August 14th 2026, from a transcript
A Swami said to me a long time ago when I was asking about anxiety: ‘Anxiety is to do with attachment to something. You don’t want to lose it or you’ve had a bad image about yourself, you may have done something bad and it stays with you. That’s all ‘attachment’.’ I asked ‘What do you mean by attachment?’ and he said: ‘Did you ever build a sand castle as a child when you were on the beach?’ I said, yes. He asked. ‘Did you build all those little turrets and a little flag, and all that sort of stuff? I said, yes, it was lovely, I enjoyed it. He asked if I knew the sea would wash it away. He explained to me that the castle only lasted for a short time but it illustrates a difference about consciousness: the child is thinking about pictures and drawing something and imaging something and then letting it go. He said, ‘‘Attachment’ is like being attached to it. ‘Did you know that the sea would wash it away?’ I said, of course I knew it would because I’ve always seen it. He said ‘If you were very attached to that castle, it would have worried you that you’d lose it. That is what happens. You need to let it go. Attachment is about letting go. Where’s the castle now?’ He pointed to my chest: ‘It’s in you!’ Everything that made the castle, everything, every shape you had is in your heart and soul. It’s there. It doesn’t disappear.’. Physicists are saying that this is just what’s coming up in all the latest research
I see three elements here of awareness, consciousness and mind. They work together to play. and to create, our ideas, our images, and they stay forever. It’s a memory, it is just there. Even though you’ve moved on, it stays, it is part of it. The mind is the computer and consciousness, the programming. We program our mind with all these old stories which we can play.
We have self-agency over consciousness to create our own consciousness. I was using mind stuff, and I was turning it into a sandcastle. if somebody is a carpenter and he wants to play chess, he can take a piece of wood which is Mind, if you like, and he carves it and turns it into little pieces, little chess pieces. And then he would play. Consciousness has created out of the pieces of wood shaped like kings and queens and the other pieces. Consciousness is the software thinking it wants to do things. And mind is the hardware, which is the pieces of chess, or all the pieces of sand – or however you want to call it
We don’t realize the power of wisdom. When I played with the sandcastle, I realized the sandcastle wasn’t me and it was going to be washed away, but I had a toy to play with. I began to get the wisdom of that. As we get older, as we become more enlightened, our identity, we let go of the form of ourselves, our name and form. And we then move into wisdom, which belongs to everybody. It’s universal. It’s everywhere. That is a great thing. That’s why you can let go, I can let go of the sandcastle, but I can still be me. I’m finding now that thinking of awareness, mind and consciousness, the whole fits together beautifully. That is why some people chase enlightenment – to let go of all attachment.
When I think of presence and awareness, It’s Now, it’s not… you can only be, and that’s why it’s so difficult to be present for a continuous period because you’ve got to keep being now. Not in thought, not in language. When you speak about awareness, consciousness, and mind – if you take it like a concept – they are actually one. There is no time. There is no movement. There is no activity. It’s just as things are at that instant. You see the reflection, not the projection. It is as if we are seeing reality as Gurdjieff’s ‘objective man’. I just heard of a website called ‘Now is Never Wrong’. So, when we see the reflection, we are looking at what we are really now. We are all of it. We’re not just what seems to be separate. Whereas when we see the projection, we are looking at our ideas about it, which is where we all will have different interpretations according to our associations. If you stay with awareness, if you stay just ‘now’, the consciousness and the mind are static as well. They are ‘What is’, which is always changing too, of course. That is always changing. Awareness doesn’t change.
It reminds me of my father said to me before he died: ‘There’s something about me that has never changed.’ He said whether you’re two or ten or 50, whatever age, the awareness that you are is the same awareness you had when you were a child. It is you; you strip it, you take away your name, you take away even your form, your job, anything, but it is still you. Even somebody who has as complete loss of mind. What do you talk about when somebody has loss of mind? Amnesia. Complete amnesia. It’s extraordinary they are still themselves. They won’t remember anything about themselves, but they are still themselves. That is that extraordinary awareness which stays. The awareness is present even despite the dementia. It is always present. It is in lucid dreams. You know you are dreaming. Who is it that knows you are dreaming? That is awareness. It just it knows.
That is something to ponder. I’m finding, as I read more of the wonderful material that comes up from scientists or philosophers that I’m beginning to see the difference between Higher consciousness and lower consciousness. Higher being, lower being. Higher being is letting go of all attachment; lower consciousness is all the attachments that goes with it
With practice, we’re moving more and more into the higher and letting go of material attachments as I let go of the sandcastle when I knew it was being washed away. But it is about letting go of everything. To stay in the moment, to stay present is to really feel who we have become, including the growth of wisdom. We didn’t have this wisdom a day before. Much less 10 years ago. Who I am now in all sorts of ways has changed, even from an hour ago before we met right
I’d like to bring in the story of Ithaca. There are different Ithacas. It depends what sort of work you’re referencing. Odysseus lived in Ithaca. He was king of Ithaca, and he was fine and dandy in Ithaca. In that wonderful poem by Constantine Cavafi, Ithaca is what inspires us on our journey. It inspires us to action. It inspires us to set out. We have this extraordinary journey. We meet lots of different people and engage with different ideas. The end of the poem says that when you get to Ithaca, you might be a bit disappointed. It’s not really as grand as you thought, but what Ithaca did was set you out on that journey. That is Ithaca’s gift to you, the journey. The journey was the journey of life, of his life or his journey. A result according to one interpretation is that he ruined Ithaca. The metaphor in a way is that what you think you’re going to get in Ithaca is not what you thought. On YouTube, Sean Connery recites the poem in his stunning voice. I would suggest, if you can, listen to his reading at the same time as having the text in front of you.
