In order for you to move to your next understanding — the next stage of unfoldment — how you position yourself in relationship to your world has to change.

Spiritual unfoldment talk transcript:

“The important message that I want to convey tonight is: in order for you to move to your next understanding, your basic position about how you position yourself in relationship to your world has to go, has to change…in order for you to make the next step of unfoldment. It can’t not go to the next level. And if you watch teachers, they do it throughout their lives.

I watched it with my teacher. He reinvented himself, not in terms of just giving classes — that’s what he did, that was his job — but in the way he imaged himself. Every decade it would go through a whole new turn — a whole new person there if you had the eyes to see it. Outwardly it didn’t look all that different. But he went from a stern Theravadin into a yahoo-ey Vajrayana to kind of an interesting epicure, connoisseur-y, renaissance-y kind of guy, to the gentle, relatively gentle, old man. But with each change the appearance changed. So if you look at the pictures of my teacher through the ages it almost looks like 15 different people, even though my experience of him, and I knew him for 30 years… he in some ways struck my ego as kind of the same. But if you look the pictures of him over time: completely different personic imagings.

So, for you, (fill in your name), for you to make the next step in your spiritual unfoldment, unless you’ve already done it just recently, [you need a] complete shift and change in the environment. Why not? If someone else did it, it would be okay, right? ‘But not me.’ That’s the point. Not that you have to do that, but why is it that you can’t?”

Talk originally given on Oct. 19, 2009 in Kyoto, Japan.
Doug Sensei’s teacher was the great Canadian lama, Namgyal Rinpoche.

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