Ram Dass Full Lecture Compilation: Volume 3 [Black Screen/No Music]

Foreigner This is a quote from a chapter called Naturally Releasing Everything You Encounter, on the one hand, when you consider disturbing emotions as emptiness, your practice becomes taking emptiness as the path and not disturbing emotions, so your practice It does not become the short path to the other hand, if you indulge in disturbing emotions thinking that they are something concrete, it is like eating a poisonous plant and it is the cause that unites you to samsara. Any disturbing emotion that may arise is wisdom the moment you relax with your natural mind, look directly into it. do not deliberately reject it consider it as a defect, concretely consent to it or consider it as a virtue the more I live my life in tune with the Dharma I try to live life dharmically live my life and see it become more dharmic certain words are heard very strongly like the word balance and the word patience I see myself going through life in which phenomena appear and some of them captivate me immensely and my consciousness enters into a relationship of thought with that particular phenomenon and at that moment I lose some balance, I lose ground spacious in which that phenomenon exists and then, sometimes I continue letting go of the thoughts, letting go of the thoughts, letting go of the thoughts, until only consciousness is left resting in that the world is lost and we have talked about the fire, whose fires purify and whose fires burn at different Moments A flywheel that would burn at one moment will later be purified, it depends on how involved your ego is or how involved you are in the particular phenomenon as it arises, but I experienced My Life as a balance dance of cultivation of the qualities of spaciousness, equanimity, Peace of happiness but I noticed that there were certain stages in my development and they still continue and are left over and far from my renunciant models where I have not yet

full

y re-entered the passions of life because I am afraid of them because I have afraid that they Captivate my Consciousness and throw me too much off my balance and I realize that you should not be afraid of anything.

I agree but I am afraid and what I see myself doing is one of those fires that I see. I am getting closer and closer to the edge of my fear of returning to a passionate Joy for something in the world, something I would have been afraid to do for fear of losing my quiet space and realizing that now my quiet space is still present, that en Still empty, clear, calm like yesterday and this is a beautiful exercise for me. I've been doing interviews and I'm doing an interview every six or seven minutes. Now many people have come for an interview.

They are getting ready. They spend time thinking about what they will say. lower it to the core of the essence of the Neurosis or to the core of the essence of the drama, the pain, confusion and they give me the core with all its juice and it is our core it is our juice it is our things and it is my things as well as its things, I want I mean, it's just us kids here that I look at because my job in that position and my job in life, but that position demands that I maintain that balance perfectly, that in that moment if I don't open my heart to the

full

ness of what It is the pain or the problem of Essence of that individual is what they experience is that I do not listen to them that I do not understand that they are alone within their situation because I kept myself separate I did not allow my empathy the passions that my empathy would engage.

I didn't let it happen, so I open myself up and sometimes my heart breaks because one person's situation is heartbreaking, but then the other part of me constantly goes back to heaven and you have the meditation that we have. We will do it later in that right consciousness, that presence that looks at the emotional states works for them, it does not push them, it does not attract them, it does not grab them and that part of me becomes a mirror for the other person. so that they see the way they are trapped, in other words, the two bits of information that my presence there offers are the empathy "We are all in this together" and the other is "but we don't need to be trapped like this." They are two bits of information and now I realize more and more that what we offer each other as human beings we offer each other an environment and that exercise keeps me in the environment of that balance so that it is an environment where if that other person wants to go out and play from the pain and suffering here I am and if they are in pain and suffering here I am but there is nothing in me that keeps them trapped in the pain and suffering and there is nothing in me that keeps them demand comes out and that is the interesting thing, it is the interesting thing about morality with respect to other human beings.

Consciousness Tim and I wrote an article in 1963 for the Harvard Review called The Politics of Consciousness in which we argued that each individual should have the right to do with their Consciousness as they choose and that is what a free system should allow. It's amazing how we don't do that in our society, but now I can see it. I see it particularly, for example, in the way of working with people who are approaching death because there is such a desire in someone who is on the path of the Dharma that that other person die your death, die the death that you think should die. to be released and, for me, I have learned over the years that this is not the case. work because when you push someone, even the most subtle model in your head should be different than what it is, it awakens in him at a very unconscious level rejecting a resistance, a subtle paranoia and I have noticed in my Human Relations that as I want less and less of each individual there is much less paranoia in them at a deep level and they are much more immediately available and the interesting thing is what does it mean to be a safe space for another human being a safe space means that you don't have an agenda but we have this tendency to have a model because we are trying to justify the way we live our lives, so for me that balance of words is a really key issue, I mean, there are so many little balances that we work with, the balance between the type of heart intuitive and thinking mind that Christine said when you think too much, the energy increases and there is a whole contraction in the system around thought and there is a tendency in the spiritual journey to denigrate thinking, denigrate the intellect, denigrate the analytical mind. and I think we as Westerners come out of our history where intellect is the highest power that we have and now that we're shifting the balance it's important that we don't throw the baby out with the bath and I think we're inclined to learn how to integrate these two things so that we can honor and delight in the beauty of the intellect without being trapped by it, as they say that the ego or the analytical mind is a beautiful servant and a terrible master and you can Feel that when looking at the world it conditions how the best of intellect, the best of Henry Kissinger, do not ultimately solve our problems because our problems require a different level of wisdom and we have worshiped knowledge instead of wisdom and wisdom has ended a very deep relationship.

Compassion Maharaji said to see everyone as God the reason I say all this is because you and I spend a lot of time in interpersonal relationships and the question I ask you since you and I will not go to monasteries to live our lives from that's one of the things we do often, wouldn't it be good to make it a yoga to make your Human Relationships a yoga to make your Human Relationships the vehicle to become free instead of the vehicle to stay trapped and what is required it is a change in the way one looks at relationships what they are about what their function is we have emerged from a psychological quagmire Freud and the whole personality people led us down a path it is difficult to appreciate how deep we are in it how deep of the junk of personality, how real it is.

I mean, you all think you have needs that need to be met, you all think you have personality identities that need to be honored, and even when I say that, I can feel you getting tense. Defending your right to have Those things are not true. I can feel them in me too. You know I have a right to be angry. Damn. I will do that. You know there's no rush. When you finish that journey, we will still be here because consciousness does not come in time. just here you want to enjoy your Neurosis in Joy, enjoy, have more, have other help, really escalate, we have become so into this, so you are either getting into this by abusing this or that, or you spend the rest of your life to get out of that, which is giving so much juice to that plane of reality and looking at your relationships from the point of view of your separation, how will you satisfy my needs?

I'll be who you need me to be if I know who I need you to be now that kind of symbiosis is fine if you don't get caught up in it but if you get caught up in it it's a nightmare it's a nightmare rooted in your sense of separation it's like feeding the illusion of separation , which is the fundamental cause of pain, then if the game is to be happy, the question is whether meeting your needs makes you happy and whether meeting your needs makes you happier than not meeting your needs. It's interesting, it does for the Right now there's no doubt about it, but if you notice that when you live in the realm of needs, the moment one ends, another appears, you have a hierarchy of needs, like a motivational hierarchy. .

I need food now, I need ice cream, now I need television. now I need a cold drink now I need popcorn now I need to go to bed if you notice you just go from one need to another and each one is uh and then oh and then oh and then ah it's extraordinary it's extraordinary now these all happen all the time we all have needs and desires we all have all things but just as I do not go around being a bald man I am relatively bald speaking for those of you who do not have eyes to see but My Consciousness is not full of baldness, it is also safe in my hierarchy of desires.

If I have the yogic powers that Patanjali talks about, I will create a beautiful head of hair for myself on a whim, just uh, I did it in the astral. plane so those of you who can see know and if you see the way people imbed themselves in their personalities, you can look at someone and the way they stand, the way they dress the muscles in their face, the redundancy It's amazing of a person who says this is what I am this is what they basically say this is what I think I am this is what I think I am this is what I think I am so you see helpless people falling this is what I believe that I am this is who I think so you see Bankers this is what I think I am this is what I think I am see Cara says this is what I think I am this is what I am just chill hippies hey man this is what I think I am Hey honey, this is what I am and everyone gives you a little Matrix, they're walking down the street with it, straight out of the Doctor Strange comics, these huge mines.

Nets and the net goes out and it catches you and immediately you enter the I'll make believe that you are who you think you are if you make believe that I am who I think I am so that you don't even look to see who it is, you don't see God as your only Dude, you don't. You don't see that it could be God and you crawl, you see who they think they are and you respond to it, so they all come into the realm of personality, they make it real and then they interact and then they look at each other and when you think that your personality is real, that's all you see when you look at other people, you don't see the other planes of consciousness.

I like the image of the man in a rowboat rowing through the fog and he hits another boat and hurtles towards the other boatman, why? Don't look where you're going and the fog clears for a moment and there's no one on the other boat, it was just floating and you left because at that moment the plane of Consciousness moved, there was no one there, well, imagine there's no one there. nowhere, there is only one of us, that is just consciousness, there is no one to talk to. Can you and I engage in dialogue knowing that neither of us are real?

Can we have needs without really thinking about them like who we are, where we live? It seems to me that we bond through roles through personality structures through all of these things these are the vehicles through which we meet these are the vehicles identification with the vehicle becomes a tremendous trap and part of the Relationship yoga is finding ourselves through the vehicle of all those things, but recognize that through the process of relationship, my relationship with you, let's find a way not to get caught up in that, together, you help me and I will help you so that we can be in the roles in a kind of celebration.

In a free and playful way, I mean, take everything you're doing in your life and instead of characterizing it now as a need and a pain and a problem that needs to be solved like it used to be with Tim Leary and the world would fall apart, believe me, all cars. in the parking lot everyone would be broken these were new cars we had bought the boiler would have exploded we were in debt everything and I would say Timothy we have a problem say how many times do I have to tell you Richard no I don't have a problem we need a plan it was like a small change of conscience.

You know, I've had a number of friends who have helped me escape my own mind time and time again. It is a great blessing to have them through humor. I remember. Once we were driving across the country witha friend and we were driving and I was busy being neurotic to get somewhere and check the oil and get to the gorge, yeah, and we were passing a store that was the Grand Union supermarket and he says Grand Union. I think I'm looking at the map to figure out where we're going to have lunch, you know, and he's busy with Grand Union, but it would fall into my head.

Consciousness, like from a distance slowly seeps in until, oh man, ya you know, it flies, United, it merges, it makes them all dead end, just constantly flipping, flipping consciousness. I'm just playing with all these things so that you think of the relationship as yoga, I mean my history of being a therapist and having clients, was that during that time my psychodynamics were such that I did not rest in my being but in a feeling of psychodynamic insufficiency that found satisfaction in proving myself in the world and in others. People's eyes are something I'm sure someone here understands when I finally become a therapist.

I really needed to be a therapist and I needed my patience to be patient. They were called patients and he needed to cure them. I didn't need them. heal them because then they would leave me and then I would have to go find another one, so I needed them to be healed and deeply appreciate how I was healing them, but I needed them to remain patient, I mean. I was going to sit next to the desk with the knee hole and I had the clipboard. I mean, now you think about this pathology in terms of where we've come in the years since this was 30 years ago, but I realize it now. when I look at my Dynamics how punitive I was with someone who came to me who was strong who didn't really need me in that way who wanted to be free, I mean I say jokingly but isn't it so funny that if I in those days met who who I am today who came to your office would hospitalize you who I am now would be a huge threat to who I was then so I invite you to examine the way your identity with your roles and your personality are creating dynamics a very rigid system with other people and if you are either using relationships or not to free yourself from that and you realize you are trapped in them in the first place.

I mean, I wrote a chapter on how I can help the so-called helpers. prison the way you start helping because it makes you feel right it relieves suffering it's all good things so you go in I'm a Helper and I realized by examining the Dynamics of my own help and the help of the people around me He told me what how disempowering this was to everyone around them, how helpless people were needed to help and I was seeing how you can give something to someone in a way where you identify with the giver, forcing them to be the recipient or you can give them to someone to someone and still not get caught up in give and take, but simply be in shared consciousness.

It's like when I give these beads from my right hand to my left hand, the right hand didn't get caught up in giving and the left hand did. Not getting caught up in receiving there was no giver there was no receiver and yet there was a giver and a receiver that's the key there was not a giver and a receiver and yet there was a receiver given how do you play the roles? how do you have the needs without? being trapped in them and the first part is, like your girlfriend said, realizing that you're in prison, realizing that you're trapped, not really, but you were, you're thinking that you're trapped and what that realization does is it changes the way you look at your life experiences I remember with uh I've talked about this many times but I was with Emmanuel my I told Emmanuel what am I doing on Earth who made this terrible mistake I mean what am I doing on this plane this is nonsense these are all these scoundrels and bandits and legal people and lustful people.

