And perhaps the most obvious level: this is a social-cultural phenomenon. We are part of a happening of some sort or other. This is it. We are it right now. You came to a happening and it’s happening. Then it will have happened, and you will say, “I was there when it happened.” That’s one level. Then there is the level of the intellect. Some of you have read Be Here Now or The Only Dance There Is, and you know that I’m a relatively intelligent fellow, and you are interested in social philosophy and theology and the changes in the moral and philosophical quality of the times, and you come to hear me as a social commentator. I wish you luck! There is nothing more frustrating than coming with your intellect, leading with your intellect, and then ending up singing, “Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you wail” all night.
Some of you come to get fed in your hearts. You come because of love—not the “I love you” love, but the “ocean of love” love. The Christ love. And you come to taste that love. And you know that when a gathering of relatively pure beings come together, that love can exist. And you’d like to drink of that love. For you, you need only breath in and out of the middle of your chest gently and deeply, and sit straight, and the course of the evening you will fill with that love.
Some of you define yourself as spiritual seekers. You are doing sadhana, or spiritual practice. And you come to have satsang or sangha, the community of beings on the path. You come to share a moment with beings on the path. Perhaps pick up a method or two, and perhaps come away with a little stronger faith in the game you’re playing. And that faith is fed by the intellect and by the heart, but it is also and more profoundly a feeding of the soul; a feeding of the deeper place within yourself.
And some of you are here in order to be it. Not to do it, not to learn about it, not to collect it, but to be it. To be God, to be the living spirit, to be—if you’ll pardon me—to be here now. To be in the moment. And for you I suggest that you don’t get too lost in the words, for words come and go and I can talk endlessly. And it’s all fascinating or boring, but it’s just words. And within the words is the vibration of the spirit. And for you, you can use this as a meditation chamber. We have for this moment in this room created a temple, a temple of the spirit, just as if you had gone to Jerusalem or gone to India or gone to any sacred space. You just sit quietly and go to God. And let the words pass through. Now and then your intellect needs a little feeding, grabs a word here and there, and then you lose the words. And you go into your heart and you feel a feeling, and then that goes away and you feel a clear empty space, a deeper quietness. You may feel energy pour through your body. Experiences, experiences, experiences. And beyond experiences, here we are again. I am an experience, but that isn’t it. That’s just more stuff along the way. When you don’t need the experience, then you are totally free to enjoy it. As long as you think you need it, you have work to do. Am I getting too heavy too fast? I could start—I never know what level to start at, you know? “Back at Harvard…”
We will go gently through the evening, I’ll rap for a while, then we’ll have some more music and chant together, then we’ll do a meditation together, then we’ll have some more music, we’ll do some questions and answers and you can satisfy every level of the game you want to. And we’ll just take it very gently. When you’ve had enough, leave—okay? There are no points for staying until the end. It isn’t how much you collect and it isn’t necessarily good to the last drop. Take only as much as you need, and you know when you’ve had enough. And one of the first rules of this game is: trust your own heart. Trust your own inner voice. And if you decide after a few minutes that this is really not your trip, my love goes with you for your honesty. And just get up—with love, you don’t get up with guilt or furtively or look like you’re going to the bathroom—just leave. It’s okay. Each person knows what they need, and you have to honor each individual’s need. I respect you for your truth. For this is a game of truth. Out of truth comes goodness. Out of goodness does not necessarily come truth.
Many of you come and take pictures of me. Let me take a word picture of you. There are many different levels I can focus my camera: on your physical bodies, on your psychological bodies, on your astral bodies. But let me suggest, let me share with you, one photographic image. Who are you? To the extent that you are a separate entity at all, just think of you for this moment as an entity. An entity. An entity that exists over large expanse of time, and it goes through experience after experience in the same way as today has been full of crossing the street, eating, going to the toilet, experience after experience, so spread out you as an entity have gone through literally thousands and thousands of births and deaths. It’s just a picture now. Those of you who don’t want to buy it, just use your imagination.
Time after time you’ve been born, born into an identity, and then you’ve died. And each time you died you tried to cling to life. Because you thought when you died you didn’t exist any more. And then you died, and here you still were! Then something or other happened, and you were born again. Birth, death, birth, death, birth, death, birth, death.
The Buddha looked back at one point with the flick of his eye, because he was outside of time and space. He saw his last 99,000 incarnations. And those were only a drop in the bucket. Here you are, in the middle of one of these rounds. The quality of this round is that it seems very real. You really think you’re here. You really think this body is who you are and this personality is who you are. And when the body dies, you figure that’s it. With your intellect many of you know that isn’t it, but with your gut it’s still it.
If you will imagine, for a moment now, a clock. Twelve o’clock: a being is totally in harmony with everything around it. No differentiation, no separation, perfect flow. We will—to give it a familiarity to you—call it the Garden of Eden. There is nothing separate. Everything flows together. All the parts are not identified with their separateness, but with the One.
12:01. Something happens. You are separate. This is your history, this is your life, your lives. 12:01, something happens. It has to do with the apple. Because the eating of the apple, we can think of, for this moment, as the developing of duality of subject/object. It led to the fig leaf, it led to God saying, “Who told you you were naked?” and so on. It’s the moment of separation. It’s the moment in which the separate entity knows it knows, rather than being. It just lost being into knowing. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Can you hear this? 12:01—separateness. You know you know. You ate of the apple of knowledge. That’s the beginning of lust, it’s the beginning of greed, it’s the beginning of doubt, it’s the beginning of all of the effects of separation from the One.
12:01 to 5:59—life after life: birth, death, birth, death. Each life you enter through the womb, build an ego structure that tells you you are a separate entity, and spend your life trying to gain through your own personal power the re-experiencing of that perfect harmony that you once knew before you became separate. Achievement, orgasm, adventure—all of it—designed for that moment of merging, that moment of transcendence. Trying to create through your control your own heaven on Earth with you as God. Mastery and control. Trying to optimize the strategy of your life so you gain as many of those moments that feel like how it used to be, that feel like you’re back at the source, as possible.
Around 4:30 you have become a master of the game of using your power to gain gratification. You function under the philosophy that more is better. More is better two ways. One: thickening every experience. So if a bath is good, a bath with incense is better; a bath with incense and bath oil; a bath with incense, bath oil, and someone else in the bathtub; incense, bath oil, a partner, and stereo earphones; incense, bath oil, a partner, stereo earphones, wine, and cheese. Grapeseed bio-oil rub. And on and on. More is better, thicker, richer. More and more. Get each experience. Try to get all your senses gratified simultaneously. The feelies of life. So you drive through the night with your quadraphonic sound in your car, smoking, talking, being sexually aroused, speeding. And you say, “This is life. Now I’m close to that place of peace.” Huh. It’s true, isn’t it? I’m not making it up. I’m just taking your picture!
