I came upon meditation when I was in the Marines in the 1960s and traveled to Iwo Jima and Japan.  I didn’t know that what I saw on that trip would influence me so profoundly.  I started to sit. And have never really left the cushion since then.

For me, one of the rewards of meditation is peace … peace and function. And availability. That’s what it boils down to for me. The funny thing about it is that there is no separate self to own or witness this peace. You are manifesting peace, function, and availability. That’s the difference.  This entity (who you name as you) has been absorbed into the totality.

We should do our best to get clear on why we are here.  People do all kinds of things to improve their lot.  All kinds of self-help, church, counselors, meditation, practice of all kinds.  But we are here for one reason—to deal with this barrier that separates us. This fixed self, this imposter self. And we’re here not as an intellectual challenge. We’re here because, a lot of the time, things aren’t going well for us.  We feel crappy. We feel not OK. We’re struggling. We’re in doubt. We’re out-of-syn. We’re angry.  We’re envious. We’re all these things.  But all these things arise out of this fixed self.

Our original condition has none of these issues. We just fit. We fit in whatever situation we find ourselves in … even though that situation is continually moving.

And so we’re here to learn to manage and to ultimately defeat this invasive entity. We’re surrounded by all sorts of invasive things. There are water lilies, and bamboo rats, and COVID … things that invade our environment. And the environment has ways of defeating these invasive things. It’s not a matter of one over the other. Instead, it’s kind of homeostasis in order to maintain our stability as individuals, as humans, We have to fight off these invasive things. The body isolates these invasive things and then attacks them. If you have the flu, or a cold, , pneumonia, cancer. Whatever it is, the body has means of isolating and attacking things that are going to disturb its equilibrium. And sometimes it wins, Sometimes it loses. Our natural condition is indifferent to the outcome. It just does what is appropriate to the situation.

And that’s why we’re here. Because we have been invaded. We call it the imposter self … or the fixed self or the  ego. Whichever, it functions to create an illusion of separation between us as an entity and the world around us. And the problem with that is that this entity has to be promoted and protected. According to our history, our personal history, we get conditioned to protect and promote it.

My personal history when I was younger was not a pretty picture. It was difficult  … let’s put it that way. Worrisome. And so I’m a worried person. As a worried person, I am going to protect myself. I have to make these moves. But on scrutiny, I find that my worries are imaginary,

That’s the point of our practice: to find out what’s actually going on. Because what we think is going on is not what’s going on. (An early AA sponsor said to me, “Gar, do not spend too much time alone in your own head. It’s a bad neighborhood. Don’t trust what you think!”)

What’s going on is very, very simple. Very, very direct. It’s not different from the coral reefs off Australia. There are innumerable little entities of coral, little functional specimens of coral. As they die, their shell create these reefs. But they’re living; they have a function and a place and a perfect fit. And as that fit is changed, they change. And that’s us. This innumerable number of us have a function and a perfect fit. But our ego does not have a perfect fit. It wants things. It wants to be reassured. It wants to be made secure.

It wants a lot of things that are unnecessary in our natural condition. So there’s a struggle that takes place. We’re here because we have a disease of the mind. We all caught a bug somewhere, somehow. And we’re here in this clinic, this life, to try to manage it and eventually defeat it. The fact that we’re here puts us on the path of getting more healthy.

Just our efforts.

And what makes us more healthy? The turning point is simple. It’s to change your focus from the outer environment and taking your cues and clues from the outer environment—to focusing on the inner environment. Because the outer environment promotes the separate entity illusion. And we try  to rearrange it. But it is not the source of our issues. So that doesn’t work. Our solutions are failures when we look to the outer environment for the solution.

Our business here is introspective. Everybody who comes to meditation gets guided to turn from looking-out to looking-in. But not looking-in to do something. But looking-in to be quiet and see what’s there. When you look in and are quiet, you see what’s there. We have this amazing ability—like a self-cleaning oven. All you have to do is push the button and leave it alone. And it reveals itself. It reveals what’s going on. If you sit still and be quiet and put your attention internally, introspectively, and just be there, you will see what’s going on. You will start to understand, in an intuitive way, what is happening.

You will start to understand what is true and what is not true. And if you keep at this, this you who sees will become absorbed into the totality of experience where there is no you. Yet you are fully there. It’s completely pervasive in that quiet. And you’re okay.

At some point you will taste that. You will experience for yourself the absorption of this individual into the totality. It’ll be open, spacious and timeless. That’s it. There’s no more to it. Everything else is taken care of. We talk about a higher power, God, all that stuff. Well, it’s all true, because we’re completely taken care of, okay? Except when it comes to our ego, because the ego wants to take care of itself in a particular way.

So let’s get started. Let’s work at that now. We are all warriors. Every one of you is a warrior. Give it your best.