I do not belong here. I am too pure for this and he said ramdas, you are in school, why don't you try taking the syllabus. Thank you, fascinated. For me that was a good way of saying it is a good way of saying it it's the same on the subject of entering into your passion or as Alan Watts once told me Richard you are too attached to the void I mean I was moving away the form is too much and the form becomes the curriculum the form is the projection of the mind, what forms you see, that is your karma writ large and the question of freeing yourself from those attachments not to not be in them but to be in them and not in them now you have the possibility of being with other people who are not trapped and who are always in that spacious consciousness.

You saw two of them on TV last night. The beautiful example of Ramona Maharshi, always so simple, present and loving, that mixture of compassion and emptiness. That's how they come together, let me tell you a little story. I think I was in Madras and I met a man who was about 50 years old I guess, and he had grown up when he was a little boy near Ramana maharshi where he used to sit. his knee and all that and then he grew up and became an army officer and now he was like retired or something and he said one day he said that an English gentleman came to the ashram and he said that this English gentleman was the head of a large set of business and one of them was from England but one of his business was in Madras and the businessman was having trouble sleeping and he was very agitated and very upset and the manager of his Madras store said that one business said You should meet this holy on the Arunachella level of anomaly, so the Englishman agreed and flew to India on a seaplane while the story was being told, whatever that means, I guess a seaplane and came to Madras and his manager found him. took him to see Ramana. maharshi and he was going to stay there for several weeks and he walked into the hall and the hall was silent everyone was sitting there and he sat there and nothing happened at this time this is a very successful businessman and he started getting more and more.

Agitated and about 15 minutes passed before he couldn't take it anymore and stood up and said, "I'm leaving here, this is nonsense, I can't spend my time this way," and Romana Maharshi, who rarely spoke , said: sir, before you leave, could you do me a favor and remind you why you said yes? Would you be kind enough to write a note to his wife? What a strange request. That's fine, if that's what he wants. He brought her paper and a pen and she wrote to him. Dear Hilda, I didn't find what I was looking for here. I'll be back on Tuesday.

Did you water the plants? And while Doris was going to the dentist, she signed Henry and he finished the note and Ramona Maharshi reached out and the note was getting hot. Ramona maharshi folded it and put it under her bare buttock and said would you be so kind as to stay with me for five more minutes? The man said okay, he sat down and they sat there for five minutes and then Ramona Maharshi got up and started to leave the room and when she passed the man she handed him the pocket book and then she left the room and the man man said: What kind of shit is this?

What am I doing? I came here. The guy is crazy and demented and he looks at the paper and he's on a different page and he opens it and says dear Harry I'm sorry you haven't found what you're looking for in India. I've ruined Doris's plans. I went to the dentist I would write a longer letter but the tall man with the turban who brought you a note insists I respond very quickly signed Hilda now those are those are deceiving those are those are miracle stories they are really nothing at all but they are fun to listen to a story like that, realizing that the game is played on many levels, but surely the old baba said that I give, it was a miracle bomb, but he said that I give people what they want so that they want what I.

You give because you realize that freedom really has nothing to do with miracles at all miracles only remind you that it is not what you think it is and that frees you a little to be able to ask yourself what it is like and you wonder what it is like If you are hooked , then you get into a relationship with someone else, if you're lucky, it could be a friend, it could be a partner, it could be a co-worker, it could be someone you meet once a month or once a week or to study . with or something like that you will sign the contract let us help each other wake up let us help each other remember together let's use our relationship to remind ourselves that we are stuck that we don't have to be stuck that we are already free, we are just busy stuck and these are very, very valuable relationships and they are very rare.

I wish there were more. I wish we all had them all the time, but they are rare and there are many people who say they would. they like to get into it they don't really want to, they just want to be someone who wants to want to get into it and that's most of us because you get to the point where you're so familiar with holding on to who you think you are your psychodynamic that you take even the contract elegant to wake up and pre and use it at the service of your psychodynamics. I'm helping you wake up, for God's sake you're trapped and I'm free and I know I'm free 'cause I see how trapped you are, damn I love it, oh boy I see more, yeah, well I guess when you're working with another person to become free or to be free to be free together because becoming is another exaggeration, it implies that you have to go a certain distance as people say you have been in this for 30 years what hope is there for me I am only new Romana maharashi is a Good example, wasn't it?

She was 17 years old and hadn't read any of this. he didn't go to dharma talks he didn't meditate he didn't do anything he just laid down in his uncle's study and became enlightened oh he realized he was in line that's a good model that's a good reminder that there is no time involved in the process so that every moment in a relationship is the moment for us to be here together dancing through the form is like the form of

lecture

r and listener can you listen without getting caught up listening? Can I speak without getting hot while speaking? can you and I am together through this dance of talking and listening, does this talking and listening separate me from you because you are them or am I in the world of us sharing this together and bringing us closer?

I really see and I've seen that as I'm resting in being more deeply like I have all these little AIDS mechanisms, things like these techniques to remind me that they're all traps, they're all traps, all the methods of traps, I mean, meditation. It is a trap. You don't want to end up meditating, you want to end up free. Judaism is a trap. This is difficult for those who are Jewish. You don't want to end up Jewish. You want to end up free. I was just in Israel. and I tried to say things like that, sure then you delight in all the ways, you delight in your sexual identity and your religious identity and your social and economic identities and your political identities and all your family identities but you're not trapped in them but Work with this small five-line phrase, do not prolong the past, do not invite the future, do not alter your innate vigil, do not fear appearances, there is nothing more than that, do not prolong the past, do not invite the future, do not alter the innate, vigil, do not fear appearances. , It is not more than that.

Now, when I'm sitting in an interview and someone tells me a particularly difficult and emotionally engaging story, I can feel my fear of appearances coming up because I can feel my emotional body shutting down and I feel my fear of appearances coming up. consciousness entering that emotional um and at that moment do not prolong the past do not invite the future do not alter your innate wakefulness do not fear appearances it is nothing more than that and immediately there is a mechanism of writing and I return it is balance and in relationships there is a balance , you don't ignore personality stuff because it's still real for people, you fulfill it the way you can without getting lost in it, it's up to the most conscious person in a relationship to create this space. where the relationship can grow it may not be with maharaji and I would take something very seriously and he would just laugh and what stays with me over the years are things like giggling.

I stay with maharaji saying like this. I have that. on my toilet because maharaji was for me that process of reflection and yet he was passionately alive, he was scolding and throwing things and yelling at people and laughing and hugging and doing all these things and at the same time he was like a big mountain of empty. We were all busy with our personalities. Who can get his foot massaged? Who can come closer? Who will you give a name to? Who will he love more? There was a guy I knew from the United States and he was a little unbalanced at that time because he had had a bad love affair, so I told him to come to India and he came to India every time he tried to get close to Maharaji.

Maharaj you pushed him away and I got really angry at Maharaji because this guy really needed something so I brought him into the room and I made him some kind of maharaji, you know, I do this kind of thing and maharaji completely ignored him and I got angry every time more with maharaji and then, in a moment, Margie turned around. and I attended to him and within a week that guy had moved to first place in the entire Temple and he would come into the room when I couldn't and I absolutely hated that guy, I detested him, it was absolutely extraordinary because Maharaji saw where my mind was left. trapped I mean, he wasn't.

I'm just projecting this, he was just an old fool, but I experienced it like he sawstood behind maharaji and they would like the army to have Hanuman as their ishtidev, their divine forms, so Hanuman is on all the army flags in India and the army trucks would come from the police in front of the Chinese border and they would pass by the small temple in the himages and all the trucks would stop and everyone would enter the temple because it was a Hanuman temple for pranam and maharaji was there so everyone would line up for pranam and then they would give them food and then they would come back.

They were always fed in the temple and maharaji. He'd be sitting there and people, these army guys, would come up touching his feet, they'd walk away touching his feet, and he'd be talking to people and he only had one foot out there and they'd be touching his foot and they'd run away. touching his foot and walking away from time to time, he would turn to someone and say: your mother needs to hear from you, let me talk again and the boy what are you good for, I was standing behind him and I saw the guy leave, you know, like that and then he continued and then I saw most of the people walk by and you saw the density of them honoring the guru, meaning that they were in a definite, deep role-playing game. in honor of the guru, get food.

Wow, I mean, they weren't doing it to get food. By the way, I want to say that this is a very pure situation, it is far from finding that in the army. I know, but every once in a while someone would come and knock and look up and you would see something happen at that moment, you would just see something happen. and you knew that that person's entire life was going to be different from that moment on and that was all that was needed. A long time ago I realized that what Maharaji, his business with me took so long, all the rest was accumulating more because of my fear that something had not happened, is very far away and I would say that for most of you that has already happened , they're already hooked, it's over, you wouldn't be here if it weren't, that's what's so strange, unless you came by mistake or you know it, but you're more or less stubborn as to how quickly you'll give up , you know, damn? it's my personality it's real I need love I'm lonely good it's funny how you do it I'm an idiot she wasn't there for me when I really needed her oh god I was there for you many times before that boy oh boy you look at him he's like hey, hey Everybody, wow, wow, dig this, look at this, this is so thick, will they ever get out of this?

No I dont think so. That's what As the World Turns makes all its money on, your life stories. I mean, it's something we're all up to our eyeballs in all the time. Does anyone want to break free? Hey, hey, hey, on the way to the gorge, hey, hey, so relationships are stinking yoga because, just like institutions, they are an institution because it's so easy to fall asleep with them I won't bother your ego if you don't bother mine you don't understand I'm trying to enlighten myself but I really need this now I like that oh Well could you put one more so I know you really need it?

Well, you can't have it now. Oh well, I'm going home to mom. Good luck. We wait. I will be here. I'm getting scandalous. I have to stop quickly. I mean, I finally tried to get impatient with myself over all this crap, but and with everyone else, but it didn't help. I mean, I'm left with only one word: "How moving, how moving." I mean, how touching I am, oh boy, I can find myself in a place of such righteousness and such self-pity, so high. I have someone who lives in the house that I live in and, um, he's a complete bum and when I come over. home after a trip, he knows how I like to clean the house and I walk in and you have to walk through knee-deep garbage, look and I feel like I have the right to have a clean house, he took care of me, he would have cleaned the house. home and I sit in my room and I'm busy being and here I come home and I've been working and I've come home and there's no clean house and there's no yeah, poor baby and I'm so full of it and then somewhere from the external Consciousness, comes hey, hey, you know, hey, do you really want to live it at that level?

Do you really want to? I mean, I've been so in control of my life for so many years that I was always right and I was always in control of my scene and I was always miserable, isn't that so interesting? I always felt miserable because I was trapped inside my mental boxes. If you feel constricted and examine how much you are getting inside your little mental box of thinking, writing and controlling. and master your needs and it does not mean that you do not have desires, you do not have needs, of course, no. I mean this sometimes, when a Ben and Jerry's cookie dough ice cream is absolutely necessary, yeah, and I go to the store and I go to the freezer compartment and it's gone, oh, look what Maharaji made.

I was now the question is will I now drive from store to store and look, will I call Ben to send it or will I be someone who didn't get a cookie dough ice. cream that night yeah, it's interesting because the moment after, the moment I'm someone who didn't eat cookie dough ice cream that night, I'm just as happy as if I had the cookie dough and much thinner, you can feel my vein. blood vessels thanking me you must see how you get a wish and you get lost in it and how quickly you get lost in it and the thing is it's so rushed and mind-blowing God, we have to have cookie dough, I mean, I remember it in the old, ya you know those days you know the need for cookie dough is ice, well, they didn't have it then, but the need for chocolate chips, everyone has their own.

One of the pieces of wisdom I'm passing on is don't take yourself too seriously to take it. everything lighter to take everything a little more with hay Wavy Gravy Arc is a clown who is on the board of directors of Seva. He has always told us that if you don't have a sense of humor it's not fun and he has it and he has it. the serious glasses the Groucho Marx glasses on the Puja table and if someone in the board meeting when we talk about death destruction violence blindness malnutrition of children uses the word serious, they have to put on the serious glasses so that we do not drink No.

We take something too seriously because taking something seriously doesn't make it go away any faster, in fact, it keeps making it a little worse. When you think of all the things the Japanese man could have done, look how cleanly he made his way through another Kingdom to the hay and persimmon tree he didn't start with, oh poor man, you must be having a terrible time being drunk, he didn't reward the fact that he went out and then came back in. It's a great quote from D.H Lawrence that talks about when you come. By relating to people from freedom from the spacious from the deepest, they do not do violence to each other and the individuality of each one is not destroyed, but rather it is about imposing Unity on diverse people at the most superficial level. from the outside in, like me.

