The Empty Cup
25 May 2009
We welcome, we welcome you here. Maybe you can take a few moments to accept that. We recognise that you desire insight and direction here, and we will bring that. But before we do, allow us first to extend our welcome.
And we say allow us, because it is also possible that you do not allow it, that you flip over this part of the conversation quickly in order to get to the more important things. It is possible that you sit where you are and you hear us, but you do not really hold the truth of what we are bringing deeply in you heart. So let us say it again: We welcome you. That means we want you. It means we love you coming. It means that to connect with you like this is wonderful.
If you can just accept even a little bit of that, maybe your understanding of who you are will begin to become accurate. We cannot convince you of who you are. We can’t write out an essay telling you the truth about your beauty and your bravery and your ability to make a difference to the world around you. We can’t write an essay and present it to you, and that will mean you accept it. No. We can offer up to you, and we will today, a fuller idea of who you are. But we cannot choose that you accept that. The last decision is always left to the human being.
God doesn’t get in the way of your choices, as maybe you have noticed. God can bring you towards people, or places or opportunities. God can also bring to you understandings and insights. But God cannot decide on your behalf what you will take, and what you will reject. So we will offer here to you today, and we have begun already, some ideas about the truth of you. But it will be your choice whether to believe that or not, whether to accept it or not, and whether to begin to live that, step by step, or not.
We are very delighted to be like this with you. It’s so beautiful for us to see your, and we’re going to call it, your unknowingness. Maybe that surprises you. Maybe you think it’s better to be in the world in a state of real knowing and sureness. Maybe you think the ones in the world who are the most blessed and the most productive are the ones who know themselves, and who know the world and the way it works. We want to say something different to you.
Let us put it in an analogy for you. Let us say that you are holding a cup, and let us say that it is full of delicious coffee. It’s coffee that you have been drinking for years. You know it, you are in a state of knowingness, you know this coffee, and you are in a state of havingness, because you have this coffee in your cup. Imagine there arrives a waiter near to you, and she is carrying a pot of magnificent Turkish coffee. And she says that it is the best she has ever tasted. You have only had one or two sips of your cup, and she comes along to offer you something better. If you hold out your cup and she pours the brilliant new coffee into it, then very soon your cup is going to spill over, and you will just have a mixture of the old coffee that you know and the new coffee that you don’t.
The other option that you have is to say “No, thank you” to the better coffee, because you’ve got what you need. And the third option that you have is to throw out that coffee that you have. You know it’s good, and you’ve got it, but you take the risk of throwing it out and having your cup filled with something that proves to be infinitely better. And you never go back to what you knew.
We are illustrating to you here the benefit of not knowing. Where you are in your life at the moment is that you have an empty cup. You are not full of knowing, and you are not full of having either. And, if we may as bold as to say, that is the most beautiful position from which to reinvent yourself, from which you can begin to re-imagine life.
The ones that are too full of knowing and too full of having, are the ones who miss out on the benefit of a new experience, a better experience. That delicious Turkish coffee will not be theirs until they give permission to empty their cup. New experiences, or what some are calling transformation, is only possible when you have been prepared to have an empty cup, when you’ve been prepared to not know, and to not have. It is not the ones who are full of having and full of knowing who regularly experience transformation to much better states of living, it is not those. Ones who are so full of knowing and so full of having want to ensure that they hang onto it, so they are not the ones who give permission for metamorphosis. We know you want metamorphosis, we know. And because you want it, it is yours to have.
Not everyone in the world is programmed with the same desires. Not everyone wants it. You imagine everyone wants metamorphosis, transformation, emergence into their most beautiful life, but not all choose it. We see, we see, from your idealisation and identification with the butterfly, we see that what you are saying is that you want metamorphosis. No less than that. You want what the butterfly does. It changes from one way of being into a completely different lighter, freer way of being.
But first, if you notice this with the butterfly, first it has to stop being what it is. There is a period when the butterfly is no longer a caterpillar, and is not yet a butterfly. In that time the butterfly is in the cocoon, and the magic is happening. But before the magic happens, that little caterpillar must be prepared to throw away, to give up, its very identity. If the caterpillar was not prepared to stop being a caterpillar, if he was clinging onto himself as a caterpillar, then it couldn’t go through the cocooning phase, and certainly could not emerge as a butterfly. That’s exactly the same as we were talking about earlier - if you are not prepared to throw out the coffee you know, you have no chance of experiencing something infinitely better.
What we’re saying to you is this: before metamorphosis can happen, everybody has to be at a place where they don’t know. Otherwise they will not accept the new. And it takes many people, hard, hard work, and sometimes years of pain, before they will acknowledge that they do not know, and before they have a point where they do not have all the answers, all the awareness, all the plans. And you are already there.
You are an empty cup, you are not full of your own sureness, you are not full of a preset idea of who you are and who you should be. You are not attached to yourself as being this kind of way, you are not attached to a career, you are not attached even to a place, and that is the very best kind of openness there can be.
We know it’s frightening to have an empty cup. We know you look at other people, and they have full cups, and you think that that is right, and you think that they are better, and they are more powerful, because they have full cups of coffee and they are drinking what they know, they have a lot of knowledge, and they have a lot of having, they have a lot. And we know you think that it is better to have a full cup of coffee, than an empty.
