10 Jan MAGAZINE INTERVIEW VERDEMENTE: WE HAVE FEAR OF LIVING OUR LIFE
“We are afraid to live our life”
Instead of “giving ourselves to life,” most of us expect life to give us what we think we need to be happy. This could be the core of what Sergi Torres proposes to us in this interview. That Life itself does not contain fear, but fear arises from the mistaken duality between us and Life.
To enjoy the silence and the solitude, walking through the forest that is near his house, is of the things that they feel to Sergi Torres, when the meetings and conferences leave him some free time. “I do not usually feel like I have too much relationship. In this sense I am very bad friend and not too social. However, as I most certainly enjoy, is sharing with my family, my partner Sara and our son Arnau, eight years. With them I enjoy the simplest, such as making dinner at Arnau or accompanying him in the morning to school or being wrapped in a blanket with Sara watching a movie. I am the one in charge of making the popcorn “, tells us when consulting him about his family life moments.
And in spite of the sporting passions that the Barça wakes up to him, team that always follows that it can, the moment more felt and tasted by it arrives when everyone in the house goes away to sleep: “when all are lying down and I remain a Couple of hours more standing, “he confesses. “Those two hours of silence, I thank you very much. They are a space to enjoy nothing and everything, to disappear … ”
Disappear, and meditate for a moment on the concepts with which we open the interview: life, faith and fear.
What is Life for you?
As far as I know, everything is Life, but to be aware of this, I must stop clinging to my particular way of seeing and living it. Only when I open to Her, then I see the essence of everything that surrounds me and happens in “my life”. To this essence I call it Life.
And Faith?
Faith is a path to travel that one starts blindly, with courage and a clear decision to get to discover what is at the end of that path. The path of Faith can lead us to great wisdom, as long as we do not convert faith into a bag of beliefs or ideologies that we want to be true yes or yes. When I have felt the true Faith, I recognize that the first thing I have felt is my absolute ignorance. That is why I said that it is a path that requires courage and a clear decision, because otherwise, one stops at this first step and falls into the trap of replacing ignorance with a belief that is often far removed from the destiny of the path of Faith.
For a long time for me, Faith was something to which I had to be caught in times of difficulty. It was an optimistic belief that everything was going to go well, instead of being an opportunity to deal with my ignorance of not knowing how to live that conflict.
For example, in a situation of job dismissal, having faith does not consist in believing that one is going to find work soon, but rather, not being afraid to live that life experience as it is.
And Fear?
It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to express what fear is for me, because my vision of fear is becoming simpler and the simple does not make sense to explain it, but to live it. In reality, fear is nothing in itself. It is rather the consequence or effect of having decided to forget something that is basic to being able to live a life without fear: to know who I am, what is my origin and where I am now. When you do not remember these three things, which are really the same, you begin to feel a vacuum of certainty. To this emptiness I call it fear.
Do you believe that fear is produced by the profound transformation that we seek and do not get, or is at the root of everything?
Fear is the root of our world: our way of relating, our way of loving, our way of living in general. However, Life itself is not afraid. That contrast causes a lot of pain. Hence, we try to avoid anything that exposes our fear, because it also highlights our pain.
When we begin a process of transformation that will lead us from being disconnected from Life to reconnect with it, fear emerges to be cleansed or filled with Life. It is not transformation that produces fear, but makes it conscious. The true transformation shows the fear that we have to let go of our way of life, so that ultimately we can see that that fear is nothing at all.
If we are truly afraid of living our life, what kind of life have we lived so far? Or put another way, what patterns of behavior have helped us survive in a life of fear?
Patterns based on irresponsibility. Put another way, patterns based on “not wanting” assume our own fear and pain. That has led us to have to hold others and our lives responsible for what happens to us, or what we think, or even feel. In turn, that has led us to a totally incoherent type of behavior: wanting to be happy without being willing to take responsibility for our own obstacles to happiness.
You propose to “honor life” and not try to change it, which is what we do all the time. What is the “non-acceptance” with which we live?
It is due to not being aware that we are Life and that what happens in our life is an effect of our way of thinking (beliefs, personality, etc.). When we forget that we are Life, a sense of dissociation arises, that is, that we are separated from Life. That is why we believe that we “live” our life instead of seeing that we “are” Life. When one honors Life, it is the same as honoring one’s life and that is the same as honoring oneself. When one does the opposite, rejecting Life, without realizing it one is rejecting oneself. Therefore, to reject an event or a person hurts so much, because it is us who we reject in reality.
In your lectures it seems like parts of certain assumptions: that we do not enjoy life but fear it. That we do not accept the other but the part that connects with our goodness. This is so?
The word “enjoy” comes etymologically from “enjoyment,” and comes to mean something like taking the fruit or bearing fruit. Seen from this perspective, the great majority do not give us life, but rather we wait for life to be what gives us what we believe we need to be happy. This is so because of our separate perception of things. That is, we perceive what surrounds us as something alien to us. Even in our life we see it as something that happens without us having much to do with it. By not having the unitary perception awakened, we believe that life can lead us to live something unpleasant or fearful.
As for others, the same thing happens. Not having the perception of unity awakened, we perceive others as being alien to us. So when we try to relate to them we are not aware that we are really relating to ourselves. When we open our heart, the consciousness of unity can also open up and offer us a completely different perspective. That is where Love resides without conditions. All experience born of the heart unites us, because it leads us to see beyond our human perceptions, based on comparison, difference, etc.