I am Jewish, therefore many of you are Protestants versus here we are beings, you want to be Protestants. I'll be Jewish, what do they say? That's a different level at the most superficial level, whether it's loving coercion or group processes to do violence and I've really heard it a lot I've heard it a lot I heard it at a social action retreat we had when it turned into chaos when the groups minority decided that they were not going to be pushed by some white people that a Meditation Retreat and they made a revolution and threw us out of power we had designed this wonderful Retreat for exhausted social activists we forgot that they were activists and for one day there was this incredible chaos, absolute chaos.

I mean they all had meetings and they didn't talk to everyone else, being right and you know each other, and then I mean there were so many subgroups that you didn't know which one to go to, do you go to the east coast men's one or you know, all the world had an ax to grind and then we had a kind of fishbowl where all the people who were oppressed went to the center of one group at a time, as if people of color were oppressed first because they had been oppressed the longest, I guess. and they, well, they went in there, we won't say that because that will start something else, they were and would be oppressed and we would all listen and then women came in and they were oppressed and we would all listen and then the gays and lesbians came and we all listened, they were all oppressed and we listened, then the white men came in and they were oppressed for being oppressors, that was repressive and we all listened and it was interesting that after we had all been through it and we had all hurt each other to share the awareness of our oppression, we all We had felt heard, we could all begin to be together in a collaborative way, but the day before that happened when we didn't know it. how to get out of this me and my Infinite Wisdom got up and said what is this all about, we are all one and they said don't give us that and you can see that three days later they said you know we are all the same but how did we have to come to that and I like this story in particular.

A shepherd was grazing his sheep when a passerby said what a nice flock of sheep you have. Could I ask you something about them of course? said the shepherd said the man how much would you say your sheep walk each day which ones are the white ones the

black

ones the white ones well the white ones walk about four miles a day and the

black

ones the black ones also how much grass would you say they eat each day? which whites are blacks whites well whites eat about four pounds of grass every day and blacks blacks also how much wool would you say they give each year well which ones are you afraid of whites are blacks whites well I would say The whites give about six pounds of wool each year when ruling and the blacks the blacks too The passerby was intrigued, can I ask you why you have this strange habit? to divide your sheep into white and black every time you answer one of my questions well said the shepherd that's natural the white ones are mine you see oh and the black ones are mine too after that invitation I just want to sit and gloat and shine and make everyone caress me.

I'm really cool. I didn't realize how good it was when you got old enough. It's interesting that you become an old man and get points just for earning a living. Someone came. He came up to me and said today, they were telling me what they do and they said, "You know, Dr. Fatiman is one of my professors and remembering when he was one of my students made me understand. I was starting to go like this this evening". I'm talking about promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path and then after we talk, Rama and Gangadar, who were two of my dear friends, and I will lead some chanting and, um, for those of you who want to do that spiritual practice.

The reason I talk about the promises and obstacles of the spiritual path is because Stan Groff couldn't contact me and that's why he created the title, but because I respect Stan a lot because he's one of my teachers, I felt that if he establishes the title I must rise to the occasion, so I'm going to talk about the promises and obstacles of the spiritual path, probably the same

lecture

, just keep working on it, you know, it was interesting to reflect on it today when I was preparing this. I'm talking primarily about spiritual work in the United States tonight because it's the one that has this feedback, it's the one that's been most visible to me these past few years, although I'm teaching more now in Europe and Australia. and abroad there is certainly a history of mysticism in America like Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and so on, but it was in the '60s that there was a dramatic awakening of spiritual consciousness in America and that is largely due to one orator . who has been here on this program, Dr.

Albert Hoffman, who I certainly want to honor. I don't know if this is a confidence, but the first time I met Dr. Hoffman was in Basel and we had lunch together in an open-air restaurant and I was meeting the head of research at Sandos, which from our point of view was quite a hit and it was a while before he described to me how once a year he went out to a field where the flowers were with his wife to explore with psychedelics and then I knew he was with a spearman, but this morning he talked about realities and the change in reality, and that was a major change that occurred in the '60s, was the change of what you would call absolute reality, thinking that what you saw and what you think.

I thought I understood that it was just one type of reality and that there were other types of reality. William James, of course, had been saying that many years before you remember his quote, our normal waking consciousness is nothing more than a type of Consciousness, while all separate, all separate. From there, from the film, they were separated from there by the slightest veils, other types of Consciousness are found, we could spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence, but we apply the necessary stimulus and there they are in their fullness and, of course , it's interesting. that William James said that when he was a professor at Harvard and I was expelled from William James Hall for doing what he said until the '60s, um, the main spiritual containers were the organized religions of this culture and they were mainly the holders of the ethical limitations of the culture and motivated people to ethical behavior through fear and through the internalized superego and were mainlymediators.

The mediator between you and God was the priest, so there was a class of priests and what the '60s initially did through psychedelics was a coup. That whole system was pushed aside because it made the relationship with God a direct experience once again of the individual, of course the Quakers have had that and they've had a long history just like other traditions, but in terms of the mainstream main thing, it started to be this. New concept that came to the culture that was spiritual and not formally religious most of the time, until then, the mystical experience had been practically denied and treated as irrelevant in our culture.

I was a social scientist and all eyes just despised him, I mean I was just cynically despised I wouldn't even read those things that rilka said about that period the only courage that this demanded of us to have courage for the strangest, the most unique , the most inexplicable thing we can find, that humanity in this sense has been cowardly. life endless damage the experiences that are called Visions the entire so-called spiritual world death all these things that are so closely related to us have been displaced from our lives by daily effort, that the sense with which we could have grasped them is atrophied by not say anything about God, but then in the 60s that changed and most of us recognized a part of our being that we had never known before, we experienced a part of our being that was not separate from the universe and we saw how much of our behavior It was based on the desire to alleviate the pain that came from our own separation.

It was the first time many of us broke away from the alienation we had known our entire adult lives and began to recognize the health of our intuition. compassionate hearts a health that had just been lost beneath the veil of our minds and the constructs our minds had created about who we were and who everyone else was; in other words, we transcended dualism and experienced our oneness of nature with all things and there was bliss and all kinds of wonderful feelings about it and uh that Its brilliance lasted until the mid-60s and there was the summer of love in '67.

And then, of course, it had started to change by then and it did become, um, but it's interesting how popular those ideas have become in the 25 years from when I lecture now to when I was lecturing in those days I I was speaking to audiences between the ages of 15 and 25 those were the explorers in those days and these meetings were like members of the Explorers Club and we were just comparing maps of you know the terrain of travel and 25 years later when I speak, Let's say, in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 1500 people and I say more or less the same thing, probably not to my credit, but I say the same thing that I said 25 years ago and I would say that the majority of those people, at least between 70 and 80 percent have never smoked drugs, have never consumed psychedelics, have never read Eastern mysticism and everyone says this now, how do you know?

Say how do you know and, of course. The reason they know this is because these values ​​represent the shift from that narrow view of reality to a relative reality that made all institutions available. If you look deep enough, all of that has permeated the mainstream culture so that, in some ways, a person today has many more choices about reality than they did at the time I was finishing school. graduate school, for example, as reflected in all the proliferation of new types of peripheral social institutions for education to understand what was happening to us. search for maps and the best maps that were available to us at the time that seemed to be readily available were oriental maps maps of Buddhism Hinduism um those traditions most of the Middle Eastern religions maps about direct mystical experience were part of esotericism rather from the exoteric religion and therefore they were sort of protected in a way, uh, Kabbalah and Hasidism were not as popular as they are now.

Sufism was not as popular as it is now, so in those early days we went to Tibetan. The Book of the Dead and the Upanishads and the bahagavad-gita, things like that, um, now, um, and what we discovered was that, since this experience was happening to many of us, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, There were different styles for different people, different people interpreted the experience differently and people turn to different forms of practice to experience more or integrate what happened to them often only partly through psychedelics, of course, but a lot through that at that time in the '60s early '60s It had happened to us so dramatically that I remember Tim Leary and I had a graph on our wall at Millbrook Deter that was a curve that showed it was a geometrically ascending curve that showed how quickly everyone would light up and um uh, it involved putting LSD. in the water supply, but other than that, it wasn't terribly dramatic, well, and it seemed so inevitable and irrevocable because the experience was so powerful and so irreversible once it happened that we couldn't, we started surrounding ourselves with other people who had done it.

I experimented and very soon at Harvard we were considered a cult because people who had not experienced could no longer talk to us because we couldn't talk to them because they didn't know and that unbridgeable Gulf had begun to happen right now in our own Department of Social Relations , that kind of naive expectation that everything would be over immediately, we were denied all the information that we read, but we actually said well, we have a new way. because psychedelics are going to do what Buddhism couldn't do when Hinduism couldn't do because when the Buddha described how long we've been on the journey since he talked about reincarnation, you know the image he said, imagine a mountain of six miles long. six miles wide Six miles high and every hundred years a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak and passes the silk scarf over the mountain once every hundred years in the time it would take for the silk scarf to wear out. silk. the mountain, that's how long you've been doing this, so you take, then you look at this life and it's less than the blink of an eye, it's just and then I had a birth like that and then I like it's like a still photograph and All of those are births and with that kind of time perspective, you take your card off the wall, you start to relax a little bit now, but they are at the same time.

There is much spiritual literature that suggests urgency. Buddhists say, "Make it as difficult as possible." As you can, this is a beautiful birth, it is a rare experience for a human birth to work as hard as you can, which is just what Western achievers love to hear, of course Kabir said friend, wait for the guest while you are alive , jump into the experience. while you are alive that which you call Salvation belongs to the time before death if you do not break the strings while you are alive do you think your ghosts will do it after the idea that the soul will join the ecstasy just because the body is rotten that is everything fantasy what is found now is found so if you do not find anything now you will simply end up with an apartment in the city of death but if you make love with the Divine now in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire, so immerse yourself in the truth, find out who the teacher is.

He believes in the Great Sound, so there was this desire to move forward and we interpreted it as taking the whole spiritual journey and turning it into a course of achievement and there is a beautiful story about a Zen uh, a boy who goes to a Zen master and tells him Teacher, I know you have many students, he said, but if I study more than everyone else, how long will it take me to become enlightened, the teacher said. 10 years he said well if I work day and night and just double my efforts how long will it take the Master said 20 years and asked with one more additional achievement and the message said 30 years and said why do you keep adding years the teacher said well because you will only since you will have one eye on the goal there will only be one eye left to have on the work and it will slow you down enormously and in a way that was the situation that we became so attached to where we were going that we really had little time to deepen our practice to get there and that's something that's grown, we've grown to the point where we've developed patience and we've stopped counting and that's great. growth for a Western Consciousness to do that I mean, I do my spiritual practices because I do my spiritual practices and what will happen, will happen and whether I am going to be enlightened or free now or ten thousand births it doesn't matter to me because what else matters?

What else am I going to do? Well, I can't stop anyway, so it doesn't make any difference to me, but watch to make sure you don't get too caught up in your expectations about any practice. It's charming. story about nasruden, the lazy sufi mystic, he's kind of a wanderer, it's great, i mean, the nasruden stories are delightful, apart from the one i love, this isn't the one i'm telling, but it's the one about us entering the bank with a check to cash and he hands the check to the teller and the teller studies the check and the check looks wonderful, but Nas Rudin looks like a complete waif and he said sir, this check looks good, but can you identify yourself now in this room?

He reached into his pocket and took out a mirror and said yes, that's me, but the one I wanted to tell you about Nuss Rudin. He went to his neighbor to ask if he could borrow a big pot and his neighbor said: nice and rude, you know? You are very unreliable and I really treasure this big pot and I don't think I can give it to you and Nasruden said my whole family is coming. I really need it. I'll bring her back tomorrow. Finally, reluctantly, the neighbor gave the pot to Nasruden. Rudin took it home very grateful, grateful, the next day it was at the door with the pot and the neighbor is Delighted, he says that he is not rude and how wonderful he took the pot and inside the big pot there was a small pot, he said what is that, then Ruden said The big pot had a baby, so the neighbor of course was delighted, so the next week Nasruden came and said: I would like you to lend me your pot.

I'm going to celebrate another party. The neighbors said, of course, friendly. Ruden, take my pot, so be nice. Rudin took the pot the next day no Nots rooting the next day he met us rooting finally the neighbor went to the nursery and said nasruden where is my pot? Rudin said he died look at how he lets you absorb your own mind starting in the '60s, um, there was an influx of Eastern spiritual teachers. I remember going to the Avalon Ballroom in the company of Sufi Sam to hear Alan Ginsburg introduce AC bhakti vedanta, who was going to sing this strange chant called Hari Krishna and this was in the early '60s and the Beatles of Of Course We Were Flying with Maharishi Mahesh at one point I went with a group of hippies from Haight Ashbury.