Then the other way that more is better is getting the rushes closer together. Like you’re in the middle of dinner, and you’re wondering about what you’ll have for dessert. During dessert you’re already anticipating coffee. After coffee, while you’re in the dessert, you’re not only thinking about the coffee, but what you’ll do afterwards. “And then we’ll go bowling? And then maybe a movie? How about an ice cream soda? A ride? Home. Music? Let’s make love. What’s in the refrigerator?” And on and on it goes, rush after rush. Because between every rush in which you are lost in the rush—and you have lost your self-consciousness into the experience, and you are back in the source—between every one of those rushes is that little panic of separation, and there’s the seeking of the next rush. And if you’re really good you can get them closer and closer and closer together, and you can almost have the illusion there is no space. And you figure, “If I had more money and more power, I could do it.” That’s around 4:30.
5:59—it’s not going to work. You’ve done it hundreds of times. Life after life after life. “If only I were this, then I would.” “If only I made this much money, and have two cars, and a winter vacation, and fur coat, and insurance policies, and my children are secure, then I will experience that.” You go through it again and again and again and again. 5:59 you recognize that Christ was in fact correct, strangely enough—this is not a commercial—when he said, “Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Because it’s not going to do it. That’s my paraphrase.
5:59—despair. Everything you could figure out to do didn’t do it. You drank it, croched it, ate it, smoked it, shot it, read it, looked at it, caressed it, and it didn’t do it. For a moment it did it, but here we are again at the Mobile end of the Memphis Blues again.
6:01. These are all incarnations now. They’re not just minutes on a clock. 6:01. In fact, some of them are
It’s the moment when you see that who you thought you were is not in fact who you are, it’s just who you think you are. That moment of awakening may have come in that particular lifetime through a traumatic experience, through a crisis, through a death in the family, through falling through space, through a motorcycle accident, it could come at a moment of sexual orgasm, it could come as you’re approaching death, it could come at the birth of your child, it could come when the despair and depression get deep because you see the emptiness of the entire game you’ve been playing. There are many, many, many conditions. When you are ready for that to happen, a leaf falling could do it. It’s called the initial satori experience in Zen. It’s the moment in which there is a moment of clarity and you see through the dance. Actually, in a lifetime there are many, many of those moments for everyone. But most people at 4:00, 4:30, 5:30 are busy denying those, because they don’t fit in with the model you have of who you are. If you’re coming up with me just take another deep breath and let’s go a little higher.
There was an article last year in the New York Times, in the Sunday Magazine section, and it was a study of mysticism in America. It turned out that two fifths of the population of the United States, a sampling showed that two fifths of the population of the United States had had at some time in their life a genuine transcendent mystical experience, an experience of breaking through who they thought they were. That’s pretty impressive. That’s like more than forty million people. Of those two fifths, a sampling of those two fifths showed that 85% of them said, “It was the most profound experience of my life and I never want to have another one.” Of course not. Because it upsets the apple cart. You’re afraid you’re going insane, you’re going to flip out. Because you think you need to be who you think you are in order to keep the game going smoothly, to keep your ground. It’s scary. It’s like waking up out of a dream that most of you have had, and being disoriented and not knowing where you are. Or the lights go off in a movie theater and you can’t figure out where you are. You’re disoriented from it all. And then you say, “Whew, now I know. I’m back.” Even as high a being as somebody like Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams and Reflections said: “I went into these extraordinary realms. I was so happy to come back to my wife and family and to reality.” Still clinging to this as opposed to that, to this as reality.
By around 7:30 you’re ready to recognize that you are here on Earth as a soul who has taken birth in order to work through the attachments and clingings within yourself that keep you identified with your separateness, thus allowing you to once again become one with the One, or return to the Source, or to know your true Self. When that recognition is deep enough, the whole meaning of your life changes, and the meaning of every subsequent incarnation changes.
You’ll notice that at 4:30 you were busy being separate. And at the moment of death, because you were totally identified with your separateness, you said, “I don’t want to die! Stop the world. I don’t want to get off. Hold on! Doctor, save me! Implant, transplant—do whatever you have to do, but keep me alive!” You grab the bed sheets and say, “Keep me alive! I don’t want to die, because death is the end of it all.” Because you are a philosophical materialist. You’re your body, and if the body goes, you ain’t. And then you’re dead. Just like that. Dead dead, not spiritual dead. Dead dead. And a voice says to you, “Welcome.” And for most people at 4:30—in fact, everybody at 4:30—says, “I guess I didn’t die if I’m still here and somebody talked to me.” The voice says, “Oh no, you did die, and you freaked.” Because it’s so discrepant from who you thought you were and you go into total confusion, which is often called purgatory. And you just hang in there until you’re processed, programmed, re-educated, and sent back.
Around 7:30 it gets different, because now you know you aren’t who you think you are every birth. So you come to death, but you’re not that far on in your spiritual work, so it comes to death and you say, “No, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die,” even though, “Ram, Ram, Ram. God, Christ, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I know it will be alright but I don’t want to die.” And you’re really caught right in between. And there you are again: dead dead, you see. And a voice says, “Welcome!” And you say, “I guess I didn’t die.” And the voice says, “You did die,” and you have a moment of pause. And suddenly, everything you were trying to believe all your life turns out to be true. And you say, “Far out!” And then you become a relatively conscious participant in the dance between incarnations. You see your whole trip at that moment. You see how much work you’ve done all your incarnations. You meet all your old mothers and fathers by the thousands. And you see that so and so was your brother this time, and your lover last time, and your child that time. There’s only about 3 of us in the whole universe. And you see what work you have to do, and you say, “Well, gee, I’m really going to do a heavy next birth.” And the karma counsel says, “Well, we don’t advise it.” And you say, “Well, that’s okay. I want to do it all. Let’s see, I want to be born mentally retarded, and I would like to be impregnated when I’m eleven, and I would like to go blind at fourteen and die at seventeen of something horrible.” “Well, if you insist.” And you just burn out karma. You just go through it all.
Now, if you can hear the picture I’m painting, now look at what you’re in this moment. Because what you are in this moment is another one of them. It’s a, another opportunity. It’s another set of experiences. It’s more grist for the mill for your soul to awaken to its true identity. When you get to understand this, then (as I said before) the meaning of your entire life changes. Because from then on, when you really understand it, everything in your life becomes a vehicle for awakening. It isn’t just going to a lecture or meditating. It becomes all of it. And you see that the game is exquisitely designed to provide you with just the opportunities you need to burn out the ways in which you’re clinging, because, as Buddha pointed out, it is the clinging that causes the suffering. It isn’t living life that causes suffering. It’s clinging to this or that. If you cling to health as your body decays, and you can’t acknowledge the decay—suffering. You cling to being rich and you’re poor—suffering. If you cling to having hair and you go bald—suffering. I used to suffer incredibly because I didn’t have any hair. I used to comb it over and get long strands and wrap it around. Incredible suffering because I was trying to hold onto a model of myself as having hair. But it is what it is. And the recognition that the meaning of an incarnation is to provide a set of experiences for the soul to awaken to its true self.
