DOCUMENT FIFTEEN
1st, march 2009

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

Stop making a fuss about nothing
or
All the fuss is about nothing.

January, February, March … March already? March 1st. 2009, a couple of days after Raffa ‘did himself in’. I’m sitting with Tami, who just came back from the house where there was a collection of stragglers from all over the Galilee – a whole bunch from Klill, a whole bunch from Rosh Pina, and people that are friends, and people that used to be friends. And here we are in 2009, where people still imagine – they have to – they move through life imagining they know what is going on. But the more things that come out in the news, and the more changes that take place, some part of them knows, they don’t know what is going on, about anything. They don’t know what their relationships are with each other. They realize every once in a while they have no idea who is who. And here is someone who just killed himself, which has this shock to it, that somebody just stepped-out of it all. And there’s something in that that looks very attractive, in a strange kind of way. They don’t cognize it. Everyone wants to say, ‘if I could just say, STOP, EVERYTHING! I can’t go on, I don’t understand.’

What don’t you understand?
‘I don’t understand how I got here, what should I do, what do I want. Basically I don’t know who I am. But that’s too deep a thought to be even considered. Because everything is moving, and everything that happens I have to relate to it, I feel awkward. I don’t know why.  Without meaning it I insult people, or they seem to be insulted. They say something, and I don’t like it and I don’t even know why I don’t like it, or what do they mean, do they really mean to say what they said, or is it how I took it, or did they actually say that, or did I imagine it?

So what became clear … is that a word? Isn’t that amazing, can anybody still say that in the world we are living in, ‘what became clear’. What in your whole life is clear? But I’ll use it. It’s clear, all this franticness, that’s speeded up, all the living from emotion, mainly negative. It’s speeded up that when people go to a, as if,  shiva like this, with a suicide, without realizing it, they’re sitting in the midst of twenty, thirty people now, and nobody knows. And each person is spinning in his own pieces, so to speak. Their wheels are spinning in different areas, there’s nothing … And these are people, they’re not, you know, they’re not really an active part of their life. They’re a fringe element so they don’t have to, they can’t organize anything there. On both sides, from the family of the deceased, to the ‘friends’. Each one wonders from the family, why did you come? So the odd person says, ‘well, we loved him’. Yes, well I guess so, but what did you love? It’s a difficult one, you loved him? Did you ever pass seven sentences together?

Like Amal said, you repeated it, or Stephen, that when this thing came up of me answering for Tamara about Raffa, something about, he was probably suffering then. You can bet your ass! He’s been suffering since he’s been four years old.

So nobody can really … No one knows why they’re really there. Well, people go to a shiva. Ah, there’s an expression; people go to ‘pay their respects’, oh? So what occurred to me in that jumble that I’ve just described so artistically, is the fact, how to put it? It’s put in words, technical for instance, esoterically, philosophically, psychologically, actually speaking (there I go again being so poetic), that the statement is that, life cannot be explained in terms of itself.

Life cannot be explained in terms of itself. What does it mean to ‘be explained’? To explain the ‘why’ of something, or even the ‘what’. Now that statement, ‘life can’t be explained in terms of itself’, the implication just in that sentence, that it requires a larger context, larger than itself. Because if you say ‘life’ it’s like everything in the normal psychology, life cannot be explained in terms of itself. What is larger than life, that’s what it implies. But to take the statement away?

There are many statements that are dense, they’re so important. There’s so much one has to see, before one has a hint of what it means. Why say it, even if it’s true, what does it imply? Here we run into a wall, a bit, a thick plastic curtain between two worlds. The larger reality, what we really are, where we came from, what created, what keeps this world breathing, functioning and alive.

And someone’s just died, stepped-out of it. They don’t think about it, but it’s a feeling that it’s not just like a picture on a blackboard that’s just been erased and there’s nothing. You don’t think about it, but somehow, he stepped-out. They won’t use this expression, but ah, he made a choice to leave here and to go to something better, less painful, or whatever. Does he think like that? How do they think about it? Is he erased, or is there something …?

So that hangs in the background a little bit, gives a shiva like this almost some kind of spiritual aroma. By them coming there, something spiritual in it, I guess, to be good … to what? Do they think they bring comfort to the person they visit? I don’t know what they think. You have to know a person very well before you can bring him ‘comfort’. If they knew Raffa better and they gave him some comfort maybe he’d still be around. But I mean, I can’t blame them, because he wasn’t the most open person.

