sheer nastiness or through negotiation or through fear, where rejection is a form of sentient language, of communication, a way that we communicate, a way that we negotiate, a way that we actually find each other in the heart. It's a feeling of the heart. So how can we belong here if we're not allowed to feel this? How can we belong here if we haven't yet cultivated the trust that we're able to even celebrate this area of experience, to honour it, to hold a space for it? And there is a lot of suffering happening in this field of attachment and negation. So often when we come to these areas, there is an incredible blockage and cut off from the sheer permission to be the miracle that you are, the celebration which you are. We meet this energy and it doesn't help us with suffering. What it does is we lose ourselves in it. It's like we cannot be here in freedom. We cannot survive being alive. We have no permission to exist as the unknown quantity which we are, as this field of sensitivity, of feeling awareness. It becomes darkened. The whole area of the heart gets clouded, redacted by something which is very, very, very difficult to feel. It's worse than rejection. What would you rather have? A rejection where Peter says to you, you suck, you're not taking any responsibility, you're really pissing me off. Would you rather have that and have a conversation? Or would you rather have this energy of negation, which is like a kind of soul murder in its energy. It's saying, you be here as you are. You cannot trust what you feel. Your feeling, what you feel, what you bring to the world, of which is true to yourself, is not acceptable. It's so unacceptable, it cannot exist in general, but also historically. This is very, very, very difficult as a child, as a teenager, as an adult. So partly what we do is we attach, we look for safety, safe attachment, secure attachment. This is what we're supposed to be securely attached. So we try and change our behaviour out there, and the psychologists train us to do this, to regulate ourselves, to develop a secure attachment. So we find a few people that we feel will not reject us and will not negate us and we hold on to them like hell. But it's a problem this attachment because what is attaching to what? We forgot who we are, we forgot the beauty and magnificence and the celebratory factor of our own being here. And now we're attaching to the form of somebody else, the conditions of somebody else. We surely are not connecting to the miracle, the celebration, the being, the wonder of who they are. So we're attaching to conditions, conditions of behavior. So this is my best, best, best, best friend. And the whole schoolyard is very, very, very, very frightening, but this friend, she's always there for me. So I attach to her and this is my secure attachment. And if sometimes we quarrel, I will regulate myself. And then I'll communicate and I'll reinstate the secure attachment. This is okay in the short term. But what about when the best friend is taken away by her drunken father to live in Timbuktu? And she's gone. Life happens. What happens when the object of attachment is lost? Because life happens. Life happens when we're children with our mothers, the poor things, they're trying to do the best they can. Life happens as teenagers, life happens, a loss happens, devastation happens. The objects of our attachment get lost. Where do we go to then? Where is our secure attachment then? So often the instinct then is to take the same pathway back again and negate that attachment. They've gone, they're not there for me, they're always rubbish, they don't have any right to exist. They shouldn't exist, it was all a lie. The love that I felt there, the care that I felt there, the meeting position that I felt there, it wasn't real. And we work very, very hard with this rage of negation that comes forward with our minds to try and make it make sense. Because again we're falling into an area of pain of the heart, which so much needs to be allowed to be felt. Not because it is supreme, this suffering, but because this suffering somehow got the ability to dislocate us from our own hearts altogether. hearts all together. It led us to forget who we are, what we are, what is our celebration here, what's our purpose here. It led us and confused us and hypnotized us into thinking that we have no right to feel what we feel, that the solution to any bad feeling inside here is out there. If I change the behavior of John, if I change the behaviour of Peter, then I will be okay and I will not feel the suffering in my heart anymore, but until then, my heart is closed and I'm going to kick John and Peter's asses. We're lost, partly because we don't know who John and Peter are, we don't know who we are. We're lost in a forest of entanglement, suffering, creating suffering, creating the very suffering that we were never allowed to feel first hand in our lives. When we can soften a little bit, bring it home. Bring home, bring it home. They're all guests. Every feeling is a guest at your party. Every emotion, every happening, every moment is a moment of opportunity and curiosity and is worthy of celebration. All of it. And not celebration out there, but bringing it home. It matters what you feel truly matters. It's an incredible celebration of the ability to feel. Of the ability to open the heart here like a wide channel from the essence of all that is through the differentiation of you into this world. It's so fulfilling. It's so worthwhile. There is a magnificent very alive. A whole party of being is happening. And we get so negated in the layer of feeling, so attached and distracted in the mind, that we forget this wonder which is happening here. And sometimes it takes a shock, like we find out that we haven't got that long to live or we have an awakening and realize that none of us have got that long to live and we move into the here and now and then it's like oh my god it's all so precious. Something reorientates again to the compass of essence. Something awakens in the area of celebrating, squeezing the juice out of every moment that we can see with our eyes, that we can touch with our fingers, that we can breathe, a gratitude comes forward. The celebration is also connected with gratitude. Gratitude for the magic, gratitude for the healing that moves through all things, gratitude that we're not separate. Gratitude that we're able to feel things so deeply. And this in itself generates joy, it opens joy. It spreads joy, it expands and it resources and gives us the ability to be able to feel things even more purely beautiful things. We can feel the essence of beauty but we can also feel the essence of abuse, the essence of pain, the essence of feeling starts to awaken everywhere. And this is so incredibly healing for everyone. But it always, always, always begins at home, at the back door of the heart with the awakening and the remembering of celebration which we are as we celebrate all that we experience. As the celebrator, the celebrated and the celebrating. As the celebrator, the celebrated and the celebrating. you