And now, if you will allow me to introduce a concept—which is just a concept, because what it is is way beyond a concept—an incarnation is an opportunity. It’s a set of choices that allow humanity to move into harmony with the will of God or away from it. It is a set of choices that allow you to return to God—which is the Source, which is the undifferentiated space, which is the Garden of Eden, which is who you turn out to be. That’s who you are. That’s what you’re doing here. If you ask yourself, “What am I doing here?” That’s what you’re doing here. A thousand times you will get lost again. You will forget what you’re doing here. You will get lost into your melodrama. You will get lost into the absolute reality of the illusion. “Illusion” isn’t quite the right word, because it’s real. This plane is as real as that plane, as that plane, as that plane. They are all relatively real. When you’re in them, they’re real. If you have to go to the bathroom, it’s real. But many of you in this room have transcended one level of reality and experienced another level of reality. And in that other level of reality, what seemed real doesn’t seem real any more. At one level of reality we are in Oklahoma and we are meeting in this beautiful hall. That’s only one level. The reason that this level seems so real all the time is because of your attachment to your senses and to your thoughts—to your smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, and knowing. You are very attached to the particular channel on TV to which you are tuned. It’s very real.
Between 7:30 and 11:59 is the process of slowly awakening. Birth after birth, or within a birth. The process of becoming more and more conscious of your predicament and less and less attached to this or that, to samsara or nirvana, to illusion or enlightenment. And what is the process of liberation? Liberation means being liberated from the clinging to any single reality as the reality. There is nowhere to stand. Here we are, nowhere to stand. And everything you notice here—for example, if you are listening to my words now and forgetting to rise in your being and tune to your soul, you are attached to the level of reality that is fed by your intellect. To some of you these words are just like bzzzzz, background noise.
You and I are moving higher and higher into space with more and more clarity and quietness and openness and spaciousness. That’s also planes of reality. Liberated being is both rising spiritually, heart open in love, totally aware at the level of the intellect, physically aware of your body and the way you’re sitting and all your pains and aches and pleasures. All at the same time not clinging to this or that, not spacing out, not coming down. Going up and coming down is not liberation, it’s a roller coaster. Finally a conscious being is Here, and Here includes up and down.
From 6:00 to 7:30 you spend lifetimes trying to get high in order to remember what it is you keep forgetting. By around 8:00 o’clock you don’t forget very often, and then you are just eager to get on with it. And when you are eager to get on with it you are less attached to your highs, for your highs and lows are all grist for the mill, and in fact your lows teach you more than your highs. Well, that isn’t true. Your highs teach you about other planes of reality, your lows teach you about what’s keeping you stuck in this particular reality.
But you must understand—and this is the issue of social responsibility—the object of the dance of enlightenment, of coming to God, is not to lose the incarnation; is not to realize God and forget humanity. For the formless and the form are two different faces of God. And if you deny your incarnation in order to come to God, you don’t know God fully. If you want perfection in your spiritual journey, you must both honor your incarnation and become totally free of it. You must both look up and recognize that beyond form lies formlessness, and that even within form lies the perfection of the design of things, the natural law, the Tao, the way of things. And when you look up, you are awed by the perfection of the work of God—the perfection that includes not only the stars and the planets and the creation of humanity, but that perfection includes the suffering and the violence and the starvation and the paranoia and the ecological destruction as well as the flower and the butterfly.
But if you only see the perfection, then you lose humanity. For you cannot stay in such a clear light if you had to close your heart to do it and expect it to be fully with God. Before you looked up at 6:01, you were only looking down and out, and all you saw everywhere was suffering. All forms have inherent within them suffering, because they are in time and space and they are subject to change and decay. It is just the way of things, and there is suffering. And your heart bled for that suffering. And sometimes it was unbearable, and you had to harden your heart because you couldn’t bear the suffering. And you looked up, or you went inside, and you started to experience deeper peace and higher consciousness, and felt the perfection of the universe. And in that clarity all of the horror and the suffering fell into place, and you were up in the heights of the Himalayas, dancing in the pure white snow.
But if you’re going the whole journey, then you must look down again. And when you look down you see that there is blood upon the snow. There is the bleeding heart of Jesus. There is the suffering of all sentient beings. It is a strong and conscious and clear and liberated being who can simultaneously look up and look down, who can with an open heart experience the unbearable compassion—unbearable compassion—and at the same moment look up and see the exquisiteness of the perfection. Such a being is in a position to liberate other beings from suffering, for such a being who knows God and remains on Earth (or on any plane of reality), every act that is performed—for such a being—every act that is performed in relation to another human being creates the optimum conditions for that other being to be liberated from the attachment to their own suffering.
For at the same moment if you are hungry and I feed you, I am feeding your belly. But if I am only attached to being the giver of the food, that environment creates a reality in which you are only the receiver of the food. If, however, I am giving you the food, but at the same moment I am in a space in which there is no giving nor any receiving—for we are here, we always were here and we always will be here, and this is merely the particular round of the melodrama we are playing out together. Now when I give you that food, since there is no giver, you are not forced to become the receiver. There can be giving and receiving on one level of reality, no giving and no receiving in the other. And you and I can live simultaneously in both of them. Now we are becoming conscious. Now we are moving towards liberation. Now we are getting less lost in the emotionality of the dance. Now we can look about ourselves in this incarnation and see what our capabilities are as incarnated beings to end suffering, and we can accept our dharma, our way, and do it as a vehicle for remaining in the perfection of the will of God.
Come on up just one more breath. If you want, you can breathe in your heart and out the top of your head, but sit very straight. Let out more stops.
Ultimately, the work is to open yourself to all of the forms of the universe (or the universes)—whether those forms be on the physical plane, the astral plane, the causal plane—to open yourself to them, to acknowledge them, to honor them, and to go beyond them. In devotional tantra, which is my lineage, this is known as relating to the mother. For forms, or māyā, all forms are understood to be the mother. For the mother is that which manifests, which gives birth, and all of the forms of the universe are the manifestations of the mother. This is not now sexist, it’s not male and female, it’s mother and father. Father is the formless. It is not the word “God,” because the word “God” is part of the manifestation, the word “God” is the mother. But God which is beyond the word “God” is the father. The father is the formless. Christ says, “Don’t get lost in me. I come only to bring you to the Father. I am a form here to take you to the Father.”
And what is the relationship of you as a seeker to the mother? The relationship to the mother is one of the heart. It is of the fourth chakra—actually all the chakras up to the seventh. It involves loving the mother, feeding from the mother, drinking from the breast of the mother, consuming the mother, devouring the mother. For the only one that goes to the father is the mother. If you would be the b ride of God, you must contain the universe. Who you truly are is the universe. Who you think you are is far less. For the thinking mind cannot comprehend that which is beyond itself. So it is only when your mind is quiet, and your heart is open, and you drink in the universe, so that all experiences that come to you from the moment of birth on, you consume. You get lost for a moment, then you consume it until you become perfect in your equanimity. There’s death, there’s life. There’s the mother in the form of Kālī: frightening, horrible. There’s the mother in the form of Durgā: beautiful, seductive. There’s the mother in the form of Mary: protective, nurturing, loving. There’s the mother in the form of Lakshmi: wealth, fame, largesse. Mother, I honor you. I drink from you. I make love to you. I consume you. For only when mother and son have become one can you know the father. As long as you are afraid of the forms of the universe, you cannot become one with the formless. Enlightened beings, the true guru, is a being who has dived deep into the formless and comes back into form no longer out of personal desire, but because of collective karma, in order to relieve the suffering of other beings.
