To Live from a Room with No Walls - Conversation with a Friend

From a private conversation on 02/11/17:

Cory: I wanna hear about what's going on with you. I wanna understand.

Bentinho: In a nutshell perhaps this is the understanding you're looking for. If not we can talk in greater depth later:                        

I generally see so many points of view that it's hard to have a bias. It's hard to land on one particular point of view, statement or expression when you can see from a vast empty space that contains everything, and where each thing appears as an equally valid expression of truth, or of the Infinite.

So imagine coming from that space, it's impossible to express yourself truthfully without staying silent. The truest expression of my being which would be the closest representation of how I see life in each moment, would be to remain quiet and vast, all-inclusive, all-embracing, spacious, loving. In that state of radiating the vastness, I don't generally appear very 'human' or 'interactive.'

But sometimes life calls for an expression. Oftentimes actually. If I were to remain silent all the time I would forsaken/ignore the aspect of my incarnation which is here to stand up for certain things and be an example of being 'someone'. Me expressing myself in specific forms and ways is foundational to certain portions of my teachings which I feel genuinely benefit people.

The predicament here for me is that expressing myself outwardly in the form of speech, taking a stance, making a statement or in any other way of expressing myself as having a point of view... it just never feels truthful to who I am. It always feels like I'm method acting. It may feel partially true, or it may feel relevant as a balancing act towards my environment or revealing of the taboos or biases that are subconsciously held in the recipients of my self-expression, but at the heart of it: any expression--any stance--is a deviation from who I really am and how I really see life.

I can never express myself authentically completely. My beingness is complete. Its radiance is complete, but as soon as I use any of my vehicles (mental/emotional/speech/physical bodies) I become partial, I have to distort myself to some degree; I become 'human.' And that's totally okay and it's a part of why I am here: to get my hands dirty where necessary. I'm not here to portrait myself as perfect, flawless, godliness. I will inevitably be seen as 'being human' as a result of the expressions I allow to come through my bodies. It just never feels completely true.

The thing is, I have to act in total congruency with my chosen stance or balancing act in each of these expressions, or there would be no power behind the expression. It would not be convincing. It has to be 'real.' It would feel empty or fake or powerless otherwise. So in order to achieve this, I have agreed to become an embodiment of the expression that needs to come through. It'll appear to be who I am in that moment. It'll use all of my bodies to execute that expression. I will feel the emotion, I will have the thoughts, and I will speak and have the bodily and facial expressions to go with the point of view that wants to express something, be an example of something, or defend/balance something.

Once I've made the choice to express something because I feel that the ripples it will cause are beneficial in some way, even when I know it's about to get messy and my image may get tainted, I have to allow all my bodies (spiritual, mental, emotional, energetic, physical) to line up in accordance with that expression, or it wouldn't have the desired effect. And so I do. I quite literally and willingly 'become human.'

“The inevitable consequence of this—unless the recipients of this expression know the same space I come from within themselves and can see through the method acting—is that I will be perceived and identified by the recipients to be the person behind what I just expressed. They generally think it comes from a place of confusion or personal need. The tricky part in this is that although I have let go of attachment to how people perceive me, there is another balance to maintain; which is that if I go too far in the partial expressions that I allow, and if I don’t balance it out with periods of appearing more flawless and remaining more silent, the likely result of this will be that people will no longer benefit from the teachings as much because they believe the teacher behind these teachings is a lunatic, or not walking his talk, or messed up. Which would practically undermine my entire life’s work up to this point and the benefit that it could continue to give to millions down the road.”

In fact, there are already many people out there who have strict guidelines for how a spiritual teacher ought to appear, and I have crossed their lines a while ago.  They have decided to no longer directly benefit from my work. They have shut that window of potential benefit. They already believe I am who I expressed myself to be in a moment in the past, and they have given up on my work because that's the personality they think I am limited to.

I have never wanted to be attached to my self-image because it inhibits how of service I can be, but at the same time there is a wisdom and necessity to maintaining some form of control as not to undermine too much the work that I've created so far. But this is really not a personal attachment, it's simply being able to recognize that I came here to be of benefit, and to see that certain actions generate benefit to a certain extent, but these very same expressions of benefit, when not balanced or taken too far into the acting atmosphere can also cause greater detriment than benefit as they have the ability to undermine the value people perceive in this message. So as with everything, it's a balance. This one in particular is quite subtle and involves so many little bells and whistles that I have to admit I get confused every once in a while and need to really pause the process to catch up with everything that's happening.