Who’s open? How can anyone give comfort to someone who never talks the truth, maintaining an image, maintaining their own life? Nobody knows them, they don’t know themselves. Ouspensky said, one of things that happened, with a group of people with Gurdjieff at first, very sophisticated dudes, and he told them one day to tell, he maybe gave them an exercise, that they should tell each other about their life. They couldn’t do it. Could they tell them about their childhood, about their relationship with their brother, their sister, their mother. A few people do that and they write books! Your sister Anati said to me years ago, ‘I have no memory of my childhood’.

But this is where the line comes, this is a big one. All this struggle; who’s my friend, who’s not my friend, who gives me, who doesn’t, to be kind, to do the right thing, to do the wrong thing, to bring the police to the house …? What do you do with that? You’re trying to judge a person, place a person, are they good, are they bad.

She said something, he’s supposed to be enlightened and then they go and do a thing like that. I mean all kinds of labels, all kinds of wanting to fix a person in your understanding. They can’t do it, nobody, not their mates and not their children. So why did I bring that up. She’s got a lot of memories with me. This boy who’s getting married at the beginning of next month, I think to myself, do I go to the wedding? I think of all the people, also it’s going to be another gathering like at the shiva, also people from London and whatnot. I doubt whether I’ll be there. Even though this is the boy I had on my knee, he was under a year (the father, Yorik, will remember, he was in the room), and all of a sudden, my head turns towards the child, the child’s head turns towards me, and we gave a kiss on the lips. So she’s got a memory of that as well, never mind the police coming. Then from her memory, I don’t know how old the child was, he was sitting on my lap, again in their house, and he fell asleep, and she was amazed. The boy fell asleep in somebody else’s arms! Whatever that implies. Oh, the other memory that she has, and I even have a memory of that. I guess I have a memory of both of them, perhaps because they were simple things and they were repeated. When the other brother Yoel was born, again maybe a few months old. She remembers it well, she mentioned it twice. I picked up the child and held him up in the air in front of my face, and I welcomed him to the world, basically. ‘Here you are, you’re with us, it’s good, you’re in a good place’ I don’t remember what was said, I talked to him. 

So what is all of this? Isn’t it nice, isn’t it true, is it god-knows what with all the money and the rent and the mother and the aunts and the suing and the police and the aging.

The truth of the matter, that statement, life cannot be explained in terms of itself, means ‘in itself’ it has no meaning. All the good, bad, should, shouldn’t, I’m somebody big, I’m somebody small, I’m somebody in the middle, I’m artistic, they went into business, they went out of business, they had a child, somebody died, somebody …

Also, Tami and Momo who are there. Their ex-son-in law hung himself on a tree in front of their house. You had a shock in death, you with your father. Who else? Gitti, lost her father, biggest shock in her life, her love. Shula lost her boyfriend, biggest shock in her life, her love.  Y. was there, I don’t know his background at all, something to do with his father. There’s some painful something in there, I don’t know if I heard anything or remember anything. I’m almost sure it’s got to do with a death of one kind or another. I think his father went … it came up later, he’s afraid of going cuckoo. Maybe his father went cuckoo. In a conventional, religious family you’re not allowed to be strange. Everyone’s cuckoo, when you’re not allowed to be cuckoo – full of cuckoos!.

This is the main point. This is the point of why I put the machine on at the beginning of the talk. And how rare it is for people to find themselves, how rare it is, and to be themselves. It’s another way of saying how rare it is for someone to find God. Which is that reality, which is everything – that which we call life and all the mysteries. Love and good and should, that has an as if obligation in it, an as if morality in it. That’s the line, then you hit this big wall that surrounds the psyche, this world, and it’s like semi transparent. You can sense there’s something behind it. But you can’t really see it, sometimes you can see something. Somebody from the dead talks to you or whatever. Rare, in sickness, in danger, different, there you pray to God. So this is what … It doesn’t make any sense! You can’t figure it out, and you can’t know who you are in your usual way of thinking about it. I’m good, I’m bad, my mother, my child, my this , my that …

Where’s all Raffa’s mine? My restaurant, my house, my children, my grandchildren. He was saba (grandfather).

So there we hit the line of the mystery. The only way you start to cognize, feel, to connect with what is larger than life, is when you’ve seen how imagination and illusion work. When you’ve seen the lies, the assumptions, the pasted-up movie that we call our life, held together with scotch tape and spit. The collage that we get a shifting identity in.  Everyone once in a while when it gets hot, the spit and the tape dry up and a piece falls off, crash. It’s just happened to Raffa.