At 11:59 you have a choice. The pull from God—the pull of the formless to merge back into the formless and to leave behind your body and your personality and all of your stuff—is incredible. No blame either way, because God is not in time. So there’s no rush about this game. You’re all going to get enlightened sooner or later. But at 11:59 a few beings push against God to stay in form in order to relieve the suffering of others. That is the sacrificial lamb. That is to leave the father to become the son. That was the sacrifice of the Christ, of Jesus. Not the crucifixion; that’s nothing for a liberated being. Taking on the suffering, the karma, of others—that’s great joy for a liberated being. Bleeding, pain, death—nothing! Nothing! Even the statement “Father, why have you forsaken me?” can understood as: “Father, why are you glorifying me? Why has the game turned out that everybody is going to worship me instead of remembering you? Why have you taken away my chance to do what it was we set out to do? Don’t do this to me.”
Your work, the photograph I take of you at this moment, is of a being who hears. And because you hear what I am saying now—not because I’m saying it, because you hear in your heart and know you knew, and know that it resonates in truth within yourself—there is no way you can go back. The hook is planted. The awakening is happening. It is irrevocable. You can no longer get totally lost in the illusion. You may make believe you are. You may try to be. You may wish this whole trip would go away and say it’s just another trip. But it won’t do it. Unfortunately, you’re hooked.
And it won’t be over until you get to 11:59, and can sit down and make your body firm, and draw in a breath, and let out that breath, and take in no further breath. The body will become stiff and the heartbeat will become quiet, and you will leave the body, and your soul will rise, leaving behind each of your bodies. All of the astral melodramas of the psychic planes—leaving behind the masters and the gurus and the methods—and you will come into the presence of God. And the last boundaries of separateness will start to disappear, and you’ll have the choice. It’s the same choice you had at 12:00 to eat the apple—except now it’s a conscious choice out of wisdom. At 12:00 it was a choice to find out out of curiosity. Now you are a free being, a being in God, and you can go into the deepest samadhi. And if you program yourself properly (just like setting an alarm clock), you can go in and out of God, and come back into form. Staying in form in order to be a life, or a way, or a vehicle, for others to find their way home.
But all the time you’re on the journey—from wherever you are now; 6:01, 7:30, 9:10, 10:30, 11:59—you are in an incarnation and you must honor it. You are a male or a female, you are an American or from another nationality, you are a Protestant or a Jew or a Catholic or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim or whatever—Zoroastrian. You are of a certain age. You are in Oklahoma. You are of a certain economic strata. You are of a certain educational and intellectual background. You have certain opportunities. And around you is an ocean of opportunity to relieve the suffering of all beings. And you learn awareness. And if your discipline in going to God is perfect (this is tough, by the way), you never lose your ground on the way to God. You never forget to put gas in the car because you got too stoned meditating. You keep it all together all the way. You’re not so busy being with God that if your child falls and hurts itself you aren’t there with consolation. You are not so busy with the beauty of the universe that you forget the inequality of races, the inequality of sexes, the inequality of minority groups, the inequality of economic groups, the inequality of nations, the physical pain and suffering of people lost in the illusion.
I work with many dying people. I sit with them. So to me life and death are all process to be used in order to awaken to God. I don’t demand that a person that’s dying feel this way or that way, or accept my philosophy. I just sit with them. And it’s just my peace concerning their death that provides an environment that allows them (if they are ready) to be free of the anxiety of death; to use their death in order to awaken. The moment of death is the optimum moment of the entire incarnation to become with God. The moment of shedding the body. Mahatma Gandhi, as he was shot three times in his garden, and as he died, only one word was on his lips: his name for God, Ram. “Here I come God. Ready? Ah.”
At every moment you are ready. At every moment you are preparing for the marriage with him. Your whole life becomes a purification. Your work is to cleanse your body, open the energy, so you can tune and handle more and more energy, open the heart so there is flow, so that you are truly in love with the mother, and still and quiet the mind. Not the thoughts, they go on. But you quiet the mind until you are in perfect balance, loving the mother and entering into the father. Those are the two levels of tantra.
For the sexual tantra is not the intercourse on the physical plane of man with woman, it is the intercourse of the seeker with the mother, and ultimately of the mother with the father. Before you are done within tantra, you are both the phallus, the lingam, and the yoni. You are both the male organ that penetrates into the universe, and the female yoni that receives the universe into yourself. For the soul is neither male nor female, and all of your sexual melodrama is just that: mellow drama. And as you come to know your soul it all becomes just stuff. Frigidity, impotence, premature ejaculation, homosexuality, lesbianism, small genitals, no breasts—da, da, da, da, da, da, da. It’s all just stuff. And you breathe a great sigh of whew! Far out! And then you are free to become who you must be.
This is the big leagues. This is the ultimate up-level. For into this stew goes politics, religion, the arts, the sciences. That’s all grist for this mill. But it doesn’t mean you deny any of it. You honor it, love it, enjoy it, and appreciate it. You just don’t cling to it.
For a little while now we’ll do some questions and answers. And when you ask me a question, when you raise your hand, which is the only way I’ll do it, I’ll ask and I’ll repeat the questions. Let me run through a few questions that have been asked of me during the intermission.
One question which was asked of me a few times is: how is Timothy Leary? All is fair in the question and answer game. There’s no place I’d stop. A gal wanted to interview me for a newspaper before the lecture, and the first question she asked me is, “How is Timothy Leary?” and I said, “Well, I’m putting my head in a space for giving this evening. And while I could do this, I can’t do it now.” And she was perhaps a little frustrated. I don't know. But now I can answer it. Because now I’ve eaten enough of your karma so that those of you that needed to went home, and what’s left I don’t care. Now you’re on your own. You’ve gotten fair warning.
I spoke to Timothy last week. He called me from San Diego, where he is still in prison, and he expects to be out very shortly. And he’s writing and seems to be in good spirits and doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. It’s just his—whatever it was he was before, he seems to still be. There’s been a lot of heavy melodrama that’s gone down about Timothy, and I think that in terms of his melodrama he’ll have to speak for himself. I love Timothy a great deal as a person. I don’t feel I have any work to do with him at this time. He and I have gone into different directions, if you will, in our work. And he was a great teacher for me in the early sixties.
But the way it is with teachers—you take a teaching, and sometimes that teaching will take you all the way, and sometimes you must go on. No blame. You don’t have to judge a teacher and say that teacher isn’t good enough. You just have to say that I don’t have any work to do with that teacher at this moment. That’s enough. You don’t have to analyze everybody’s clay feet. You will know in your heart.