I was the eldest of that group to meet with the Hopi Elders at Hota Villa to organize a Hopi hippie good at the Grand Canyon because we were honoring them as our elders but they didn't really want to be honored by us I don't think because when we went there we made terrible mistakes we gave feathers to the children and some of us did Love for the uh well because I really didn't know how to honor the lineages properly and that's something we learned over these years through our connection to the Eastern traditions , something about the lineages and, of course, the problem with the lineages was how much of the lineages we would incorporate as they were from the East and how much we would modify them and the problem with all that was that to modify them you have to modify them from within, you cannot modify them from within. outside and what many Westerners began to do was take on a tradition.

Let's say from Mahayana Buddhism and let's say, that's fine for the Tibetan Buddhists, but actually what we should do is this and they did it before we fully understood the practice from the depths of our interior. Carl Jung talks about Richard Wilhelm in his preface to Iching and he calls him a Gnostic intermediary and said that what he did was he put being Chinese into his blood and his cells so that he dreamed that way and then he brought it back to him. the culture and the interest of the Gnostic intermediaries. It's just that we were so eager to get ahead that we were really violating several of the lineages because we went west rather east and bought them, but we kept modifying them for our own convenience and comfort and because in the West it is much more of a cult of personality than East, we are much more focused on what I want, what I desire, what I need, and that is not true in Eastern cultures.

I mean, I might be more repressed there, but whatever. It is not a dominant theme and therefore many of the spiritual practices are not personality focused and therefore not immediately transferable to the West. um, I didn't really understand the lineage. I remember doing a television program with chogim baúl for Rinpoche. and uh, we were talking about detachment likemental quality that was so desirable and I said, well, if you are so detached, why don't you abandon your lineage? and he said, I'm not attached to everything. but my lineage and I said well you have a problem and it was because of my rudeness of not understanding the form of intimate love that one has with a method where one enters a method first as a kind of dilettante and then remains in the method of in a more or less fanatical way, then one comes out the other end and then one uses the method or uses it or honors it without being attached to it just because you become the sole bearer of that lineage, it's a whole. different place than where you carry a lineage Once you no longer need it and that was something I didn't understand at the time, well what we did was we gathered around our spiritual New Awakenings in all the ways we knew how to do it. to get high, so there were people who gathered around sexual freedom, there were people who gathered around drugs, there were people who gathered around singing, others around meditation and we had wonderful oriental names for them. , the satsang and the sangha, and um, the situation is that after a while most of them went from being very fresh, pure and joyful upon joining, they started to have boundaries around them, to have elitism, to have who was in them and who doesn't, and profess that their way was the only way and many of us have seen a lot of violence committed simply because of that simple concept that my way is the only way.

It reminded me in those days of that story of God and Satan walking down the street and they see this shiny object on the ground and God reaches down and picks it up and says Oh, that's right and Satan says oh yeah, here give it to me, I'll organize it and that was More or less what it felt like when it started to become institutionalized and structured in the '70s. And it was fashionable to be part of these great spiritual movements and they were beautiful and they got people incredibly elevated. The problem was that many of the Eastern teachers who came had come out of paths of renunciation primarily celibate, they were not. ready for Western women who were in the midst of their sexual freedom and feminism and could do anything and were absolutely vulnerable they just dropped like flies because these people were teachers they were not gurus a guru is a cooked goose a guru is is made a guru The Good the difference between a cave and a city does not make any difference for a guru for a teacher it makes a There is a lot of difference because a teacher points the way while a guru is the way and it is a very different quality what makes a guru is a mirror for you where you are not, that's all they do, but we can, we took every concept of Guru when we turned it into our need for a good father in a psychodynamic sense and we wanted the guru to do it to us when in reality what happens is that the guru is like a tree or a river and depending on your karma predispositions or Disposition you do it to yourself in presence and the guru is a presence that allows you to do it is a presence that does not trap you anywhere you just catch yourself and then um what happened was that we uh after a while We started applying our critical mind to the whole scene and I was surrounded by people gossiping about this spiritual teacher or that spiritual teacher and it seemed like They were all becoming knowledgeable about feet of clay and were busy deciding whether they could afford to receive a teaching from someone who was impure and sought impurities to protect himself because he did not understand the concept of surrender and thought that what you were doing was surrendering to another person as a person when what you are really surrendering to is the truth Ramana maharshi says that God, the Guru and the self are one and the same thing and then what you are surrendering to is your higher truth or your higher wisdom in the guru and it is an interesting topic that has been going on for many years and I We will talk about it on the next page, the topic of surrender and because surrender is a very unpleasant word for us in the West, it always has images of MacArthur and you know they are terrible images, you know that I accept your surrender and it is the sample. of the invulnerability of the neck and the fact that surrender is such a profound part of the spiritual path is something we have had to work hard to understand.

I'll come back to that as we learn more about the traditions, we'll realize that if we were going to incorporate what had happened to us through psychedelics, but we were going to use these other methods to stabilize and integrate them into our lives. We were going to have to do a lot of purification at first, but we made fun of it. It was like the Ten Commandments, who cares about you, you know, that's all old, all those uptight people and we can have all our stuff and then we started to see that you had to stop creating Karma to put your head in a place where it could rise. and not get down, that was the interesting question, how to get up and stay there, that was the way we used to say it, we don't say it that way, no, and that's why there was a big push for renunciation practices because the idea was that this earth plane is the illusion that is causing problems.

The best thing we can do is go up there, go out in a kind of La La Land, get very high, get to the place where everything is Divine and this is kind of the era where everyone ended up here anyway, that was kind of model of renunciation and then people felt that by giving up many things they would become much purer to be able to have deeper experiences and many did, but others simply ended up as horny celibates. It was like because they went back to collecting things as an achievement and Meister Eckhart said we should practice virtue, not to possess it and that was the problem, we tried to possess it and use it as marks on Our Sleeve about how pure we were. but even a little bit of Sheila or Yama or whatever your purification rituals are, of just not creating suffering, not stealing, not killing, not having adultery, not, you know, not causing much trouble, even that affected us and we started to have many, many. more spiritual experiences and that led to a time of such spiritual materialism.

I mean, it may baffle me because everyone was in Rapture or Bliss, everyone was having experiences of seeing radiant balls coming to talk to them. It was an incredible moment. Now all this is true. but the way we reacted was what was interesting because we fell in love with absolutely all the phenomena that occurred as a result of our practices, our meditation or our spiritual purification and we were really very vulnerable to spiritual materialism and we had a yes We had a Ford in the garage, we had an astral being in the bedroom and the Traditions warned us about this, they said don't get stuck like Buddhism says, don't get stuck in the johnnas in the trance states because you will go into trances and experience omniscience omnipotence omnipresence don't stay stuck in it just notice it nod and move on don't get caught up in it but we, uh, it was too tasty for us to let go and it continues to be quite tasty, it's very difficult to understand that spiritual freedom is very common, it's nothing special and that's what's valuable about it and we keep trying to turn it into something with all these powers, it generates a tremendous amount of energy because if you meditate, you calm your Pay attention just a little to the amount of energy that dissipates through your mind. of thinking monkey going from here to here, the moment you concentrate even a little bit through chanting or meditation or anything, you begin to tune into other planes of reality where there is an incredible Energy, it is as if If you were a toaster and you plugged your plug into 220 instead of 110 and everything fried and many people had these incredible experiences and continue to have these incredible experiences of energy or Shakti or what is often called Kundalini, which is the energy that rises. . the column and I remember the first time it happened to me.

I really thought he had hurt me. I mean, it was so violent when it started going up my spine that it felt like a thousand snakes were going up my spine and it reached my second chakra and I remember I ejaculated automatically and then it just kept going up and I was really scared, extremely scared because I wasn't expecting anything. so horrendous and I get calls all the time because I'm sure of the spiritual rise of Network and uh, Stan and Christina, who. I've done wonderful work with that organization because of the way I get calls often from people who have Kundalini experience who say I'm a therapist in Berkeley and these things happen to me and I ride my bike for six hours a day and I don't get tired and I can't sleep and I cry at the strangest times and I think I'm going crazy and I said well let me read you a list of all the symptoms I have on a copier and she said I thought I was the only one who had that.

I said no, it's They scared us or excited us or captured us and made us fall in love and we stopped to smell the pretty flowers. Many people, when they got on the plane where they experienced this power, brought their egos. Their egos rose with them and they interpreted it as my power and they embarked on a Messianic Journey where They tried to convince everyone that they were the ones and that was very painful for everyone, extremely painful. I remember a time with my brother who was in a mental hospital because he was Christ and he was doing terrible things like Christ turned out and there was a moment when the doctor, my brother and I gathered together in this hospital room and the doctor didn't allowed him to see anyone without the doctor present and I came with a beard and a dress and beads, my brother was in a blue suit and a tie and he was locked up and I was free, whose humor did not escape any of us. three, you know? and he said to me um we were talking about if the psychiatrist would ever know that he was God um the psychiatrist was writing on his clipboard very awkward I mean because my brother and I were really floating and then my brother said no You understand why I'm in a hospital and you're free you look like a crazy person and I said well I said do you think you're Christ he said yes I said well I'm Christ too he says no you don't understand I said that's it Why are they locking you up and then you tell someone it's not Christ?

Watch out and then, um, those were the messianic phenomena that happened along the way. Is this too heavy or are you still with me? It's okay, because I'm trying to cover. a lot of material a little bit quickly and I'm sorry, um, now many people, when the energy of their spiritual practices became so intense, they really lost the ground, they lost it on this plane and that is what constitutes the emergency network spiritual. has done it because it has been done to help these people because in India or other cultures, when that happens, they are called Maher Baba, they served those people, they were called mosques or God intoxicants and everyone knew that if someone became like Ananda, my mother, one of the greatest saints. of all time she was a Bengali woman, a very dignified woman and she spent about two years doing cartwheels in her front yard and taking off her sari and stuff that now in our culture is Bellevue material and in that culture it's ah, there's a Intoxicating God. we should take care of them in a temple so that there is a very uh we haven't had a support system for that kind of transformative transformation uh loss of ground that you need to go through sometimes and you go through the ground and then you get it back, a lot of people just went out you know , I remember in the early days the whole game was to get everyone out to let go of their minds and the heaviness, then you looked out and everyone was floating and I looked. half the audience now I want to say hey, take a breath, it's okay, it's not that heavy in life, the other heart I mean, come on, get your act together, learn your zip code, get a job, for God's sake, You know when you practice spirituals. work a little but you are not stable in your transformative experience your faith is wavering and that is when fanaticism reproduces strongly the mosquitoes of fanaticism reproduce in environments of wavering faith and that is really what happens to the majority of disciples in The spiritual scenes become much worse. when you meet, when you meet a spiritual teacher in any tradition, you meet a Zen master or a Hindu Buddhist Sufi, it's not American Indian, every time you meet a teacher, you know that you meet and recognize another amench that you know and like us. really here and don't sit around saying well, you're not following my path, so you're lesser, but all the disciples just below them usually go deep enough in their faith, but as far as they can, they haven't gotten out of the other end, because you see that what happens with a method is that for a method to work it has to catch you, if you try to delay your path, it doesn't work, you have to become a meditator, but if you end up being a meditator. you lost you want to end up free you are not a meditator there are many people who simply end up being meditators I have meditated for 42 years and you know when youthey look intensely you know seriously you know it's the golden chain of righteousness that trapped them again, but a method must trap you and finally, if it works, it self-destructs and you go through the other end and you're free from the method, that's the story or that's what Ramakrishna's gospel is so wonderful about. because he just went through the worship of Kali and then he went out and started exploring all the other methods, because once you go through your method, all the methods lead you to the same thing, people say, well, how do you do meditation Buddhist and you have a Hindu Guru and you're Jewish, you know, I say I don't have any problem, what's your problem?

That seems fine to me. In all shmias, Royal is all, there is only one God and the one has no name so there is no way, so that is it. Nirvana, I have no problem with that, what do you say? The righteousness we had. The way we approached the spiritual path had an element of righteousness and teachers came who really helped us a lot. Teacher. What helped me the most with my righteousness was probably Trump's ba

dass

ness, um, because, and what you look for in a really good teacher is that quality of scoundrel, not scoundrel, but scoundrel, and I remember when I was teaching at Naropa the first summer , uh, when Naropa started.

I was having a difficult time with Trump Rinpoche and one of the problems was that he had all his students drunk most of the time, he had them busy betting on high meat diets and I thought what kind of spiritual teacher is this. I understand my dilemma. I came out of a Hindu path of renunciation, you know, yes, Hindus are always afraid of falling into the abyss, so it's best to keep everything separate, but here he was just taking them to hell, the path to hell. as far as I was concerned and I was sitting judging oh I was judging oh I was when I think about when I looked at those same students a few years later, I saw students deep in the hundred thousand deep prostrations in the heaviest spiritual practices because they had taken them to through his obsessions and then into deeper practices, he wasn't afraid to do that, while most of the other Traditions were afraid to do that with fairies, which he would get lost along the way and that's what a Tantric master is not afraid to do. and tantrics are very exciting and terrifying and you never know if the tantric is just hung up on himself or if he is an exquisite master.