Now all this doesn't mean that I don't have any personal challenges, for I do. I really AM a little energetically jaded recently and I have been recuperating from that. But even that is part of being of service as well as forming a part of my personal journey, for there's a deeper aspect to this impartial space choosing to express itself partially from time to time (or regularly when there's people around) because it seems to cause benefit in some way to do so. And that deeper level is that sometimes in order to express something that causes a ripple effect of learning and benefit into the community, I will have to become the result of a chain of cascading events that far supersede the more simple example of me expressing an opinion in a short moment for the benefit of balancing out some misperception that's hanging in the air.

This more comprehensive molding of my bodies sometimes will last for months or even years to have me reach a certain level of experience, learning or breakthrough or frustration, so that I can express the embodiment of that in a completely lived and weathered way toward the world as an example. In other words my bodies can pick up on ideas or imbalances and illnesses in such a way that it will have a function later on for the benefit of others, while also always of course teaching me greater clarity, precision, love, wisdom, oneness, and foreverness.

Not sure if this is the understanding you were looking for, but it may help clarify some of my behavior. Though I think I've expressed this to you or the team before.

Cory: That's great actually. I somehow forgot that. The stuff you've been posting lately feels so partial; so biased that it's hard to remember you're voluntarily entering a bubble reality in order to 'fully act something out' and extract the learning from it. That actually just sorta puts the whole thing to bed. 

With this stuff right now though specifically, do you already know what balance you're aiming toward? I won't tell anyone if you don't want me to, it might postpone or diminish the benefits for folks. After your response to my comment on your post it was just like okay yeah I believe him, this is all relevant, I don't know shit, and I wanna know what the higher perspective is. What's getting balanced with all this?

Bentinho: It's subtle and far reaching stuff, half of which I don't have conscious knowledge of because there are so many people affected by my public choices these days, and I don't know consciously half of what they are dealing with or how they take it or what cascading ripple effects it generates. The beautiful thing about this 'mechanism' of being a shepherding consciousness, a mirror to the collective, is that I get to feel whether or not the probable benefit outweighs the trouble.

In intuitively expressing statements that cause ripple effects, I can feel whether it's necessary and beneficial or not to be an expression of something even before I know exactly how it's going to be beneficial. I have learned to recognize it when a 'package of expression' comes to me that wants to come through my bodies and find its expression in the world, usually for the purpose of generating greater balance and/or expansion in a large group of people.

But there are certain effects I can share of which I am aware so far with my recent chain of expressions, and they're pretty easy to witness by simply seeing how people have responded to my last few posts on Facebook:

• People were triggered to think more for themselves.
• People felt inspired to think/create more for themselves.
• People were inspired to step up in one way or another as a community of co-creators.
• People were made to think how much they value an awakened civilization, and in what way they personally want to contribute to that and be a part of it.
• People re-prioritized their lives, or at least certain aspects of it.
• Some people allowed themselves more permission to feel like they own the teachings within themselves because I showed a more human process.
• People were empowered to feel different degrees of compassion for another human being (me mostly in this case, but it increases their ability to feel compassion for all of life).
• People were able to pull me off some of their subconscious pedestals and really own their own power.
• People were able to relate to me more and open their own hearts and vulnerability/love more as a result.

There are many other effects but these are the general once I've observed so far.

Cory: Nice yeah that does feel like the main 'result' so far — people getting empowered and taking more ownership of their lives. 

Jesus so I'm starting to sense this a little-- it feels scary as hell. Like your 'human' is going through the ringer, and you know it's about to go down and be hard and trigger people and be unpopular and make you look bad, but it feels true so you don't even question it. You just rest in the confidence that it's for the best and you patiently observe the effects along with the rest of us? It's like an utter detachment from the human experience, but it looks the opposite. Lord. I've heard you talk about this stuff before but to feel it now is daunting / contracting. So really you're just sitting back, so confident and identified with the 'real you'-- the nonhuman you-- that none of the human drama or repercussions or negative feedback lands for you? You just know to follow it because it feels true? 