How can we accept that others – couple, family, friends – have the need (and the right) to live their lives out of our control, whether or not we agree with what they decide to do with their lives?
It is obvious that others are part of our life, so again, when we do not accept their lives or their way of being, we reject our life and ourselves. You only need to see the pain of trying to change the life of another. Although the most curious thing is to realize that when I relate to another person it is not really with her that I relate to but with my opinions about that person. This generates the familiar sense of incommunication with others or not feeling totally loved by others. However, when we first relate to ourselves from the depths of our Being, then we find the essential, and in essence we are all united. There the need to be understood, respected or loved disappear, and thanksgiving for the other resurfaces no matter what we see doing or not doing. When you discover that loving leads to peace and that not doing it generates pain, one decides to love even though it may at first cost. But we must not forget that we are learning. The most important thing is to make the decision to love. The rest comes by itself.
Have you ever said that when we are afraid we are wrong. Do you believe that fear is lack of faith? Why is it so difficult for us to live without fear?
“When you are afraid it is because you are wrong” is one of the premises of the book “A Course in Miracles”. It refers to that every time we feel fear is because we are interpreting incorrectly that situation that we think causes us fear. When we get to see it beyond our “personal stories” we can see that there is nothing that can really affect us if we do not previously choose to feel affected. Very few are aware of such choices because they occur mostly in the realm of our unconscious. Every time we feel afraid it is because we have allowed a part of our consciousness to forget its universal identity.
Fear is an absence of consciousness, it is pure ignorance. It costs us so much to live without fear because we are afraid to live without fear. What paradox, right? Fear is a closed circuit of thought. Getting out of this circuit so well known to us would mean a complete turnaround to our world, to our way of seeing and feeling things, and that scares us. “Better known evil than good to know”, is the banner of the great majority of humanity.
When you say “life does not think, do not think, life is” what do you want to suggest?
That we usually do just the opposite. We are the fruit of something that does not judge or judge things as good or bad. However, we have invented a moral and dual way of thinking and seeing things, which is the opposite of what Life has. Knowing this and taking into account that we are the product of Life, we will now understand why the pain and suffering that we carried for so many thousands of years.
Feelings such as sadness, loneliness, fear, occur when we are disconnected from life. What do you do with them when you feel them? So what is your way of connecting to life?
The truth is that when it comes to explaining to others how to connect with Life, I realize that in reality this all escapes me, it is very far from my understanding. All I know is that it’s worth stopping to run away and start feeling and living. The rest happens naturally. This is what I can not explain in words or concepts because it responds to an infinitely superior Intelligence. Everything tends to Life, therefore, if we stop fleeing the situations of our life, we will be dragged into Life again. Simple, right ?. As simple as it is difficult.
You ask us a very liberating question: “what do you hide in there, that you have not yet put into play in your life?”. Putting into play would involve risk, and risk leads to fear. If what we can manifest is “being”, it is “life”, the luminous part of us, why does fear have more weight and cancels us?
On the one hand because we do not remember that inner part of full consciousness. On the other hand, we intuit it enough to fear it. We intuit, albeit very unconsciously, that upon awakening that part of the Being in fullness, our life will give a complete overturn and that will never be what it was before. Somehow we prefer to suffer than to awaken our peace, because suffering we know it, but Peace does not.
When you refer to the love that my life feels for me, do you mean God? Why do not you mention God (spiritual, not religious), since the image people have of “life” is finite and vulnerable?
When I say God, what I say is so far removed from the word God, that I stopped using it. After a while, and without being premeditated, I found myself at a conference speaking about Life in terms of universal consciousness, and I saw that I was naming God with a word devoid of proper religious, philosophical, or spiritual meanings in general. God does not respond to religions or ideologies. Not even so is spiritual. Although, after all when speaking of the Absolute there are no words or concepts that define or name it.
What do you think is the way people relate to a higher power, called God, Energy or Life?
There is really no “way” to relate to the divine, because we ourselves are a form of God. God is everything, therefore there is in reality no form of relationship with that Supreme Consciousness, because, being One, there is nothing to be able to relate to. However, when we lose our divine consciousness, we forget that unity and we begin to try to reestablish that connection by seeing God as something separate from us. That is when the desire and the need to be happy and to live in peace is born, but it never works under the dual, human prism. The memory of our divine identity always comes from God to us and not the other way around. The interesting thing about this that I say is not to know or understand it, but to live it.
Many of the people who read our magazine are looking for answers to their spiritual dilemma; Others simply “search” for possible alternatives that will improve their lives. You always say that the answers we seek are much closer, within us …
I remember when I was looking. I remember that feeling of “now yes, now yes” or that of “this yes, yes” or that of “this girl yes yes”. However the search implies more search. It stands to reason that one does not stop searching while still feeling an inner emptiness. The curious thing is that we seek to fill us from the outside. The search ends when you finally open yourself to learning to accept yourself completely.
If we look at it again, from the terms of Life, we will see that Life is being given all the time. Instead, when we seek, what we do is try to get what we believe will get us to feel full (happy or at peace). This is the opposite of what Life does; Giving is the opposite of trying to get. That is why our search never tunes us to Life and by not tuning with It, we still feel empty, and therefore, needing to look for something that fills us.
The most curious thing about the seeker is to blame what he finds in his search, not to fill him sufficiently. Ironic, right ?. I did it for many years. I blamed my friends, partners, jobs, relatives and circumstances, not to fill me. I blamed them for having to keep looking, when it was me who was panicking to find myself.
Interview with Mario Martínez Bidart for the magazine VerdeMente.