Look, and there's no way you can know if Raj Nisha's 92 roles were a ruse or really. a hanging indian, you know, I mean, you never know, all you know is that if you want to be free, you use them as hard as you can to be free and their karmic problems are their karmic problems, and that's the secret. I finally found out about the teachers, so our period was a period where they called us the me generation and that was because there was a narcissism, there was an inner work that we had to do and we still have to do, an inner work that we made us somewhat oblivious to our social roles in society, we were less interested in political things and, um, there was some metaphysical confusion around that, which is reflected in the difference, say, between um uh teravade and the buddhism. and Mahayana Buddhism, Teravatan Buddhism at its simplest, this is simplistic and we all agree on Jack Cornfield here, he knows I'm not serious, but the Terravidens in effect say look, my job is to become enlightened and then, If I enlighten myself, nothing. exists anyway, that solves the problem, Mahayana Buddhism says no one makes it until everyone makes it, so I might as well take the bodhisattva vow and stay back and help everyone because there is nothing, I can't go anywhere part until you too finish, you can see these.

There are two that are oversimplified, but they caught us a little because many of us said I have to work on myself to be free and others said I have to work with everyone else to help them be free. We have to be free together and part of Vietnam's anti-Vietnam action was part of we all have to work together and the inward turn of many of us who simply withdrew from political action was: I have to be free. Myself, although I could rationalize and say that I have to free myself so that when I do something for someone else I am not creating suffering through the attachments of my own mind, many people on the spiritual journey once they realize that Enlightenment it wasn't going to happen the day after tomorrow and once they started getting some powers because their mind calmed down, I mean if you do TM 20 minutes a day you will definitely calm down and start getting powers, there's no doubt about it.

So the question is, what are you doing? These are called cities and cities or powers. They are a terrible trap on the spiritual path. They are a real obstacle because one is inclined to want to use them to do good. I mean, that is the one and once you realize that. because the moment you see cities you realize that the game is not at all what you thought it was, for example, I was with um, okay, what story can I tell you? I was with one Sai Baba, the miracle man of South India, a beautiful man and he said Ram Das, let me give you something and I said no, Baba, I don't need anything.

I have a guru and he says no, let me give you something and he held out his hand to me and I got very close and I knew what he wanted. See, so I wasn't going to blink because I thought he might be a wizard. I'm really going to watch, so he was up here and my eyes were on his hand and he did this in this bluish light. appeared and turned into a medallion which he then gave me it was cold it looked like it had been made in Tijuana very poorly made it had a photo of it in a circle and I thought my God if he is going to bring something from somewhere Otherwise the least What he could do is bring me a crystal or something, so I told one of the swamis who were nearby.

I said, well, that's wonderful. I told him he produces these. He said oh, he doesn't produce them. He said no, he says no, he keeps them in a warehouse, he only moves them with his mind. I said, oh, well, if that's all he does, who the hell wants it? You know, I'll just give you one more because they're hard to stop. I'm not going to tell you my Guru Miracle stories because I wrote a book Miracle of love and you can read them all at your leisure. This was with Swami Muktananda, who was a great guy, he really was a real scoundrel and um.

He and I were traveling together on a pilgrimage to South India and one morning he woke me up at four in the morning and took me to a small temple and sat me down and whispered a mantra in my ear and then he started doing a Pooja and me. I fainted. I do not remember anything. About five hours later someone came and said Baba loves you and I had been there. I don't know where I was, but I felt good. I came back and the Mantra was in my head. I said, what is this Mantra that says it will give you great wealth and great power?

Now that I am a Jewish boy from Boston, my father told me that he wanted you to see, however, now I am a righteous spiritual seeker, you see, so I said that I only want them if you give me the same amount of compassion and love and he It says just do the mantra well. I could not stop. I mean, I was doing a day and a night waiting for wealth and power and I went back to his temple in Ganesh Puri and he put me to meditate in the inner room of the meditation hall and I went down there around two in the morning and They opened it with a big key and it was hot, it was like 110 degrees and I took off all my clothes. and I was lying there naked and I started with a mantra and they ripped me out of my body, it's like two in the morning and I get to another plane and I'm at a door and I look in and there's muktananda sitting at a table and I set it up so I go in and I kneel in front of him and I start flying over his head now this is all in the astral and I think wow, I'm flying, I always wanted to fly and then I was like flying and I started leaning and I went to write and I was back in the meditation room.

All of this took about six minutes. I was so manic from that experience, I mean, so high that I put on all my clothes and my doors rattled. and they came with a key and I opened the door and I walked into the Dark Night of the courtyard and there was Muktananda with one of his disciples walking in the middle of the night and he came up to me and the man spoke English and Muktanada said to me: How do you feel? did you like to fly? Well, I mean, those are my direct experiences, so I have to live with those things, so the question is when do you get powers like the power to remain silent enough to hear what's really going on in a situation. he becomes quiet, so you don't react as much but you are more receptive.

There is a tendency to want to take your profits and move on. I had a fun experience. I was in Oahu, Hawaii, oh, I don't know, maybe eight. or ten years ago and a buddy said he was with Rick Bernstein said there's someone who wants to see you at a mall he said okay so we went to the mall after hours it was closed except there was a place in the mall. where there was a new Honda where there was a competition to see who could keep their hand on the Honda the longest and whoever did that would win it and there were three people left and they had been there for about five days, well, day and night.

I had my hand on the Honda so I told one of them how do you do it he said I am a Buddhist another I told her how do you do it she said I am a Christian fundamentalist the third one said I am your righteous Devotee, I am a Hindu and I realized that each one of them was going to win the Honda through their spiritual powers, right, I'm not even going to tell you who won abroad, but you take your, you take your winnings and put it in. I work and it is an interesting question if I am one of those people because instead of being in a monastery now I continue with that type of internal work, I am here teaching and it is an evasion that my Dharma I can say that my karma, my Dharma, whatever, but I don't know, I really don't know, I don't know how we are prepared in the West for the types of discipline that are necessary for the types of practices that were offered to me.

I was in Burma three years ago meditating in a monastery for several months. . Very, very severe meditation practice with um Saida upandita, who is my meditation teacher, and you got up at three in the morning, you meditated until 11 at night in your cell. sitting and walking that was all you saw the teacher for five minutes a day, otherwise you're on your own, you didn't read, you didn't write, you didn't do it, you just did that and it becomes very subtle, I mean, after you're done. with your seven-hour sexual fantasies and all that, I mean, after you get through it, you get through it in the first three days and then, it was two months of that, yeah, and I got a telegram that my stepmother had cancer. to be operated on and my father was very old and they would probably need me, she didn't say that, she just said that she was going to have cancer surgery, and I didn't know that she was sick, so I went to the teacher and signed the session. and I said here and I showed him the telegram and he said um I don't think you should go I said well um my stepmother or my father my father is old they need me it's scary time he said you're making such spiritual progress don't go, he said if you were Burmese wouldn't let you go, but I don't feel like I have that power to do it because you're from another culture and I looked and saw that my karma as a kid from Boston with the responsibility of my family.

I was not a sadhu who had given up on my family and I told him: I have to go and we both saw the poignancy of the situation. If you can hear that, I mean, I had to leave because it was my part as who was to do it at the same time that he said if you continue on your path you will be able to alleviate the suffering of many people just as if you go back you will alleviate the suffering of one couple of people He said: I'm sorry, I have to do it and it's like you get to the point where you see that you can only advance on the spiritual path so quickly because of your own karmic limitations, not because of what someone is doing to you, but because of the things in you and that ruin you begin to recognize the moment of spiritual work that you cannot get ahead of yourself you cannot be a false saint because it comes back and hits you on the head you can reach so high but they do not fall and many people fall off the path, they say that They fell off the road.

You see someone who was busy and white dancing with big smiles on their faces and you see them about a year later and they're in a bar having a whiskey and soda and well I thought that was it and you know and then they say I really fell off way and I say no, you didn't fall off the way the impurities with which you were doing it in the first The place had that karmic effect. This is all the way once you have begun to awaken. You can't get out of the way. There's no way you're going to fall into believing it never happened.

You can forget about it for a moment. But he is there. I'm going to keep coming back and trapping you and trapping you, so don't be mad, it's okay, be worldly and very often I really push people into worldliness, you know, go out, have more sex, have more, you know, really more. drugs, come on, make more money. Come on, do it, do it, do it until you're done, don't do it too soon because you're going to be, uh, you know you're going to be greedy if you do it, a lot of our expectations. were that the spiritual path only gave me a few more minutes.

Can you handle just one mood? um that the spiritual path would make us psychologically healthy that was an expectation um heI have said this in many lectures that some of you have heard but it is interesting for me that I trained as a psychologist I was an analyst for many years I taught Freudian theory I was a therapist I took drugs for six years intensively I have a guru for whom I have meditated since 1970 regularly I have taught yoga, I have studied Sufism and many types of Buddhism in all that time I have not gotten rid of a neurosis, the only thing that has changed is where these huge monsters of no, don't take me again, yes, that kind of thing used to be. sitting in the bathtub now cowering in fear.

They're like these little idiots, you know, oh sexual perversity, there you are. I haven't seen you in days, come and have some tea, no, and for me that is a product of the spiritual path that what happened is that I have now. rested comfortably in another contextual framework that makes me much less identified with my known neuroses and with my own desires, if I don't get what I want, that's as interesting as if I get it, it turns out. Did you ever notice that I need all of this? Well, you're not understanding me, oh, you know, and then it's not that interesting and then you grow from it.

It's so far away when you start to realize that suffering is Grace, so you can't believe it, you think you're cheating. along the spiritual path you start to get bored with the usual things in life and uh gurjeev said that's just the beginning he said um he said our friends found that we were getting boring ospensky said Rajiv said there are worse things to come he said that He is an interesting man whose lies well, you have already begun to die, there is still a long way to go to complete death, but still a certain amount of nonsense is coming out of you, you can no longer deceive yourself as sincerely as you did before, now he You have gotten a taste for the truth and that happens and you lose a lot of friends and your friends change and you don't grow at the same rate and it is very painful to have people you have loved even in marriages where other people don't grow with you and that is a trap. very painful to go through until death do us part and we are together as long as the quality of loving growth is present in the relationship and that is a complex topic that I can't really go into because it is very interesting, there are many permutations of that, but is one that caught many of us feeling guilty about letting friends go and realizing that you needed new kinds of relationships and new kinds of friendships along the way, when that becomes deep enough when the meaning of things that you justified.

Your existence to achieve something begins to lose meaning when, even when you win, you gained nothing, you begin to experience the Dark Night of the soul, the despair that arises when worldliness begins to fade. We are never closer to the light than when The darkness is deepest The Dark Night of the Soul and in a way what is happening is that the ego has been based on our entire structure has been based on our separation and our needs and desires. of making us feel comfortable and happy and at home and as Trump or Rinpoche said in his mischievous way, he said that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment of the ego and that is the predicament that you see, the fact that your spiritual journey is a ball game completely different than the one you thought you were on it's a different path than the one you thought you were on and it's very difficult to make that transition, many people don't want to, they want to take the power of their spiritual work and make their life enjoyable. wonderful and I honor it and it's great and it's exactly your foreign Muppet car but that's not freedom and that's not what the spiritual path offers as the potential that offers freedom but freedom demands complete surrender, that is, surrender of who you think you are and what you think you're doing is what it is and it's mind-blowing when you understand how powerful the game of dying is within yourself, but there's a death in it and people grieve, there's a pain when you start to be who you thought you were. ages. disappear thank you Carla rimoche says he is a beautiful man beautiful man beautiful said we live in illusion the appearance of things but there is a reality we are that reality when you understand this you see that you are nothing and being nothing you are all that is all is that until now you can to hear that we live in illusion the appearance of things but there is a reality we are that reality when you understand this you see that you are nothing you are no longer anything special you are just part of everything and being nothing more than that you are part of everything you are everything in the moment you that you gave up your specialty you are part of all things so you are in harmony you are in the Dao you are in the path of things you are in the moment but you are no longer anyone, you are only part of this, these are just phenomena that happen in this moment, the illusion that I am doing this and you are busy listening, that is all our minds behind it, here we are. just this, nothing else, nothing special, this is very, very far away and we don't want to hear how far it is.

I only take people through the first line of the writings of the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, only the first line is a small booklet. It's only about 10 pages long. The first line says that the great path is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When loving the great path is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. yes, the slightest Extinction however and Heaven and Earth are infinitely separated the great path is not difficult for those who have no preferences When Love and Hate are absent everything becomes clear and undisguised to make the slightest distinction However, in heaven and earth they are infinitely companions.