Now, with the idea of higher and lower consciousness when you’ve actually achieved Ithaca, you’re just everywhere, just oneness. Lower consciousness is very attached to the world around you. Some people are very in lower consciousness. Dante’s Inferno is about all the attachment. The more attached you are, the more painful you’ll find the world and everything’s having a go at you. His whole life was devoted to help people get free of attachment. Let go of the same sandcastle. Let it wash away and then find the beauty of love itself at the end of the journey. That is the point of Dante’s Inferno. Then now go back to reading some of these great things from the past and they’re all talking about the same thing.
That’s why it’s so real for me. I get confident of this whole thing, about higher consciousness, lower consciousness. The brain has an extraordinary way of absorbing it without getting tied up in all the detail. We get so tied up in detail we get lost in it. By removing all these attachments, it shows itself. It’s not a destination to reach for, but it’s an uncovering
(Comments from the gathering)
‘I would say instead of growing in wisdom, we’re decreasing in ignorance. What I heard is that there is no such thing as levels of enlightenment. There are only levels of ignorance. And you come out of ignorance and the beauty of Ithaca. Is … it’s there for you. It’s always there. It’s always been there. But you are there without knowing yet the fact that you say ‘I’m not there’ means you must know what there is in order to say you’re not there. It’s hugely paradoxical… I believe in life we are the expression of the divine within us. So life experiences itself through us; We’re experiencing a human life Through that, we have to go through certain lessons as a human being. And part of that, I believe, is overcoming. It is a conditioning from others to uncover our true soul and our purpose.’
I love the way the Taoists talk about, they talk about the true heart and the false heart. And if you see it, the true heart is actually the heart of the tree where the roots began. And the false heart is up in the leaves where you’re chasing all the leaves and you’re wanting this and wanting that and you don’t see the whole picture. But if you come back into the true heart where the seed began… Where is the DNA of the tree? You then see that is the true heart and all of the Tao Te Ching talks about how to find or how to uncover the false hearts so you can see the true heart.
Scientists struggle with all this – we had a great talk about five physicists talking together – they said problem with physics is that you always have to measure something to prove it. But the destination is not measurable. You can’t measure it. There’s nothing to measure. Measurement, boundaries, everything’s gone. There are no boundaries, no nothing. You can’t measure it.
There’s a wonderful image I heard. I call it the ‘Time bubble’. If you imagine you’re inside this bubble, like Doctor Who’s Tardis, you go inside and suddenly it’s huge. And outside its small. Imagine you’re in this bubble and inside this bubble, as time goes both ways, space goes on forever. Loads and loads of it, all these things inside this bubble. You open the bubble door and stand outside and suddenly the bubble disappears. There was no bubble there. There was no time, no nothing. When we achieve this level of enlightenment, you’ve opened the door and stood outside the time bubble which wasn’t there in the first place. When the individual has the courage or insight and ability to actually open the door to escape the prison he has been put in, then there’s a freedom of everything….to have his own mind his own perception, his own understanding. There is no door. That is what we’ve created with duality. It’s always there. We are the full package. We are the higher self. And then we are the lower animal instinct lower self. We have all of those. Everywhere, each one of us is everywhere. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And Time Future is contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
When an individual has the courage or insight and ability to actually open the door to escape the prison, my word, it’s been put in, then there’s a freedom of everything. To have one’s own mind, own perception, own understanding. It’s like when Socrates said: ‘God is like an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere!’
Modern physics books by the greatest of the physicists today are saying much the same thing from a physics point of view and the latest philosophers say the same thing. There’s ‘Biocentrism’. In Biocentrism, the foundation of the universe is awareness or consciousness. Everything comes out of it. Consciousness has no boundary. Awareness has no boundary. It just is. It was never born, never dies. There was no big bang. The idea of a big bang is happening all the time. It was just our idea of it. It’s so revelationary. It gives us an opportunity to really enjoy the journey of Ithaca, of finding. Each of us has an ethic, and mine is a spiritual Ithaca. It is like somebody who has a craft, for instance a carpenter, it is his Ithaca, and it can be seen in the best possible way of making, for instance, a table.
I love the way the Taoists talk about the true heart and the false heart.
It is for our sake as in our human nature and being physicality we start somewhere and we end up nowhere. We have to start the somewhere and the journey in order to gain the wisdom of understanding to free ourselves and help other people to be free.