That was one of the other questions asked of me—is about finding a teacher. You will notice in your own development that you will come here and get fed in a certain way, and then you will yearn for, say, a quieting of your mind. And so you’ll start to look around for a meditation space, and people around who can help you with meditation. Or you will start to see that your body freaked out, and your whole consciousness was captured by the pain in your knees. You couldn’t hear hardly anything. And so you figured, well, you’ve got to get your body together. And that will lead you into some kind of body training. And you will listen, then, for that kind of a teacher.
At first the beginning of the journey is very eclectic. You take a little of this and a little of that. You quiet the mind, you open the heart, you sing with one group, and you meditate with another, and so on. That’s all fine. As you get further along the path you begin to feel a pull towards one (if you want to call it) a ray or a lineage or another. It’s not a lineage necessarily determined by your strong points. It might even be by your weak points. It might be a lineage of the heart, and you’ve been a head tripper all your life. But you’ll feel a pull in that direction and you won’t like it. You’ll hate everybody involved. But you can’t stop, because you’ll know the rightness. And the secret is listening to that truth that’s coming out of your inner being. And if in doubt, just sit down and go inside and ask. And if you ask in purity, and can quiet your mind, you will hear some kind of an answer.
And there is nothing wrong in this journey with falling on your face. If you make mistakes and fall on your face, you just get up and brush yourself off and get on with it. So you go, after you say, “Oh, this is my teacher. You are so pure. I love you. I want to study with you.” And then the teacher rapes you or something. “Well, I blew it. That wasn’t the right teacher.” It was a teacher of a certain sort, but it wasn’t the teacher I expected. Okay. Thank you for your teaching. On you go. Just keep taking the teachings, take the teachings and go on.
And as the time comes where you need to be pulled, you’ll feel a pulling into wanting to go deep and deepen your surrender and your trust, and finding a route that will take you much deeper. And then you are tuned in such a way that your perception is open to finding the beings you need. And you may have to go on a long journey, and you may end up going thousands and thousands of miles, and then come back to Oklahoma City and find out that it was your Aunt Doris who was all the time the Buddha waiting in drag, stirring the chicken soup, waiting for you to get back so she can feed you and take you to God. So don’t get caught in models as to what one is going to look like, because they never look like they’re supposed to look like, believe me. I mean, I’m taking teachings at the moment from a Brooklyn housewife, and that’s very unlikely. But it’s just like being in the Himalayas with a great yogini. So you can’t figure the models at all. They’re very—God has a great sense of humor.
It is certainly useful to have a teacher on the physical plane, because the teacher will show you—through their mirroring and their training—will show you where you’re holding your secret stash of attachments, right? They will uncover them, help you uncover them, just by shining their light of clarity and truth. Problem is, there are very few teachers that are that pure. And very often a teacher has a set of subtle attachments, and the student gets into a relationship where the teacher’s attachments keep the student from seeing herself or himself clearly enough.
So when you get involved with a teacher, you keep listening with your heart. Not your emotional heart. Your, like, inner voice. Your inner voice. And if it doesn’t feel right—even if everybody around you tells you it’s right on, this is the way you should be going—if it doesn’t feel right, trust it. My guru—who is not in his body anymore, but who still teaches me from another plane—my guru, at times I have hated him, and my intellect has said he is a total phony, a charlatan, exploiting me, a dirty old man. You know, senile. My mind has done all kinds of stuff about him. But that inner voice says, “Go, baby, go! This is the pure thing.” Okay?
And if you are like me, you are totally hooked on purity. You are just looking for that pure light. And purity comes in strange forms. Don’t confuse purity with righteousness. They’re not the same. It’s just purity in the cleanliness of the feeling of the presence of the living spirit. It’s not goodyness; it’s not goody-goody. It’s cleanness, it’s clarity, and a kind of a love that’s like a diamond love. It’s not thick and saccharine type love. It’s clear love. And with such a being, when they’re really clear, no matter how deep in you go, you won’t find them. Because only when you know yourself will you know them.
So for teachers you just stay open to them, and they come and go, until finally something happens and there you are. Believe me, when you have raised your hand in purity and said, “Hey God, recognize me. I’m coming. I know what the trip’s about and I want it.” That choice on your part, that reaching forth, that is what calls for the grace. And you may have many teachers on the physical plane, but your guru may not be on the physical plane at all. Your guru may be Christ, or your guru may be Ramakrishna, or any number of beings. But the minute you raise your hand, your guru recognizes you. And it’s really much less important that you know your guru than your guru know you, I’ll tell you. Like the Buddha during the night, every night, there were a few moments when he would look out over all the Buddha realms—all the realms of existence; not just this plane, but all the realms—to see who was ready, who was ready for that touch or that connection or that grace. For one thought of the guru when you’re ready will liberate. But to rush to get that far when you’re not ready, because you could collect a thousand of those and nothing would happen if you’re not ready. And a guru who is a true guru just is, and you take what you need. The existence of the guru is the grace. They won’t come and take all your karma just like that. But if you give them your karma, then it will go through them, and you will be free of it and they won’t get stuck with it.
So that’s dealing with another question that was asked of me: “How do you deal with your negative stuff? The stuff that’s not getting you to God?” Because your life is full of stuff that you’ve got habits about that isn’t getting you there. Your anger, your doubts, your frustration, your lust, your greed, confusion, agitation, laziness, torpor and sloth—all of the five hindrances and the ten fetters and all the stuff—it’s not getting you there! I mean, you can hang in there for thousands of incarnations, but it’s not going to get you to God. And you get to the point you’re so greedy for God—I mean, this is real greed we’re talking about, not heady greed for millions of dollars or lots of sex or something. This is real greed. This is greed for it all. And that greed for God gets so strong you say: anything in me that’s keeping me from going to God, I don’t want it. Then, when you don’t want something, you don’t have to analyze it, therapize it, think about it. You just let it go.
Like, you’re going along in your day, and somebody comes along, and they do something, and you get angry. What do you do with the anger? Most people sort of stew in it. They create it, and they work on it, and they say, “Well, I was really right!” And they just are building a reality to justify the anger. But the anger is not going to get you to God. It’s not going to get you there. You don’t need it. Who needs it? So you get to the point: the minute you see the anger, you say, “Oh, anger.” And the labeling of it is the beginning of it. And then there’s the process of offering it.
And here’s where it’s fun to use the mother. There is an aspect of the mother that’s really a gas—if you can take her. It’s called Kali. Kali is a form of the mother that’s very far out. She is the most horrible looking thing you’ve ever seen. She’s got long canine teeth, and her tongue is out, and there’s blood dripping from her mouth. She wears a circle of skulls. And she’s sagging and old and just ugly ugly. And she’s ugly ugly. She’s what ugliness is. And she exists. She is an aspect of the mother—we’re talking now about astral planes—she is an aspect of the mother that exists for one purpose only, and that is to consume impurities in beings that keep them from going to God. She eats them. She feeds upon them. It’s what feeds Kali.
