The Best Thing to Do is Be Uncomfortable

The
best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the
one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants
to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You
do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue
of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell.
Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of
consolation and involvement with all this hardware and
software so that you will not feel uncomfortable.

You cannot avoid that discomfort. It
is essential to your conditional life. You must find it,
locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do.
Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful.
Rather, be uncomfortable — in other words not satisfied
and not satisfiable — in the framework of ordinary
living, and you will find me, you will hear me, you will
practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence,
and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But
you will not have any energy and attention for that practice
if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied.
You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form
of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for
practice.

At least this is the way it seems to
me, but you know how Crazy I am! All I can tell you is the
way it seems to me. The real import of all of this is not
whether or not there is some order underneath it all, evil
or good, whether there is some conspiracy or some creative
cause. The real importance to be observed is the
non-necessity of this experience and, from the conventional
point of view, the binding power of this non-necessary
experience. The real import of life is not to discover its
hidden secrets, the secrets of its working, but to transcend
it, to break its spell altogether.

Even though, as people in the world,
we work to generally serve the well-being of others in this
confinement and even to find out some of the secret workings
behind it, even though we may do all of that as an ordinary
matter, the fundamental motion of our proceedings, our
energy, our consciousness, our attention should be founded
in our essential discomfort and our will to transcendence.
Therefore, whatever we may be doing, if we understand, we
will be renunciates and practice Samadhi moment to moment
and not be fools. Above all we will not be fools to
ourselves. Whatever conspirators there may be elsewhere, we
fool ourselves by becoming overserious about our
apparition.

So, it is appropriate to have had
this discussion on an evening on which we have all gathered
together to watch TV!