I don’t know where it was ascribed, I’m sure I’ve got a handful of educated friends who could tell me exactly the Greek source and where it was engraved, and who said it first.  I don’t know whether I’ve got the whole sentence, or part of it, the statement that says that, ‘The truth shall set you free.’ And that’s the meaning of life. And what’s the moral of the story?

Will you stop making such a fuss about nothing!

I wonder how that would look in written text, not so good. Maybe on a CD. Who has the energy in themselves, they’re leaking so much, even to be able to listen to a trip through what people like to call ‘real life’? So we make a CD, we’ll label it, we’ll give it a name:

‘When will you stop making a fuss about nothing?’ Or,
‘Stop making a fuss about nothing!’ Or,
‘All the fuss is about nothing!’

That’s the truth. If you can see the ‘artistic’ combination of collages that we admire or have contempt for, if you can see a collage as a collage, you might get interested in seeing what kind of a boy … and there are no nails and there are no tacks. What’s holding it to the board, to the wall, what’s behind the collage? The collage is supported on a surface. A collage is supported on ouvda (fact).

If you see the mixture of wishful thinking, of fear, of vanity, of pride, of possessiveness, of guilt, of greed, with little pieces of affection here and there, between the pieces, but there usually overlapped, so there’s not a lot of room for it. That’s what called ‘creation’, it’s all …
When you see the truth of it. You see the truth of how it was made, how one gets identified with it. How one gets identified with your own creation actually. Actually it’s your own, it’s yours, not because you made it, it came together mechanically. So you can see the truth of how that … then you’re able, the more you’ll see, that becomes transparent, the more you’re living in this magnificent mystery of existence. The Unfathomable, call it what you want.

Us extra-terrestrials on planet earth. Running into aliens all the time, from god-knows what world, and we’re arguing with them! Because we want them to be like us, and to think like us. We miss the amazing. We’re bumping into aliens all the time.

So now I think, should I go up and meet some of the aliens? Should I bring this tape and plug it into Raffa’s sound system? One of the best in the world. They’re going to listen to this? Would it make any difference?

If you know the truth, you die in it, as a socialized significant something, if you want to change something. You know, everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. ‘Everybody’ that’s the mechanacality of that level as well, that’s the way it goes. That keeps it going.

No, it wouldn’t work. Ian, ey, ey, and Nili, ey, ey, and Momo, ‘I never understood you,’ he said to me. I said, it maybe so, but there was love, ‘yes, but…‘ Tammy, ‘not everybody likes to hear you speak’. To Dina, Tamara, ‘hard for some people to listen to Alan’.

Remember the last time we were there, right? Somebody wanted me to read their future. Maybe we’ll make a tape of this. I don’t know what her name is, we can find out. Send her this tape and say, this is your future. Maybe that should be the name of the CD, should be called, ‘this is your future’. It can work in different ways. We’re sitting in our past/future, right? This is our future to whatever was before, this is your future.

Every single one of them that I know, which is almost everyone up there. So when I say ‘I’, it’s not ‘I’. It’s not the usual ‘I’. When I say ‘me’, I would say that how I relate to them, how I see them, they’re all my children. They’re all the children, never mind that, they’re not my children … how to put it? I love them all. And what do you love?

I said some time ago, people don’t want you to love them, they want you to love their pain. Because they take themselves, they feel, so even when I say, I love them, in a way, I’m loving … I see them through their pain. Can I say l love their pain? Of course not.

Eliya and Liat. Liat, it’s like to see her, you have to be able to see her behind her pain and confusion, it’s like that. And the more pain and confusion, the more you want to love them. On the other hand, with Eliya, it’s not like that at all. In that way she’s not a child. Couple of days ago here, she was telling me, I asked, or it came up, how Liat had this tendency to boss people around, like her mother (her mother really had a lot of love in her). And Eliya said to me, ‘yes …’ I think she said for a year, a long time, she said, ‘I let her do that to me’. I forget, it was amazing the way she said it, I gave her, I let her do that, but now it’s coming to an end, it’s enough. So she showed her love in her adulthood. With children, they’re children as long as they’re … but I mean people are born children and they die children. But as I was just saying there’s a certain love you can feel for Liat that comes from her pain, by seeing her pain …


Tair! Tair! Come in here! Sit down! Shut-up and don’t think. Maybe we make this tape for her. Sure any one with a little bit of honesty can follow it, doesn’t mean they step out of, as Gurdjieff said, ‘the terror of the situation.’

