Eastern Sierras July, 2008
Santosha Ma: Anybody can like music, but that does not mean you are a musician. You can talk about how much you like about music, and you can say, ‘I like that song,’ but it does not mean you have the experience of someone who has actually spent countless years and days learning something. But in our culture, because we have affluence and we have access to almost anybody’s experience – people who have real experience – there is something about that we like. We can study it for just the information, instead of the experience. Now we can be this big conceited ego in this little pond, and actually have no experience. The experience we have is actually nothing.
That is what the modern-day ego is about. You can read all the books about people who do incredible things. We can watch shows about it. You can like those things, but you will not actually go and do any of it. You will just soak in all the information you can get, go around and feed on information as if you are actually just like someone who struggled day in and day out in experience with it. Because if you had entered the day-to-day experience of it, maybe you would just be mediocre at it, you never know!
Devotee: You do not want to find that out! (laughter)
Santosha Ma: Maybe! Yes, if you do not want to do the work.
Devotee: For some they do not want to get clear…
Santosha Ma: Yes, because what you are more interested in is the ‘hero persona’ than the actual work, the actual thing…
Devotee: The actual learning you get.
Santosha Ma: The actual thing; you do not actually care about being a musician; you only care about looking like you are a musician. Abby only wants to look like she has learned how to drive. She does not want to actually learn how to drive better. She sees no reason why she should drive better. Absolutely no reason.
Devotee: Well, if she has another accident maybe she could see a reason!
Santosha Ma: But people get in accidents, and that does not convince them they should be better drivers, does it?
Devotees: No.
Santosha Ma: People do all types of bad things that produce diseases in their body, like eating really bad diets; they don’t actually care do they?
Devotees: No.
Santosha Ma: No. It seems like we are so programmed – just for a certain band of experience and nothing else – and we cannot really do anything else. But the ego can do one thing – invent an identity around something that we do not really experience. The ego is really good at that.
That has nothing to do with the transmission of enlightenment.
Devotee: I can remember there being guys in college, who used to attend the Black Studies and Political Studies classes who just wanted to take that stuff and put it into being this “rap guy” persona who was educated. It was really weird. It was not like they were really moved to do something in the world, or they were trying to get something done. It was just cut-and-paste-ing.
Santosha Ma: Yes. The mind can do that. See, identity is created through persistent experience. You become a musician by persisting in the experience of music, but nowadays you can cut and paste identity as long as you have the periphery information you get from someone who has actually had the experience—watching shows, reading books, taking a class.
Devotee: At that level, it is so many layers removed from the direct experience. It is like they were not actually there at the point in time that they are going to rap about.
Santosha Ma: You have been in the music field. Young musicians who learned how to play their instruments think they can figure out a formula for what people like and then deliver it to them, and be successful, make a product out of it. To a certain degree you might be able to do that if you really are a musician and you really have studied popular culture, and you also have the experience of pop culture. You cannot just be a musician and decide ‘Now I want to write popular songs and make a lot of money,’ if you have never done that, because you are not really a part of the popular culture.
Now Brittany Spears and Michael Jackson can do that until the day they die! Why? Because they have been totally immersed in experience in that kind of writing, in that kind of popular culture. They can do that forever. But let us say a classically trained musician comes in and says, “I want to learn how to do that because I want to make a lot of money!” They really wouldn’t be able to teach him how to do it. The same way they could not learn (Brittany Spears and Michael Jackson) how to be a classical musician, unless they were dedicated for years and years, and they just might be mediocre at it. They might never be good at it!
We are just programmed and karmically setup for certain kinds of experience. The ego can do a lot of gaming on it; that is not actual real experience. It is just mental fantasy — I looked on Google and now I know this, because I looked for it on Google—but you do not actually experience anything.
You do not know anything without experience. You cannot assume other people’s experience and now you are an expert. It is your experience, you have knowledge, you have gained knowledge. You can go study medicine for five years but if you never go on and have a hands-on with patients you are not going to be able to do it.
You can take people who have no written knowledge, no book knowledge, throw them out in the field, show them how to do stuff, and they can do it. It is really experience; but the modern-day ego, the mental ego – it is the generation or the culture of information now.
Information is seen as actual experience now. People are deluded to believe that information is the same as actual experience, that if you have information, you can succeed. But you cannot succeed by information! You do not succeed by information – with actual experience is how you succeed. In fact, if you never got information ahead of time, and were thrown into an experience, with someone who would help you to do it, with actual hands on, you would learn faster. You would be more capable. You might make it.
Now it is the age of information, and the more information you have, you don’t have to have experience. But you do not know anything without experience.