I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly. You can see why I don't want to remember it. It's interesting because that doesn't mean you don't have preferences. And now this is not an evasion. This is as deep as I can go. getting it doesn't mean not having preferences it means not being attached to your preferences of course you have preferences and opinions but you don't have preferences or opinions that's the one, if you don't get what you want, you don't get what you want interesting because the interesting process It's transformation not getting what you want all the time giving up giving up giving up giving up Mahatma Gandhi one of my great teachers says that God demands nothing less than complete surrender as the price for the only Freedom worth having when a person is lost like this It immediately finds itself at the service of everything that lives, it becomes its delight and recreation, it is a new people that never distrusts spending itself in the service of God's creation.

It reminds me of the story of the pig and the chicken who are walking down the street and They are hungry and they want to have breakfast and they arrive at a restaurant and they start to enter and it is the pig says I am not going to go in there why not because there is a sign that says eggs and ham the chicken says oh come on, we will eat something else Pig says look, it is okay for you all they want is a contribution from you from me they want Total Surrender okay, I have to finish quickly sorry running so far is something very interesting um if I say it's not mine um one of the things that we developed throughout the The path is the witness, the ability to silently observe phenomena, including our own behavior, our own emotions, our own reactions, and it is fascinating and As you cultivate the witness more deeply, it is as if you are living simultaneously on two levels: there is a level of testimony and then there is the level of Desire, fear, emotions, Action, Reaction, etc., which is a stage in the process and again gives you a great amount of power. there is another stage beyond that which is again the question of surrender here is a quote when the Mind looks into the Mind itself, the train of discursive and conceptual thought ends and supreme Enlightenment is obtained.

See when the witness turns on itself when the witness witnesses the Witness that it is like a Zen koan technique, then you go behind it and then you become aware that everything just is and you are no longer occupied with a part of your mind observing another, you are not busy observing, you are simply being that. It's very simple again. I am having the most extraordinary experience these days: most of the ones I have received are more and more letters here. I've spent 25 years trying to become divine and most of the letters I receive now say thank you for being so human.

Isn't it so strange? One of the great traps we have in the West is our intelligence, our thinking, because we want to know what we know, and what happens with freedom is that you can be wise or you can know knowledge that you cannot. know wisdom you can be wise wisdom has simplicity when my Guru wanted to belittle me he called me intelligent when he wanted to reward me he said it is simple and I can understand the way we want the intellect to be a beautiful servant, as I believe Viva Cananda Yogananda said, it is a beautiful servant but he is a terrible master.

The point is that intellect is the powerful tool of our separation and intuition. The compassionate heart is the door to our unity and the dialogue between the mind and the Heart has become unbalanced in this culture so that we are in love with our intellectual Powers just as we should have been at some point in our prehensile ability we are in love with our intellectual power which is in the service of protecting us as separate entities. So, to the intellect, the heart that would give away the store is seen as a threat, an internal threat, because when you see someone on the street here, take my coat here, take my money here and the mind tells you now wait a minute, forget the lilies in the shit field, just think about tomorrow and, in a way, what the spiritual path offers at its best is an opportunity for us to return to the compassionate quality innate of our heart and our intuitive wisdom and return to the balance where we need our intellect.

It is available as a servant, but we are not governed by it or trapped in our thinking mind and to me it is worth working for because, as Albert Hoffman pointed out this morning, most of the social, ecological and political problems we have are the creation of the human intellect along with all the benefits and the answer to that is to once again recognize the unitive nature of all things and realize that you are nothing and therefore you are everything. What I have done tonight is to try to show you that the spiritual path is a Inc.

It is an elegant opportunity for us the fact that you and I even hear that there is such a path is such a Grace for human life from a point of view karmic and each of us must be true to ourselves to listen to what our one is until the end because if you become false and holy you end up kicking yourself in the butt, you have to stay true to yourself and have people say things like if If I didn't have my children, I could meditate, your children are your path for many. Services for people your path for many people your marriages your path relationship yoga is exquisite yoga I don't mean sloppy I mean really disciplined techniques meditation is a beautiful baseline for the whole game devotional practices are extraordinary all of them are incredibly useful study of the metaphysics of the The words of holy people are simply incredible, we have the opportunity to become the truth we long for.

One of Gandhi's strongest lines that guides me all the time is that he is sitting on a train and a journalist runs up and says mahatmaji, give me a message to take to the people of my village and God only has time to scribble on a paper bag and hands it out and says my life is my message and it's like the rabbi who said I went to see Sadiq the Mystic The rabbi in the other village said I didn't go to study Torah with him. I went to see how he ties his shoes. um and Saint Francis says it's not worth walking to preach unless our preaching is our walking.

Finally we must integrate spirituality into our daily lives to bring it equanimity, joy, wonder and the ability to look suffering in the eyes and embrace it in oneself without looking away when I work with AIDS patients and hold someone and myself. My heart breaks because I love this person and he is suffering a lot with fissures in his rectum and social ostracism and all that and I can't stand it, I mean, I am crying with them and at the same time he is inside me. This equanimity and joy and I don't, it's almost the paradox, it's almost too much for me to handle, but that's what real help is about, because if all you do is get caught up in suffering, all you're doing is It's digging.

Everyone's hole grows deeper, you finally work on yourself spiritually as an offering to your fellow humans because until you have cultivated that quality of peace, equanimity, love, joy, presence, honesty, truth and simplicity, all your actions are colored for your attachments. You do not wait to be enlightened to act, so you use your actions as ways to work on yourself, so as we begin tonight talking about paths, practices and lineages, for me my entire life is my path, every experience I have, as said Emmanuel, my ghostly friend. to me ramdas why don't you take the resume try to be human because it's all the resume is an exquisite resume I invite you to join me to enroll thank you everything depends on where you look at it we canlook at it from above looking down or you can look at it from below looking up as to who you think you are when you look at it from below looking up you continually underestimate yourself and when you look at it only from above looking down you often forget who we are also from below looking up we are a group of reasonably rational human beings deeply immersed in the reality that is available to us, our senses, our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin and what we can think and then something happens to you or a friend from yourself or from someone you've heard about or in a book you've read for someone at some point and you try to see it from down here, that is, explain it to yourself in a way that makes you feel comfortable as a foreigner. you have an experience and the first label you apply is well, that was an experience and then you say well, that was an experience like other experiences, then you can say well, that was a dream and then you feel confident that you know what it is because he just labeled it right, you say it was a hallucination or you say I think I'm going crazy, which means where you're thinking and where you're thinking from is sanity and where you just went isn't there so it must be like that. crazy is not the same or you are sitting tight and suddenly a beam of energy shoots through your body maybe up your spine and your brain explodes and your whole life flashes before you and you experience the oneness of all things, which you experience everything at once and Well, I will say that it is a very interesting neurophysiological development, what has clearly happened is that there has been a short circuit that has led to the simultaneous activation of several neurons in my brain, which has given me the illusion of that I am experiencing the entire universe. all at once or you take a book like um in the west, the book The Bible and it says that Christ touched his eyes, put clay on his eyes and touched him and the man was healed, the man was lame and he was healed and looked down. above you say well that was probably written by someone who wanted to strengthen people's faith and it's probably just a metaphor it probably didn't really happen, I mean how do we know?

Because everything that is written in the books is not true, it seems that we are going. out of our way when we are down looking outward to protect the safety of the world that our minds and senses allow us to know, trying as best we can to explain everything within that context, the story that always comes to mind when I am . thinking about that particular perception, perceptual point of view, it is the story of the blind man who looks for the drunk, he looks for the clock. Under the street lamp and other people help him look for the clock and finally they tell him, well, where exactly did you move the clock and he says, Well, what?

I lost in the alley, so why are you looking here? And he says that because there is a light here, it is the same problem that when we are looking up we tend to want to look only into the Realms that our senses and Minds illuminate and everything else we treat as irrelevant we have a science a category of waste paper we can call it measurement error with social scientists we can call it lying we can call it various things to protect our model of reality I just looked at some books by Gopi Krishna who is an Indian man who had the Kundalini experience and was a very good man , but immediately upon having them, he tried to bring them back by explaining them within scientific terminology and that is a very reasonable thing.

You're saying look, I was born into this plane of existence. I have had this experience or know this experience. Let me. bring it here so that the countryside is richer here so that life is better for everyone around me. The only issue about it is timing because sometimes you tend to try to bring things home too soon because you are afraid of going too far away. from home and it's a very reasonable fear you remember the astronauts who were going in um you get on several planes uh uh where the gravitational field becomes very thin and if you jump off the rocket at that point you fall to Earth but then you go out beyond that period and you remember they did spacewalks and they went out on a rope and there was nothing to drag them back to Earth and if you remember one of the companions didn't want to get back on the rocket. and he was considered a weakness of the will of Consciousness because he said yes, well, I am free and if left alone he would have started floating for eternity and probably would have left his body recently.

A teammate in Wisconsin and Minnesota was practicing. yoga and went into samadhi he left his body and after five days someone found him and they found the body and they found no heartbeat or pulse and they decided he was dead so they buried him, poor guy, now he has to find another body. because he was exploring away from home and he didn't leave a good enough support system for people to take care of his earth capsule and the earth capsule fell into the hands of people who didn't understand that he was just traveling. It sounds pretty weird, isn't it weird, really weird, weird, weird things that were weird?

We are in a very peculiar situation, many of us because we discovered that we are not who we thought we were and not only did we realize that, but... We have even discovered how to become who we could be and some of us have decided to let go the robe, maybe you'll get home and maybe you won't. Now many of us try in one way or another to jump into that. It's called getting high, I mean, I remember it's relevant to jumping. I'm not supposed to tell these kinds of stories, they're bad for my image, but I once went to the opening of Lincoln Center and I was high on LSD, that was years ago. and um nuriev was dancing with Margo Fontaine.

I saw them once before, I was also high on LSD and I sat in the orchestra and when I went last time that time, nuriev seemed just in pure form, you know, there was no human being there. She was just the perfection of form, but this time she was sitting in the Circle dress facing the stage and in my drug days, what I saw was these species, this species on the stage that couldn't fly. I kept jumping and falling and jumping, falling, exactly, that has been the problem for those of us who thought we would step out into the Realms of possibilities of who we could be by taking a running leap, taking enough of this or that, holding our breath for a long time. fast enough, long enough, a running jump, perfect sex, enough, don't walk away, we are westerners and we are achievers, so it was going to be another achievement, right, he must be a way to grab it and do it, but the parable of the wedding guests at the party seems to apply, we keep entering the wedding party but we never wear the wedding attire and we keep being thrown into the outer darkness that is here, look at it, utopian, be on your guard, well, I have to play very gentle audience next God is everywhere and after several years of using each technique, we use things like biofeedback to try to control our alpha waves.

I mean, we've really done a lot of things, some of us drilled holes in our brains, folks from Sweden did that, he actually drilled a hole and gave a whole document on how to do it and where to put the hole, and the right thing to do, because if we were different than we thought, we had to get out somehow because whatever it was, it seemed to involve a much greater potential than what we were now realizing, but the law that what went up seemed to come down continues to apply and for those of us who we became very tuned into other systems from people who had been playing this game before us.

There was something very disturbing about his literature and instructions because it seemed to suggest that it wasn't something you could do, it was something you had to become and to become that you had to stop being who you were, which means you had to undergo a transformation. in nature in the very essence of your being, most of us had very gross attachments, some of us more subtle, to our identity here as social psychological social entities on this plane and we thought we couldn't have both. We will not be who we always were and we will also be more than we always were or than we always were foreigners because we still wanted to have some little things around here like our personalities and our bodies, let alone our five games in our car and our and the Rules seem to be that if you gave it all up, you have it all, so we tried to make believe and said, okay, I've given it all up, now give it all to me, look, but in reality we were saving our stash of attachment.

I gave up, I gave up now, but the law seemed to be inflexible, you really had to risk everything and it wasn't that easy, just packing your bags, getting vaccinated and going to India, that wasn't enough. I don't, I see it was another Western achievement. I will do that. I will go to India and become enlightened, but there are many neurotic Westerners in India, as there are in the United States. The ashrams are full of them thinking that they have gone through the right of initiation into the brotherhood and have the right to be enlightened, but there is still an ego lurking in this literature, where words like surrender, which is a very creepy word to Westerners , surrender always gives you an image of Japan with General MacArthur or General.

Patton or something like that where Mike has ruled and there is a table in the middle of a battlefield and there are the defeated and the victorious and someone comes up to you and tells you that in order for you to go to the Higher Consciousness you must surrender. It doesn't feel very good, but all our ingenuity and we've used it to try to bring it home, bring home the bacon or the soybeans, maybe it didn't quite work because no one wanted to go there to get it, everyone just wanted to bring it home. , so suddenly there were all these great training programs in the West on how to absorb all the wisdom of other cultures and turn it into that.