So if you want to get into a relationship where you invite Kali to help you, you say, when you get into the anger, you say, “I don’t want the anger. Here, Ma, you eat it.” And you keep feeding your mother. You just keep feeding the mother. “Hey Ma, you eat it.” “Hey, hey, baby. You eat it.” Just keep feeding Kali, and Kali drinks it. But the thing is, you’ve got to be careful. Because you don’t offer it for food unless you really mean to give it up, see? If you would like to be somebody that’s offering it, but don’t want to really offer it, don’t fool around with Kali. Baby, she’s got a sword in one hand and she’ll cut it off. It’s bad. She’s fierce. She’ll go right after you. But when you really don’t want to hide any stash, you just want to get to God, then Kali becomes this incredible helper. And when you’re really offering everything to Kali, you see in the middle of her heart the true Kali, which is this golden goddess. That’s the goddess come down, the golden goddess that exists in the heart of the black Kali. She’s black because she’s gorged with blood, from eating all the impurities of the universe.
So there’s a process of offering all your impurities to the mother. You can offer it all to Christ, because that’s what Christ was crucified for: for your impurities. So since he did it already, you don’t have to do it again. Just give it to him and let him take it with him. He’s already done it. If you let him do it, he’ll take it from you. You don’t have to go through the trip. So you give up the anger and the lust and the greed, and every time it comes up you give it up again. And then you fill your mind with stuff about God, or quietness of mind, or breathing in and out of the heart with love. And you just start with daily simple discipline, cleaning up your game, cleaning up your game. You don’t need the stuff. Anything you don’t need, you let go. It’s just excess baggage.
And as you go to clean up your game, you find out that you’ve done a lot of things in life that have left a lot of loose edges; they’ve left a lot of karmic shit around, you know? Stuff. You walked away from your parents, you did something that left a ripping thing. And so you go and you start to clean up your game. You pay off some old bills even though somebody is not hassling you for it. I mean, you really get very simple. You start to want to be simple. And you realize that as long as you live in a paranoid world where you’re afraid of being caught for this or that, you’re spending so much energy keeping the world away you’re cutting yourself off from God. Because ultimately the process is to get into this flow with the universe—there’s this flow, heart flow. Well, that all will become clear as time goes on. Questions?
The question was: how can you be sure that the inner voice you hear is the true one, is the clarity, is the connection to God? The answer is: you can’t. And, in fact, that’s why the Quakers call it the still small voice within, and there are all these other voices which are your desires masquerading as God, see? And they’re saying, “I’m God! Listen to me! Get as much as you can.” And what you’ll do is: you’ll listen, and you’ll listen, and you’ll hear a message, and you’ll start a journey, and it won’t click. You’ll learn to use this image of clicking. It doesn’t click. It doesn’t feel—because something that is in harmony in the universe is in harmony on every level of reality. And you’ll find you’re doing something that is beautiful at one level and stinks at another level. And it won’t click. It’ll feel off. And you’ve got to start to trust that process. And you keep tuning and tuning to that inner voice, and tuning and tuning and tuning. And the more that you quiet your mind, and the freer you get of the clinging of thought forms, the more you will hear that inner voice. Because it’s not a voice of the intellect. It’s much deeper. It’s what in the West we sometimes call an intuitive voice, but it’s even deeper than that.
So the quieter the mind—like, if you sit down and follow your breath, just follow the breath in and out of your nostrils for twenty minutes. At the end of the twenty minutes you’re in a much better space to hear your inner voice than you were before, because you’re quieter; your mind is quieter. And the more your heart is open to the flow, the more you don’t have to turn off that and turn off that. The more you’re flowing and the quieter your mind, the clearer that inner voice will get. So this is a process of tuning yourself as a receiver to hear yourself, right? And many times you’ll hear the wrong voice, you’ll act on it wrongly, and it won’t click, and you’ll stop, and you’ll say, “I blew it again.” Because if you had it down perfectly and could hear that voice perfectly and always did the right thing, you’d be enlightened. There’d be nothing to do. So the journey to enlightenment is the journey of error, right? So don’t worry about making mistakes.
The question, or the statement—it didn’t come out as a question, but I guess there’s a question in it. He says when he tries to do mantra or chanting aloud, he feels silly. And so he just kind of goes into the quiet kind of stuff. Right?
Audience
Yeah. I’m kind of wondering, you know, like, what is the significance of the words, you know? Like—
Dass
What’s the significance of the words? Well, one of the significances of the words is to get you through feeling silly. Another significance of the word is that the repetition of word, which is mantra—there’s mantra, yantra, mudra; all of these are designed to bring your mind to one-pointedness, to bring you to getting the power of mind, the quietness and power of the mind. If you focus on a mandala, in the center of the mandala, of one of those circles or holes, or if you create a sound or listen to a sound, or do a certain kind of mudra. These are all orienting you, directing you, narrowing your attention and your relationship to the universe. They’re sending up a certain kind of relationship to the universe.
For example, certain mantras will tune you to certain planes of existence, other mantras to others. Certain mantras will give you great power, others will open your heart, right? So they are vehicles for tuning you vibrationally, right? And you start out feeling silly. Like I said, if we did Hare Krishna for ten hours, you’d go through: “Isn’t this fun!” “I’m getting tired.” “This is a foolish thing to do.” “Geez, I’m bored!” “What the hell is this about?” “Why is this a foreign language? Why can’t we talk English?” Then you go through that, see? Then you might fall asleep. Then you wake up and there’s about six people chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. And then slowly it changes into something else. And maybe about four in the morning it starts to happen. And you tune until finally you are talking to God, you come into the presence, the space, through that mantra, through the repetitive mantra. Because the repetition is just like looking at a candle flame. It just brings your mind—finally you keep thinking all that stuff about silliness and all that, that’s just thought forms. They’re like those little bugs that are around a candle in the summertime—you know, those little things that last a day? Well, that’s your thoughts, you know. And on through it all is Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, see? So after a while all the bugs go home to sleep, you see, and there’s just the candle. It’s a beautiful device.
Prayer is another one. For example, you know, “Oh God, God, let me know you, let me know you.” And you slowly go into a prayer. At the same moment your mind is saying, “Do you think anybody is listening? What kind of nonsense is this?” But if you will let the heart do the praying—I have praying groups that just pray as a group, and we just pray and pray and pray until pretty soon the process is really happening, the heart is open, and the flow is open, and you’re calling forth these beings, and the connection is opening you. Questions?
Since enlightenment will become reality for all, why do we need the journey? Because you’re in a rush. Because you’re suffering. I mean, if you’re not suffering enough, don’t worry about it. Just go to the movies, alright? Because sooner or later it’s your motivation to want to get done. God is not in any rush, because God isn’t in time. You aren’t in time in truth, just in relative truth are you in time. So you then want to get done, and when you want to get done, then you chose methods to get you done. So there isn’t any—okay [???]