Makes me wonder tho like, when do you take feedback from people? Or do you not? Do you have any blindspots that others can expose for you?

Bentinho: All of the above feels true except I cannot say that none of the drama ever lands for me. My bodies are engaged in this process and so I am made to feel at least some of the repercussions of the initial expressions. It does land sometimes and even hits a personal note still at times. Especially when people don't seem to respond with any degree of understanding the deeper reason behind the expression, when they lose utter faith in me as their beloved friend/teacher (which means I crossed their threshold of believability), when they display their blindness to anything but their own judgments, or when I get sucked in for a second tempted to respond from a place of partiality (I've learned to allow this less and less), or when friends don't understand it or support it and I feel the chosen expression causes a rift in my core circle of friends and co-creators.

This last version of the repercussions usually means I have to wait until the misperceptions get big enough, or the rift gets big enough, to where they initiate some kind of flawed behavior toward me that trigger a conversation, or until they simply initiate a conversation (which they are usually a bit scared of it seems). I generally don't feel I have the permission to interfere with their process of dealing with their projections of me. But in the meantime, the friendship and the ability to work together in any meaningful way is severed until further notice.

Since some version or level of this partial expression and the consequent projections are generally always going on, having the experience of real friends is a bit of a rare commodity for me. But I happily accept this consequence as it allows me to be of service more than if I were to play it safe and always seem consistent outwardly. Maybe that time of silence or absence of any significant partial expressions will come some day, when I can no longer carry the energetic repercussions of playing with the mud, or when it feels no longer of service, and resign to complete absorption as I no longer make my vehicles available for these energetic requests from the collective. We'll see.

As to your question regarding whether I take feedback or not: 

I do take feedback to heart, and it does allow me to see more of myself, it just rarely is the way people think it is. So they may point something out in me that they think comes from an unconscious place, but it generally doesn't. Then I learn something else as a result of their interaction with me, or their mistrust of me, which shows me something or teaches me more about how to be even cleaner in these types of situations next time, how to take things even less personally. But yes the feedback people give me seems to rarely be as it seems. Rarely is it accurate. I always have to dig through to find something else valuable in the feedback that was not directly stated. But I do generally take it to heart and extract benefit/learning from it.              

And what has always seemed tricky to me to admit and to fully surrender to is that oftentimes it actually seems that by me not even considering people's feedback, I actually remain the purest and cleanest that I can during such a process. The more I take on other people's views, the more the original intention tends to be obscured or distorted along the way. So during this process over the past decade or so, I have learned to trust myself more and more because every time I mistrust myself and take people's feedback to mean something about myself, I tend to wobble or not be as effective or clear as I can be. But there is this thing in our society, this fear of people who don't take feedback, and I think I've taken that too heart a little too much: that in order to remain a good, pure human being, you have to take everybody's feedback seriously. Especially as a spiritual teacher this has been ingrained in me by the spiritual community from an early age onwards. Sometimes I find I am still shedding layers of insecurity which I can trace back to this sense of mistrust of myself because that's what has been necessary to completely scrutinize myself and make sure I kept being pure in my intentions and actions. But nowadays, this seems less and less useful. And it's a tad scary to fully submit to this realization, for it could potentially mean I lose more of my connection to how people see life. Which can be both a good and a risky thing. It can make one ungrounded.

So it's a tricky balance because one also doesn't want to completely decide that one is always right and other people simply don't get this yet until they reach true emptiness of self. I have to walk a thin line between knowing I can always see more about myself and thus welcoming any reflections of others I can get, and on the other hand trusting myself so fully that my initial impulse/intuition gets distorted as little as possible by other people's thoughts and opinions along the way. It's quite the puzzle sometimes, but the challenge has made me who I am today. It teaches me undying faith in my true Self/God/Source.

I'm grateful for my public life. I cannot imagine being just a single person living in concern of only its own life. That'd be way too simple/boring for my mind. I think I'd go more crazy in that type of an existence than my mirroring public life could ever cause me to become. [knock on wood]