Phone rings …
Tair: It’s Uzi. I’m at Alan …

Think of what we had to deal with in life. There’s Uzi on the phone. The associations, how our mind in its mechanicality wants to … It’s always looking to figure out, it’s looking for a place and it’s always looking not too … ah arh!
Does he want her, what does he want, where is she, she’s with Alan, does he like that, not like…?
In a way he likes that. He has a connection, or maybe he would like to be sitting here … right? That’s life, more or less. Go figure it out.

We’re just about finished.

The truth shall set you free. To see the truth, you have to stop being concerned about how you are seen. To see the truth, you have to be out of fear. It’s important how you’re seen, because how you’re seen and the impression you give, is how they’re going to deal with you, whether it’s your boyfriend or your banker. Are you reliable, not reliable, are they going to get from you, not get from you, be afraid from you or not? Everyone’s kind of in this collage of situations that feels so dangerous. Everyone’s judging, everyone’s moving, everyone’s saying, everyone’s giving, everyone’s taking. The truth of the matter is that it really is not so dangerous. The only danger is when you want to be part of that, when you insist on being somebody in that, where nobody’s nobody. But how do you know that? Because everyone calls that, ‘ma ze (what’s that), it’s life!’ That’s real life, that’s the real world! The fact that everyone’s nervous, sick, angry, depressed, just to name some of the nicer things that happen inside of them. That’s life, no?

Phone rings.
Tair: It’s my father

‘My father’, Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy Name … mmmmm. Brings tears to my eyes, almost.

But it’s like talking on the other side of this plastic wall that surrounds us. It’s like, we can feel through it, we can see, but we can hardly … There is what to see actually through it. Because whatever’s out there is also here, that’s the funny thing about it. Whatever is in the ‘greater world’ is also now. We, in it. We’re just enclosed in a corner of reality. Sense based perception, hot, cold, high, low, good, bad. We in a … Ah, that’s an interesting angle. Hard to say that we’re in it. The finer is within the gross. Whatever is after our death is now as well.

I can see Raffa, some where up there, down there, I don’t know where, saying, ‘yes, yes, they’re idiots down there, they don’t realize it’s all going on at the same time’.

He might be alright this guy, you know, because he suffered! Very sensitive, nobody saw him, but there’s one thing about it, also Tzvika, guilty. He felt so guilty, so guilty. Like we’re guilty, ‘love’, ‘love’, ‘love’, but we’re not helping anyone. Because it seems no one wants to take it, and does it do anyone any good, all our good will and love? But the one thing is that he, and with Tzvika with the same thing … Let’s leave it with Raffa, we’ll give him his week of shiva. I’m sure he never did anybody any harm. That he would never do something to his advantage that would be to someone else’s detriment. So, in a way he’s clean. He suffered, he didn’t get any recognition, he didn’t get this, he didn’t get that. So I can see him in a rather clean space. I won’t let my imagination run into that area. And I’m getting hungry … everyone’s so busy with food and all I do is eat.

I just want to put a period on this.

The truth shall set you free. You’re not going to understand, re-arrange, change, get a comfortable or respectable inter-recognizable promotion into significance in all this stuff that’s going on. To get back from it. Watch it, be intelligent. Don’t worry about being somebody. You’ll waste your life in trying to be ‘somebody’. If you were ‘nobody’, they would leave you alone to start with. You would be amazed at the satisfaction of being that ‘nobody’ and seeing the truth in front of your eyes. I think it really can’t hurt you. It can only hurt you if you engage it.

The truth shall set you free. It will also take you out of your own bubble into … we’re not born yet until we’re out of that bubble. You know, we’re born and they put us into an incubator, and they never take us out! An enclosed space, an incubator, controlled temperature, everything fed in.

So it’s like which comes first, the chicken or the egg? You can’t leave go of yourself when it’s the only thing in this world. They say, ‘it’s real life’. You can’t see anything larger as long as you’re in it. But when you realize that it’s all artificial, and gives no satisfaction or profit to nobody, then … Well things are required … You have to have a taste, before you know what to do. You have to have some kind of increasingly clear taste of ‘yesh ve yesh’ (there is this, and that).

The truth shall set you free.

And with that we close off and see what’s happening in the world.