The roots of the tree would be the wisdom. The wisdom is not conceptual. It’s not what you know, it’s what you are. And out of what you are, you—from what you are you can manifest specific objective knowledge. Or collect it, same thing. Whether you collect it—like, learning is really remembering, because it’s all in there already, right? And so then, the knowledge, or knowing, or objective knowledge, comes out of the akash where it all is, which is all inside yourself, which is like the root of the tree, so that the knowledge then manifests outward, and then it goes back in. So as you get higher and clearer, you get simpler and simpler and simpler, until oftentimes you find that your mind is totally empty. Nothing is happening at all. And you’re always available to know what you need to know, but you’re not busy knowing just to know. You’re not caught, you’re just back in the roots. You’re not flowering at that moment.
How do you know what mantra is good for you if different mantras are for different people? Well, unless you are around a guide who gives you a mantra specifically out of a deep place—really deep, not just out of a formula, a mechanical formula, but out of a deep place in themself in their own connection—there are general mantras that are useful for everybody. And you will find as you start to work with mantras certain mantras will pull on you and others won’t. You just get tuned to the sensitivity. Your whole trip will unfold from inside in terms of the rightness. People say: well, you need a teacher, but how do you know what teacher to take except for that inner thing that says go, go, go, right? So for one person it might be om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, for another person it’s Ram Ram Ram Ram, for another it’s om ma hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum, om ma hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum. Now that’s a very powerful mantra. Hum is a power word. om ma hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum. For another who is more an Advaitist, a non-dualist, beyond form: gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha. Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha. You feel that mantra, just as we did now Hare Krishna. Some of these will open your heart, some of them will move into your head. They’ll touch different energy spaces in you. But if you don’t know, there are all these general mantras you can use.
What is a good mantra for opening the heart? Ram is a good mantra for opening the heart, Hare Krishna is a good mantra for opening the heart. Then there’s a special mantra called aditya hridayam punyam sarva shatru vinashanam. that’s in Be Here Now; it’s in the back. It means “all evil vanishes from life for him who keeps the sun in his heart.” You keep bringing the warmth of the sun into your heart and feeling the warmth coming out of your heart. You just keep doing the mantra. Aditya hridayam punyam sarva shatru vinashanam. Aditya hridayam punyam sarva shatru vinashanam. Aditya hridayam punyam sarva shatru vinashanam. For another person it will be: “Oh Jesus I love you. Oh Jesus I love you. Oh God I love you.” That’ll do it too. As long as it comes from a pure place and you really want the heart to open. Just pick something you really love and go into the essence of the love with that. It’ll just keep taking it.
The question is: why can’t everybody be at 12:00 o’clock? Why is anybody at 4:30? The answer is: everybody is at 12:00 o’clock. The humor of it is that all these are different planes of reality. At one plane you’re working like hell to climb up the mountain, and when you get to the top of the mountain you realize you never left it and in the first place, because there was no mountain, nor was there any you to begin with. The whole thing was a dream within a dream within dream. But within each dream it’s real. And all we’re doing is using dreams to get rid of dreams, because all form is just stuff. It’s like patterns of clouds. It’s beautiful. I mean, you don’t knock the drama, because no drama, no you. All of it is exquisite. It’s beautiful. You honor it and love it. All of it. You just work with it, work with it, and love it. Then you push it away. You say, “Oh god, I wish I was enlightened. Oh it stinks.” You gotta keep waiting until you can honor it all. “Yeah, right. Ah.” But not give a damn. Caring, but not giving a damn. Called non-attachment but involved. There are many ways of saying that.
Is there any way of stepping out the back door and cooling it, meaning, stopping the trip for a while? It gets heavy, doesn’t it? No. Sorry, there’s no way. I told you before: you’re hooked. If you stayed through intermission, you’ve had it. Tough day. Come on in and stew with the rest of us. And it’s hell. It gets worse, too. Yeah, you’re welcome! And it’s totally delightful. I mean, you know, the cosmic joke just becomes more and more obvious all the time as you’re suffering and sweating and… oh. It’s beautiful. As long as you’ve got a stash, Kali’s hanging out!
The two questions are: what do I think of the Castaneda trip, and is TM a rip off?
I am inclined—it’s very delicate now. I have a choice at this moment, this evening. See, each evening I have the same choice. I can either get into being the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, or I can say: look, you listen to your own heart, and if you think that’s good for you, if there’s something there for you, take it. And if you don’t, don’t. You don’t need my approval. You know what you feel in your heart about it. That’s the other option of what I could say.
Now, to answer the question—I can never resist! Don Juan is a very beautiful being, and it’s a very good teaching. I don’t know if Castaneda has it yet, but Don Juan is interesting if Don Juan exists. And the problem is that the books are written by Castaneda, so what you’re getting is Castaneda. The books don’t take you all the way, and you don’t know if that’s Don Juan or Castaneda. Because it’s always the eyes of whoever is writing it.
As far as TM being a rip off—the only person that gets ripped off by that are the people at TM. I mean, the people that run the TM thing. If you, in purity, go and you seek a mantra, and then use the mantra to go to God, you win. If somebody did something for anything that isn’t pure enough in them, that’s their karmic problem, not yours. So if you’re pure and you want to go to God, don’t worry, don’t spend your time being paranoid you’re going to get ripped off. If it feels like you need something, go get it. And if it costs money, so what! And if it doesn’t, so what! Don’t make a big deal about it. Don’t get lost in that level of the game. That’s too trivial.
All institutions are a ripoff anyway. I mean, institutions—I’m involved in them too, and they’re all a ripoff. Because the living spirit is the immediate moment. The minute you put it down and say these are the rules, and this is the group, and this is it, and are you a member or aren’t, you’ve already lost the thing. It’s very hard to keep an institution alive. It all becomes calcified bones of old thoughts, you know? And so the real teachings are in the moment. Like, even the collecting of this on tape and using it later is nice, but it’s not what this moment is, because this moment is the air and the lights and the room and the tower and all that stuff; is all the existential process of this teaching. That’s the true tantric teaching. It’s in the moment. It’s not just reporting the teachings of others, it’s bringing it right into the present moment. And that’s what a living teacher is so good about, because they keep bringing it right into the moment. They use the situation. Like, somebody calls me and they say, “Should I have an abortion?” There’s a real immediate situation for spiritual learning. Somebody else calls: “My mother is dying.” There’s a real immediate situation. Someone else calls and says, “I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. I’m stagnant.” There’s a real situation. It’s right in the moment of your karmic predicament that the growth exists, the potential growth exists, that’s where the real teaching is.
Irachi Book. Irachi Book. I’m sorry, I’m not a great student of the Irachi Book. I’ve seen it and looked through it, but I really am not… that hasn’t been my vehicle. It feels good, but it hasn’t been my vehicle, and… yeah that’s all.
And here’s that question again. If we’re already it, why did the drama begin in the first place? Like, how did it all happen? It happened because of man’s choice. Somebody came up to me and said, “You sound like you’re saying that what happened was that, when man left the garden of Eden, it’s all been horrible ever since.” That isn’t true at all. In the perfection of the design exists the choice of man. That’s part of the perfection. And that choice can move men towards or away from the flow; the flow of God. And the reason it all began is because man makes the choice, makes a choice. And the reason it all ends is because man makes a choice. And that’s at the level at which choice exists. For in reality nothing happened at all, because everything was in the moment. Buddha says in answer to that question: it’s none of your business. Because the answer to that question cannot be dealt with on the rational conceptual level. Because it isn’t in time, and words and concepts are all referring to time and space. Because at the same moment it didn’t begin, it did begin. You can’t talk about it because it’s not speakable about, and that’s a bit of a cop-out, but that’s as close as you can actually get. If you’ve lived in that space where you understand the answer, you can’t talk about it. It’s not speakable. It’s unspeakable.