You never had to leave home. You simply paid for the course. True, the problem was that the teachers had not done it. He didn't leave home, someone in the system has to have left home, someone has to be a Ramakrishna Ramana Maharshi a Buddha Hazrat Anayad Khan a Rabbi Ben day but someone has to be someone who risked it all a spacious always reminds me of the children who are playing on a dark night near the edge of the forest and they don't have the courage to go to the forest, but they run near the forest and then they run back towards the light and the other one says, well, I'm going now and they run towards the forest and they just put their foot in and then they get scared and they run back, then you take any student and you sit him down and you make him start meditating and you keep working with him and he is ready and he gets to the point where his breathing starts to stop and his body starts to stiffen and their Consciousness starts to leave their body and they get scared and want to run back towards the light or you take someone who is used to functioning with a kind of energies that most of us function with every day and you start to nourish yourself through a meditative experience or through a devotional experience, so through a hot and yoga experience or through the presence of a spiritual being, the experience begins to show that it pours out ten thousand times more than that . energy and the person begins to tremble and sometimes we call it Shakti and if you have observed such a being, sometimes I have seen some teachers, spiritual masters who can awaken that Shakti.

I described a scene I remember in Melbourne, Australia, in a living room. in a nice little house in Melbourne where this spiritual teacher who could awaken Shakti was sitting playing his actara his

music

al instrument with his eyes closed and all over the room people were beginning to show the effects of this incredible energy flowing through them. their bodies. and a tweed-clad professor with a pipe stuck in his, I mean, he had all the signs of being a professor. I don't know if he was a teacher. He looked like a teacher. He got up and started dancing Indian dance and the look on his face was one of total amazement, obviously he didn't know anything about Indian dance, another gentleman started doing incredible mudra movements with his body, a very traditional symbolic movement, a girl began to breathe automatically, which is called bastrika, although except that she did. with so much violence that she was bouncing on the floor and she was just the girlfriend of a guy who had come to the meeting, she didn't want to be there, right, what kind of madness are we playing?

Are you the ones who have read to Carlos? Castaneda understands the confusion and fear of the Western rational mind in confronting these other planes of consciousness, these other energy levels, these other Natures of our own identity and if you are not ready and if you are too busy holding on to what you have, You are going to put yourself in the simplest terms, you are going to be scared, you are going to be scared, you are going to be shaken by such an experience, if you remember, I have reported this several times in the article. in the New York Times Sunday Magazine section on mysticism in America in which he said that two-fifths of the population of the United States, more than 40 million people who had had some kind of mystical experience, were a statistical sampling interview that sounds perhaps likethrough childbirth or an accident or whatever, but in those two-fifths, 85 percent said it was the best experience of my life, but I never want to have another one, why not, because it upsets the apple cart because it doesn't They were prepared for this.

It is the experience that Dante says he will spend the rest of his life trying to describe These are the experiences that William Blake drew and wrote poetry about These are the experiences that all this Huxley was dealing with The experiences that Buddha was talking about when Christ What he means to his father, he is not deceiving you, it is that everything in the realm of good is relevant to someone else, but not to me, your feeling of your own unworthiness is so deep that you consider that it is something that will allow you to go much further. beyond what you have. known is to someone else who is better than you, but not to you, I mean, couldn't it be divine, could it be a being of life, could I and my father be one?, could it be the Ancient One?, could it be able to get through? in the Realms beyond my mind my intellect could know what Buddha knew Buddha looked back and saw his last 99,000 incarnations oh I couldn't do that I mean no I no I why not the strange situation is that in every human being It's all That's what Buddha kept saying, he kept saying that everyone is a Buddha, the only thing that no one knows is that in you everything you need to be a fully conscious, fully realized, fully free, fully enlightened being, Why would you want to be the one you grew up in? this physical reality, pure reality and you said this is real, your parents said this is real and you always felt the edges and at the edges you felt fear and you felt pressure, it's like having a chess board and you can never get off the edge of the board , the game has to be played inside the board and at one end was birth and the other was death and if you played wrong you went crazy, which was as good as going off the board, wow, but then you know something came out Some of you have seen it.

The three-dimensional checkers came with a clear plastic board so you could play checkers this way and this way, suddenly other checkers boards also appeared during the first 50 times I experimented with psychedelics back in the '60s. Tim Larry thought the same thing Carl Jung thought in his book about dream myths and whatever. I thought it was interesting to go out, but now I'm back home, where it's good, where my family is and safe, but somewhere. the way in that experimentation the other realities became as real as this reality and I began to recognize that I had an identity in these other realities just as I had an identity in this reality and from time to time I would encounter a being along of the years. who looked at me and knew that he or she wasn't seeing who I thought I was, they were seeing another being in me that I couldn't see because I was too busy being who I thought I was where the Boss speaks. about higher faculties, which is the natural course of the evolution of consciousness, that's what we're talking about about the evolution of consciousness, the only thing is that when we think about evolution, we generally think about things like Darwinian evolution, we think about evolution of things en masse, but now Think about the evolution of each individual consciousness and that in each round of birth and death Consciousness develops a little more and everything is directed, it is not random, just for fun, let me repeat the image that I have repeated so many times about the Buddhas as to How long have we been in the game?

Remember that the village Buddha describes a mountain a mile by a mile by a mile and every hundred years a bird flies over it with a silk scarf in its beak and passes the scarf over the top of the mountain. the time it would take for the scarf to wear down the mountain that that a mile by a mile by a mile a silk scarf every hundred years once that's how long you've been doing this right birth death birth yes yes and it burns 80 yearsdeath , that's true, it's a big mountain. Buddha looked back and saw his last 99,000 of these and that was just a drop in the bucket.

So, who are you? Are you so busy identifying with who you were born abroad as? So heavy, so real. solid that when you get to the edge it grabs you and pulls you back so hard you say I can't get out of this it's too real it's too real I guess I'll settle for being who I thought I was it was this round she'll keep going I mean there's much more to come there is no rush God has no time God doesn't care how fast you move just you don't care God lives beyond time it's all there, you'll get it at home you know, he's a very laid back dad, You know, the kid wants to stay out until two, let them stay out until two, get home tomorrow, get home tomorrow, okay, sooner or later that's where the food is, he'll come home, okay, foreigner, I mean.

All beings who have ever freed themselves from attachment to a plane have said the same thing: there is no time, it is simply a structure like your space within certain planes of reality, that is what Einstein pointed out, but the way in which the evolutionary game knows those salmon. that swim against the current and bang their bodies against the rocks for Upstream to spawn, it's not because they're too horny because it's built in, they just have to get there, that's how evolution works and once you start waking up, once you You begin to recognize that you are not who you thought you were right in the middle of a life.

I mean, it's not supposed to happen in half a lifetime. It's supposed to happen at the end of a life. See you die, say goodbye. I don't. I don't want to go I don't want to go save me save me doctor help me help me and then you did it and then the next moment the being says hello and you say you say oh I guess I didn't die and the Being says no you died and that leaves you speechless or whatever whatever you have at the time and usually most beans just stare in awe until they are catapulted into the next round when they enter the illusion and forget about it. again, but then when you get really high in the game, when you die, you die and you buy and then you die and then someone says hi, you say hi, you say it was an interesting round so far.

I accomplished a lot that time and then you look around to see what's left to do when you greet all the people on the farm and plan the next round and then you say, okay, here goes, it could be a year or 500 years, you could spend some time in a helloka. for a while or you know Florida or you go anywhere you know Hawaii you're falling asleep waiting but they just wake up between hatches do you realize what happens to the game when someone starts waking up in the middle of a bird I mean? the cover is revealed.

I mean sitting there in a body and realizing that you're not who you are, you're supposed to be okay and the nature of the evolutionary game is that when that happens, what's the point of how old you are. they're in terms of how many times you've been around and that can happen in a birth at one year of age it can happen it can happen in the womb it can happen some that happen in the womb they say oh I understand how this is I'm not going to go on that trip. and we say they were stillborn, it's not that terrible, oh, they were blue babies, they just wouldn't play, I mean, they wouldn't do what you're supposed to do, they wouldn't eat.

They were not breathing and simply said: I will not stay. I mean, I did, thank you. I have given you my blessing. I'm going, yeah, some of those are the really tall ones, but once in the middle of a bird somewhere. birth and it could be happening in the moment before you die, it wouldn't matter if you woke them up, so the frustrating thing for most of us is that you can't go back to sleep and you're a miserable mutant, not even the fish can catch you. nor disgusting, you are not a god nor a human being, you can't get there and you can't forget about being up there and coming back down, as I have always been the image that most of you who have ever heard me do this business.

Before, the easiest thing to imagine is if you have any favorite pastime like in the old days, not true anymore, thank God, but it used to be eating pizza for me, yeah, yeah, I mean, I like pizza, but ya It's not something with me, but I would sit down with the perfect crispy, hot, cheesy, green peppers, mushrooms and vegetarian pizza, you know, with gluten flour and all that, I would take the first bite and I would be looking forward to becoming the super sensualist Eater of pizza. pizza and look, it's not hot enough to burn the roof anymore, just perfect, you know, it's that moment, you know, and there's a voice inside that says eating pizza and it's not, it's not judging me and it's not belittling me and it's not says "you." you should stop it's nothing it's just noticing that you're eating people it's that voice inside you that who are you what are you doing there you know you're not me I'm a pizza eater I'm your deeper self you know I'm like I'm here too , you cannot get rid of me and, in truth, you cannot get rid of this being and this being goes and goes and goes and slowly consumes all your other selves and that is what surrender is.

Finally, a surrender to this higher self which Hindus refer to as the Christian Atman, it is known as the soul, it is a surrender of yourself to yourself, it is not a surrender to another boy or girl, it is a serenity to yourself, so sit in the middle. You are still very attached to worldly things at the very moment when this inner voice attracts you, this inner feeling that you are something other than what you thought you were, the attraction is the same that the moth feels towards the flame that the salmon. pulling up River going against the current is the pole that is the pull of the evolution of Consciousness or The Awakening of the spirit depending on how you want to talk about it the evolution of Consciousness is looking at it from below looking up The Awakening of the spirit is looking at It you look from above, you look down and you sit in the middle for a long time, sometimes births where in every birth you keep Awakening and feel trapped in attachments to the world and at the same time you struggle to get out for many, many births, but every birth. it is just a delicate tone of more Consciousness a little less sticky a little less sticky just a little less clean and what is a being that is called a free being what is a free being what is an enlightened being what is something liberated for the being that has become strange as the third patriarch of Zen says about this or that there is no longer attachment, you do not cling to this plane of existence and you do not cling to enlightenment, you do not cling first, you are clean to get high and avoid Going down then, to As you evolve, you don't hold on to it and when you are depressed, ah, there is depression, when you are related, ah, there is euphoria, ah, there is an up and down, and you are sitting behind all those things until you finally sit inside so deeply, so silently, described as a vast ocean, a calm ocean where mother and child become one, where you are sitting right on the edge between form and formlessness, you are neither nor are you not, and you are fit and yet, are. uninformed and you have a personality but it is not your personality it is all the paradoxes at that point you live right in the middle of the paradox but not clinging means you are not clinging to free yourself from this plane there are not many beings either that says look I can't cut it in this world I go to God but God does not seem to see that strategy well it turns out that you have to honor your incarnation to be able to transcend it if you push it away it is the same as if you kept it it is like people who have stopped smoking if you are busy saying no for two months I smoke three hours and 42 minutes you continue smoking as with Alcoholics Anonymous in their philosophy you are always an alcoholic who does not drink you will never be able to stop being an alcoholic look at the beginning you wanted middle class things a certain type of car a certain type of home a certain type of family a certain type of job certain type of clothing certain type of insurance policies, etc., etc., then you got busy seeing that something wasn't working right about it because the people who had that weren't making it in terms of their inner being, she he took it upon himself to reject everything, so you're not going to have a house you're not going to have a car and you're not going to have a high fine you're not going to have books you're not going to have an education you're not going to have you're not going to have a bank account you're not going to have to have an insurance policy and you go down the street browsing one night and you say well, here I am, I'm someone who doesn't have any of that and that's the same attachment as if you had everything and that was the whole story of rebellion and radicalism, there was always a reaction against which it was only attachment in the opposite direction, it was always the liberals, the conservatives and this and that, communism and capitalism, they were always forces against each other. another, but liberation is not against anything.

Liberation is much more and that's also safe and that too, of course, and that too, yeah, right in that too, like if you could decide what your problem was going to be, your problem would be pollution, ecological medicine. and health and vitamins, your problem will be the beard, your problem will be sexual freedom, your problem will be new types of politics, then a more conscious politics, your problem will be abortion, your problem will be the energy crisis, it is your The theme is going to be, but the theme of Consciousness is not exactly the same as those other themes because the theme of Consciousness does not exclude anything else that I can discover.