We’re not saying that it’s wonderful to life forever with an empty cup. We know that it’s pleasurable to drink coffee - we’ll continue using our analogy - but what we are saying is that only those who are prepared to sit with an empty cup for some time are those who will have the even better coffee. Which is our way of saying to you that only when you are prepared at a certain set of times in your life, only when you are prepared to not know, and only when you are prepared to not have, can you be wide open enough to allow for your biggest metamorphosis.
The caterpillar first has to go through an intense period of unknowing. For a while, while the caterpillar is in the cocoon, he is neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly. For a while - hear us carefully - for a while the caterpillar has no identity. He’s no longer crawling on the ground and eating as many leaves as he can find. He’s no longer participating in the world at all, have you noticed? There is a period when the caterpillar is not in the world, and is not having an identity, of any kind. He’s not a caterpillar and he’s not something else. He also doesn’t know what he’s turning into, have you noticed that too?
The reason that your soul loves butterflies is because the journey of the butterfly is also the journey of you. But, we are talking to you in detail about the journey of the butterfly, because people forget that the butterfly was first something very different. And they forget that for a while the butterfly was nothing at all. They forget that. They just see a beautiful free creature, living as she chooses, but they forget the journey. And they forget what steps that butterfly had to take before emerging in that way. And one of those steps includes where you are now, which is having an empty cup, not knowing their path. Not knowing who you are. Not knowing the answers, not knowing the right way to live, not knowing the path to God, and so on.
It’s very few human beings who are brave enough to sit long enough with the not knowing, with the empty cup. It’s very few who are brave enough to sit there, and even fewer who are brave enough to talk about what it is like sitting there. You think it’s wrong to have an empty cup. And we think it’s part of what is required for full metamorphosis. You think it is wrong not to have a certain and clear identity, and we think it is what many people are missing, and so they are transforming a little bit, but not to the degree that the butterfly metamorphisises.
So, even though, we can recognise and respect the place that you are in as being fearful and unsure. even though we know that according to the world it’s better that you know and are sure, even though we see you comparing yourself to other people and you think you’re falling short because your cup is empty, even through all that, we feel excitement at the space around you.
So many people are so full that we can’t possibly bring them something new, something better. They are full of their own identity, for example, they are so sure of themselves as a teacher, or as a healer, or as a poet, or as a mother, they are so sure of that identity, that it begins to get very full around them. Others are very full because of all they know: they know exactly what is the way to live, they know exactly how to manifest dreams, they know exactly how love works, they know exactly how to raise children, they know exactly how to run businesses and make money. And they are so full of what they know that there is no space for us to bring something better. They don’t even hear us knocking on the door, they are so full. Others are so full of having all the things that they have around them, all the gadgets, all the entertainment, all the space to live in and take care of, all the friends, all the engagements. They are so full of having, and doing, that they also don’t leave enough room for Divinity to trickle in, let alone for enough Divinity to come in to create a metamorphosis equal to that of the butterfly.
So here you sit, with an empty cup, with space around you. You have space. You have space in your identity, because you don’t know who you are. You have space within your time, because you are not attached to a requirement of a job at this moment. You have space even around where you are going to live, which is unusual. We invite you to do the unthinkable, and that is to sit with your empty cup, and if you can, to start to be thankful. There is no reason for you, and it will not be, to sit with an empty cup for very long. We will move into your path that which can assist you to begin to fill your cup again, to begin to refashion your identity and the other parts of your life. That will come. But if you rush this emptiness, if you are too scared of it, if you are too resistant to your own un-sureness, then you can go and force your cup to be filled, but it won’t be with the very best quality of Turkish coffee available. It will be something less perfect. Many people do that all the time, there are very few who have the courage to sit with emptiness for very long, and lots of them, in resisting the emptiness, go and fill their cup with whatever comes along, just not to sit with the unknowingness. When they do that - and it is okay because one day they too will taste the Turkish coffee, one day they too will fly as a butterfly - they are delaying it. They are going around in the same cycle, over and over, and that’s not required.
So we invite you, and we are going even to close this conversation soon, because at the moment your emptiness, and your unknowing are the most beautiful parts of you. You find them so ugly, you find them so undesirable. You feel a lesser human being because you don’t know. You call yourself lost, we simply say you have an empty cup. And we hope we have made it clear to you that there’s a certain kind of beauty, and of grace in the experience of not being sure, of not knowing. We know that it pulls at the deepest parts of you, and we know it raises resistance, and we know it raises in you self-hatred, we can feel that, but that’s not a reason to run away from the emptiness too soon.
Give yourself the respect you deserve for being in a place of not knowing. Give yourself enough time with an empty cup to allow for that cup to be filled with the very best quality of experience possible, instead of just a substitute. You know what it’s like to make a choice as a substitute, instead of waiting for something better, you just take what’s here now. That’s not wrong, but it does put you into a cycle that you might have avoided.
And so this time, this time, we’re asking something even bigger of you, we’re asking you to change the way you think about yourself and about not knowing. We ask you instead of using the word lost, to use the word empty. Yes, you are empty now, we feel that, and that is the only way to allow yourself to be filled with something superior than you used to have. So, for the moment, we invite you just to rest. It’s okay not to move, it’s okay to be unsure. You have a wonderful blank slate, don’t rush the filling of it. There are people living the kind of full and sure life that you think is amazing, and what are they desiring in their innermost hearts? A bit of emptiness, a bit of space, a bit of people not wanting them all the time, so there is beautify in where you are.
But as we said earlier, we can bring you that understanding, but it is you who chooses to be.
Thank you.
This reading has been slightly edited by Angela to facilitate easy
reading and understanding.
© Angela Deutschmann
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