The question is: can drugs be used as a vehicle to enlightenment? I don’t think there is much doubt about it for you and me, for many of us, that at least psychedelic chemicals—not all drugs, but psychedelic chemicals—have a capacity to cut through places where you are attached and clinging; to set them aside and show you a possibility. The problem is that they don’t allow you to become the possibility, they only show you the possibility. And then, after a few hours, you lose the view of the possibility and you have it only as a memory.
I mean, I made a very genuine effort in five years of drug taking to use that as my full upāya, or way, and it didn’t work. Because I just kept going up and coming down. And Maharaj-ji, my guru, when he took LSD—he asked me for that yogi medicine I used—and he swallowed a huge amount that would have freaked anybody in this room, and nothing happened to him at all. And then he said: “Well, these are known about, these chemicals. And it will allow you come in and have a visit with Christ, but you can only stay two hours and then you’ve got to leave.” He said, “It would be better to become Christ than to visit Christ. But this medicine won’t do that for you because it’s not the true samādhi.” He said, “Love is a much stronger medicine than this, because love is that flow with the mother. That’s the thing that brings you to God.” “But,” he said, “it’s good to visit a saint. It’s nice to visit a Christ.”
And I would be a hypocrite if I knocked drugs. At the same moment, let me point out that it is not a full upāya. And once you know the possibility, you might as well get on with it. Getting on with it means cleaning out the places that you have the attachments, not overriding them. And what chemicals do is they override them. They leave them there, they just push them aside for a moment. And finally you get so greedy to be done that you just start to want to deal with your shit rather than pushing it under the rug all the time. No matter how bad it smells, you just want to get on with it and deal with stuff. And at that point you start to not try to get high, but work with your lows, and then drugs lose their savor or their pull.
Now, there is another subtle effect of drugs that I noticed in some of the work I was doing this year, that my astral and physical teachers pointed out that there were definite psychic effects of the repeated ingestions of drugs I had used in my medulla, in this part of the brain, that made my work slower and harder for me at the advanced level. It didn’t ruin my chances. It wasn’t in any way damaged in that sense. But it just kind of built of a kind of toxicity in my medulla—psychic, not physical; psychic toxicity—that made that work more difficult. So that my inclination is to say that for some people they could be useful, but I don’t believe that for anybody that’s able to sit in this room and know what I’m talking about they are any longer necessary. I think that’s a straight statement, okay? And the problem is that when you’re using something illegal, even though it’s wrongly illegalized, you’re paying with a certain kind of paranoia that keeps cutting you off from other human beings. And that’s very subtle, but it costs something. Because it was five years after I stopped smuggling before I could go through a border without freaking, and I could imagine a border guard could actually be a human being; an immigration official. Questions?
The question was: would I describe Jesus Christ? When I—the being that I relate to is a heart that is like a bottomless well of compassion. It’s like just turning itself inside-out in its flow into humanity. It’s like spirit keeps pouring down through this being, coming out of the heart, and just feeding the world; just keeps feeding with love, feeding with love. It’s a very pure—it’s not mushy at all. It’s not mushy at all. It’s very clean. My relation to astral beings is not visual primarily. Mainly it’s feeling tones, feeling [???]. My third eye is not open in that sense, so that I can’t describe it visually to you. I can just tell you the feeling quality that’s in me.
The question is: there is much talk about the end of the world and the beginning of the new world. The entire fix of where we are at in terms of our drama is all a source of endless fascination. It’s endlessly fascinating. But it comes down to: no matter whether it’s going to end in one minute or end in ten billion years, once you know what the trip is, there’s nothing to do but get enlightened. You just keep doing it anyway. You just keep relieving suffering wherever you find it, get your scene straight, because you know the closer you get to enlightenment the more you relieve suffering of all beings around you, you just keep doing it. And if it ends in a minute, it ends. Because that’s still the optimum thing you can do. So it turns out not to be a functional thing to spend all your time thinking about, right?
See, it’s very easy to get lost in what are called the psychic realms, the realms of the planes where there are many beings and where there is much drama as to who we really are, and you were before, and who you will be. It’s incredibly interesting, and there’s a lot of power in it. Zeus has lightening bolts and all these beings have this stuff. There’s no doubt it’s all there. It’s all real. It’s all as real as you are. But the problem is: you can get lost in it. You can start going towards God, and then it gets so fascinating as somebody appears with sixteen arms and is all golden. And you tend to get caught. “Wow! Yeah, man. I’ll follow you.” And it’s important to remember you’re going to God. Keep clear. Because ultimately it’s all the mother, and you’ve got to consume it all. Just get your scene together here. Don’t try to go anywhere so fast. Just quiet your mind, open your heart, simplify it. You can listen to those fears, you don’t have to override them.
The question is about distrust of people and information and other—all of it. Distrust in me. Can you work with that? If you are clear, there is no doubt that distrust has power in it. Because your separateness and your standing back and that kind of cold dispassionate wisdom, that cold dispassionate witness that watches it all, and keeps protected from it, has power. There’s great power in that, right? It is not a liberating power, unfortunately. And when you understand that liberation requires that flow, you realize that when you intellectually know that who you are isn’t vulnerable in the way that it matters whether you trust or don’t trust. Because others can’t hurt who you really are anyway, they can only hurt who you think you are. I mean, if you’re shamed, you’re shamed. If you’re killed, you’re killed. You’re still here. It isn’t really at that level.
When you intellectually know that, you start to open up because you need to open up no matter who does what to you. So that I—like, I’ll walk out of this room, and I’ll look at somebody, and I’m wide open. I mean, I’m as open as I am in this situation, and I look with much love at a human being. And it comes back a flow, and there is love. And then I walk out and I look at somebody who is—they came with somebody else who wants to stay and they want to go home, or they didn’t like it and they got a stomach ache, or something, or they’re stoned, or something—whatever it is—and I look with this love and I get back a kind of a icy stoned thing, right? Now, at that moment I can either be hurt, pull back, close off, right? But the space I’m in, all I experience at that moment is compassion for their predicament. Because can you imagine what it must be like to be inside there, right?
And all I just keep doing is flowing. Because my game—if I buy their reaction and react to their reaction, then I’ve gotten lost in their mind, in their karmic predicament. But I understand that my freedom comes through that flow. So I’m just doing to keep flowing, even if it gets buffety and all that stuff. Just keep eating it; eating my own reactions to it. These are experiments in trust. Experiments in trust and flow, you know. Can you hear what I’m saying? I know it’s frustrating, because there are a lot more questions. But I think our satiation for questions—because, as the evening goes on, there is only so much that you can take with your mind.