I mean,Allen Ginsberg works on his Consciousness, but he is still a poet. Jerry Reuben works on his Conscience and is still some kind of radical politician, Jerry Brown works on his Conscience and is Governor Charles Lloyd. How many

music

ians work in the Consciousness of it and remain musicians? People work on their Consciousness and still make belts and sandals. people work on their Consciousness and still have babies or have abortions or protest against pollution or drive cars that pollute Consciousness work is not something you do instead of doing something else, you do everything you do, but you do it. as a way to become more conscious that's the difference in the game, I mean I'm a terrible role model in a way because I'm a professional Consciousness person, okay that's how I make a living rapping unconsciousness, But how many of those do you need? foreigner may not be a future profession, but what about when you finish pushing and pulling and grabbing and saying I have to look holy, you know it's already unconscious enough, I can't drive a bus because that will knock me down, no, I can't live in the City from New York no, I look and all this, well, I can't eat fat, I can't, you sit back and say, well, I'll be as aware as I am of the pendulum and then something interesting happens in that new kind of no-Hysterically clinging to holiness, you begin to hear who you are in this incarnation and you begin to understand the concept of Dharma, that is, your path depending on your Incarnation, this time thank you.

I mean, I'm bald and it's no use. Let him read the lives of saints who have hair all over their heads because I neither do nor will. You might as well figure out how to be bald now. The interesting thing about this evolutionary change in Consciousness or knowledge of new levels is that the moment you touch what Gurjeev called the higher faculty the moment you enter what we call intuitive consciousness the moment you go beyond your irrational mind you are aware of more you are calmer you can go back further you can see more clearly you are less trapped and as a result, everything you do in the worldly plan you end up being able to do better, thank you now, that is both a curse and a blessing.

It's a curse because most people meditate to become more effective in the world. the way TM sells it, get your mantra and you can have a better job, a better car, a better hi-fi with just 20 minutes a day and it's true, that's what's funny about it, yeah, and the army wants to meditate now, everyone does. to take action now the CIA meditates everyone meditates that they want to be a better CIA the army wants to be a better army none of them want to become Arjuna by the way they just want to become a better army and the beautiful horror of that is that the Meditation was a vehicle and that all methods of altering Consciousness are a vehicle to enable you not only to do better on this plane but also to begin to realize your own divinity and your own existence in other planes to begin to contact the higher Consciousness, not with the higher consciousness of Mars. to begin to know God, simply put, even go beyond the concept of God, go to God where God is not, but the concept of God is not there, because when you merge with God you are in Nirvana, for the Southern Buddhists do what knowing the father and not getting stuck with a son, that's all that is possible in this game, but the problem is: do you see what guards are at the gates in this game?

The guards who prevent you from entering the inner temple have greater power. and the success you get in the world as a result of any spiritual practice, do you see what I'm talking about? I mean, you wanted sexual prowess for me and you didn't get it to start meditating, you say Well, since I'm not. I am going to achieve it on this plane. I guess I will go to God when you start meditating and become filled with life. Life springs from your third eye and your body lights up and everything and people start to come and say: Will you sleep with me?

And suddenly, every fantasy you ever had has been latent there and how many lifetimes are you going to spend doing that now. Sorry, I do not have any time. I'm going to God. Yeah, that's not me. You know, thank you, those are the lions that guard the doors of the inner temple and they are known in Hinduism in Sanskrit as the siddhis or the powers, they are your own subtle desires because if you don't want anything, nothing bothers you. As people say, well, I started to open my Consciousness and suddenly these demons appeared and I got scared, you know what you were afraid of, afraid of your own desires, because the only thing demons play with is things in you if you don't there is nothing.

They don't play in you, they look around and say no, that one that you don't want anything, remember when the devil took Christ and said, hey, baby, you can make bread by looking at jumping, do it, you know, come on, man, I'll show you, you're a foreigner, I don't want any of that, I'm going to the father. I want to go to God and how many lives how many thousands of lives you spend playing where you wake up in the middle of a life you start going you get a little and then you settle it's like playing roulette in Las Vegas you put in so much bread, you put in a dollar and you win and you get two dollars and then you let the two ride and you get four, the four you take eight, you let the eight be right, you get 16 or 16 right, you get 32 ​​32 64. that cuts 128. 256. going up there to do a lot with 256 dollars, do you want to go bankrupt, do you want to go bankrupt or do you want to take the 256. well, I don't know 256 dollars, I can do a lot with that and I will tell you that in the last year my life has been a very intense struggle and my training begins every morning at six and it lasts until about quarter past two the next morning and that's every day and they pressure me and harass me all the time and they let me go out about three days a week to earn a living, yes mother , Why do that?

I mean, I can play Ram now. points for the next 30 years it's a paid game, I mean, I wrote here now supposedly I can write more books and I can be that book was the author of being here now I'm still playing for 30 years if I want to take the 256 but the addiction to the heroine it's nothing like that this is the orgasm with God I'm talking about this is all mystical poetry is about this is merging with the Divine mother and yet the rules of the game are very simple and very fierce If you push this one to get there, you'll be thrown back and you'll have to stay calm here and you'll have to stay calm there and you won't be able to stick. up here and you can't be attached to there, sometimes I go into states where my breathing becomes very thin and I start to enter very high energy spaces and I'm floating through the Golden Plains with their Zeus and Shiva and even the target.

Plains and beyond and Purple Plains and I am entering these amazing beings and my whole body is an ocean of bliss and suddenly I feel this hand, this astral hand on my head saying, come down and I am brutally brought down to this. plane and then the person on this plane says it's time to go, fast forward and I have to find in my body this is my foot and I have to get it to move and go out the door and I have to get in my car and through the The way my car was running, I had checked the oil so I could leave and here I am, someone who was practically with God and I am checking the oil well because if I don't check the oil I won't do it.

I have a car and if I don't have a car I will have to spend all my Consciousness on getting a car you have to keep it together it is a ruthless game it is not easy by the way it is ruthless you keep it together here and there to be too busy with the oil in your car to forget to look up, well, there is another birth, a shot to hell, a shot to Earth, not bad. I don't want to say that the Earth is hell, it is a sea of ​​suffering, but it is beautiful, it is an ecstasy that God manifested in form if at the moment you make any plan you say no to that one or I want that one or that one is better than that one in The moment when that's why they tell me that one is Pleasure and Pain, imagine that someone could say something like a twin pharaoh, I mean, I work with people who are dying a lot and I don't know if they are supposed to die or not, and there is moments when I am with them and because of things that arise, I become better and sometimes things come out and they die and I live in the world of your will, my will be done, but your will, because I am not attached to whether people must live or die, I am not even attached to whether I should live or die oblivious to the harmony of everything learn to live your life in harmony on every plane live your life as a god being live your life as an earthly being live your life as a biochemical being live your life as a psychological being live your life as a social being live your life as pure spirit live your life as a quality of the soul, you do not cling to this or that and the reason why you use all the practices of meditation, chanting Hatha Yoga and so on is to loosen your grip on this plane, the physical psychological plane, so that you can know the other planes once you have known them, tried them or tested them, it is not that those planes are better than this one, They are just different and ultimately you do not live with this or with the fact that you live on this plane and that planet.

It is true that on some of these other planes there is much more joy than on this planet, there is much more ecstasy that there is also much more horror than in this prayer. Can you imagine being conscious with your third eye open so that you can see, look around you on this physical plane and see all the suffering in the universe at the same time. Can you imagine how unbearable that is? Can you imagine being the possessor of knowledge while you look around you and see all this suffering of people who are not? They don't have it as they need it, it's all because they are trapped in the illusion of their Incarnation and they don't want to hear you tell them to imagine the horror of that talk about the Buddha's unbearable suffering. unbearable suffering of goodness you have to be very strong in this game very very strong nothing is hidden from your eyes not everything becomes beautiful by looking at the Perfection of God on Earth which includes all the suffering of the perfect universe and simultaneously being an earthling who works full time to alleviate suffering on Earth and live with that paradox day in and day out that when someone, when a child is crying, you pick up the child and relieve their crying at the very moment that you know the crying was perfect and the relief from crying is perfect, you are ready for that whole situation, it is that as you go through your Consciousness and tune into other planes of existence, this Plane becomes one more of them, it is beautiful, sacred and it is a part of God but it is just another and the scary thing is that at that point you can stay and there may be no guarantee that is why the fear is real people face the fear of God because your ego is very scared but knowing how to be Spirit It can manifest having touched your soul realizing that your soul is part of God having risen to that ocean that is beyond form having become strong enough to contain the energy of the mother all the force behind the forms of the universe the Shakti pure, the pure shrimp that lies behind the form to be able to renounce the limits of your identity enough to merge with the white light and even beyond to put your finger on the formulas and then see how you see the entire universe, all The Buddha embraces all the Worlds and see at that point the nature of form, the nature of Divine Law, the nature of suffering and choose at that point not to finally merge but to taste God and remain in the form to relieve. the suffering of all beings to bring from that ocean a little light to illuminate the path for others.

When Christ said, let this cup pass from my hand, he was not asking to avoid suffering, he was asking that he did not need to die at that moment in order to continue. suffering in order to bring life to this plane of existence. The aliens who have freed themselves from the Earth's atmosphere, free from psychological and physical dominance, free from Their own freed intellects, attempted to do this. rose to the Realms of the Gods, all of which I guarantee are as real as they come, no more, no less, and that includes Shiva, Zeus, Ram, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Christ, Cochise and many more American Indians , all different.

Beings that are as real in this moment as you are, are simply on a different frequency and have all chosen to remain in form, not necessarily on the physical plane, they are often formed on an astral plane to be a transmitter of light to bring down. the Shakti to spiritualize the universe that surrounds them in the plane in which they exist and to whom they offer that light, that Spirit to those beings who in the course of their evolutionary journey are ready to look up. Buddha looked around every night for all the Buddha fields to see who was ready for enlightenment who was ready who was attaining who was saying God, listen to me who is saying it's not like I thought it was who is meditating saying Christ come now who calls Hanuman who sings to Shiva not as a ritual farce but with faith a faith that transcends the reality that they have known those who are doing all that are those upon whom Grace the sin for what it is Grace is the touch of those beings who were free to leave and chose not to because they are not here because of their personal Karma they are here as perfect and pure instruments of God they are the gurus the saints live now or lived on this plane in the past and still live said Christ when you call meI come but who calls Him in faith, surrounding you right at your side at any time, they are the highest beings who have kept themselves in shape just to bring you to liberation, but what is required is that you ask to extend your hand and say, Come, God, listen to me.

I want to go too I want to know you I want to know myself because how strange is it that when you keep going up higher and clearer and higher and clearer and higher and clearer who you end up being Romana maharashi said it very simply God Guru and I are the same, so who was it that designed the game you think you're trapped in? Did you design it? Now you are playing it and little by little you will wake up until you are free and then you are free to continue playing or not that is the true vowel of the bodhisattva and you stay informed not because you want anything because everything you want is fulfilled by being with God because that is the all and all is the total realization which is the complete return home is home everything you ever wanted that's what God was saying he said it to Adam and Eve if you get trapped in your own mind and seeing me as an object and walk away you will go through hell until you wake up again recognize that in surrender to me you are satisfied you can work to get a new car for security and pleasure and then everything comes in time and passes and you grow old and die because the entire existence of the Earth is in time and it is passing show your great success and a moment later you are forgotten look at my Works ye Mighty said Ozamandias with despair and there is nothing left but that tablet but in you is that which is beyond time it has nothing that It has nothing to do with time, it has to do with space and once you have stopped holding on to who you thought you were, you don't push it away, you just don't hold on to it, you start to recognize who you too are and who you are. you are too, that's all. the great Saints ROM here said I am without form without limit I am beyond space I am beyond time I am in everything is in me strange absolute existence absolute knowledge Absolute happiness we were so busy looking down that we forgot about God so we got so busy looking God, we forget to look down.

Final Release is where you look up and look down. He clings neither to this nor to that. You are here now on every plane in every moment. That's perfection. That is what the being that you are is capable of. God manifested to know yourself this time, this bird now not as labels, I am not God, but beyond the legal, so that every moment of your existence on Earth is n-dimensional, it is everything, everything in all directions, so you listen, but there is no listening, I speak. but there is no speaking, sit in the silence behind the form and play with God and all forms are our games including our bodies, that is the joy that comes with freedom once you know that from that moment on only There is a game with God, nothing more for everyone.

The form is playing, you really have been incredibly patient, look, we're, uh, it's okay now. Now we will take a break. Those of you who have had enough. For those of you leaving now, let me say that when you leave, don't. Don't work to remember anything that happened today when you come out of the smelly air enjoy the ocean look at the trees God is all manifest feel your steps feel your lungs look at the ones you love and feel your heart rejoice in your incarnation blessing