Transcription
[Music] Be here. [Music] Now, it's like going to death row in San Quentin. I mean, it took me a half hour to get up my courage to drive in the gate. I sat outside looking at San Quentin, saying, “I don’t want to do this, man. She’s death row. This is too heavy.” Was scheduled. How do you do? And then, finding as I walked down the rad, shaking hands with each guy through the bars of his cell—out of about 32 people, 28 of those beings are right here sitting in this very audience, are on this very stage, just us. Just happens they murdered somebody. And the lepers—it’s just [Applause] us.
David Spangler, uh, who’s connected with, um, Finn Horn, or used to be, and he’s got a little booklet out about conversations with John, which is his Emanuel, I guess. John sounds just like David Spangler, as I guess Emanuel is going to sound like me, since it’s probably projections of all of our minds. And John says to David, “You got to separate the USSR from the Russian people. They have different folk souls. There’s only a very thin covering of USSR over the Russian people.” Who are they? Them or us?
I have an MG, and I drive around with a top down, driving from gig to gig. I mean, I got a great gig. I just share Dharma. I’m a Dharma sharer. You rent a Dharma Sharer and you wind it up, and out comes Dharma. And in my mind, as I’m driving, having an ecstatic time driving through the mountains on my way from Albuquerque or to Boston—I just drove from Boston—and I had wonderful conversations with all the policemen who stopped me for speeding. How do I know why? How we’re supposed to meet? I mean, I met an American Indian policeman in Arizona who was—he was writing out a ticket; we got talking about God and Elders in his tribe, Uncle David, and so on, and we just fell in love right there in the police car, right in the cruiser.
I met an American Indian in New Zealand this winter. I told you it wasn’t going to be linear. Is this two? No. The hell you can leave any time if it’s not what you expected. I met this guy, Orin Lion. He’s a, uh, chief of a tribe in New York state, and he was at this, um, NASA festival, and I was at this winter with, uh, Steve and Ina Gassin and, um, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Bird, John May May, and, um, the Hare Krishna group and Buddhist groups and energy groups, and was far out. 15,000 of us out in the bush in New Zealand. And Orin Lion was there, and I experienced being in the presence of a true warrior. He was so committed to his cause. He’s the guy, if you—whenever you see movies like Wounded Knee, he’s always up in the front lines, marching right into the machine guns—very clearly and strongly and solidly and non-flickery. He is totally committed to his part in the dance, which is to advise us and his people of the heritage and tradition that they—their lineage. He is a transmitter of lineage and a protector of the lineage, and he will go to his death within that role. And at the same moment when I looked into his eyes, there was not one drop of anger. He was right here. “Have some more beans.” And looking into his eyes, I flickered through all my little roles—liberal white man roles—and they were all just little myths that I was—I blew away. And there we were, fellow human beings, and he had his thing to do, and I have mine to do, and you have yours to do.
Driving in the MG, sun out, singing Sham Jam, guming along. Right there is my Guru, and right there is the poorest person I have ever seen, and right there are my teachers, and right there is my mother, and there is my father, and right there is my country, and right there is my Judaism, and right there is my love of Christ, and right there is Buddha, and right there is Allah, and right there it all is. And I’m just approaching Flagstaff. I throw my neck out on the way into Flagstaff, so my father has given me a jar of the jelly that he makes—raspberry jelly with two ramas, four ramas—it’s printed. So I’m hungry, so I go to open the jar, and in trying to open the jar, I pull a muscle in my [Applause] neck. So I go to a chiropractor in Flagstaff. Now I want him to adjust my neck and cut all the—cuz I want to go on to California. I don’t want to be healed; I just want to have my neck straightened. And he walks in, and he introduces himself; he sits down; he says, “Well, what do you do?” Two hours later, he and I are so close in the spirit that both of us are [Music] healed.
Who knows what? What’s about the—the great way is not difficult for one who has no preferences. Or another saying: Truth awaits eyes unclouded by longing. Even now, are you waiting or just being? [Music] Is there something you think you need to hear that you don’t know already? Are you busy not knowing something? I’m not busy knowing something. We are just talking to ourselves. I don’t know anything you don’t know. It’s just my part to talk about it. It’s no different. You and I are Divine, and we are human, and we are all the levels in between. We are myths; we are legends; we have lineages; we come through rays. There’s only one of us. The whole thing is a dream, and it’s all real. Form is no other than formless, says the Diamond Sutra. Formless, no other than form.
My Method through is—I’m of a lineage which is connected with a monkey called Hanuman, and Hanuman is that form of God which exists to serve God. It’s the relation—the bhakti form of devotion through service. There’s devotion through being lovers, like Radha and Krishna. This is the path through service, but it’s also a path through love. There are all these levels of service. I am serving, not that one or in that one. Patanjali—Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga, eight-limbed yoga, Raja Yoga, says in Yama—in purification first. Eight includes non-receiving, non-giving. Non-giving is the Sutra. There is no giving, no giving, no receiving, no attachment, no identification with being The Giver, because then you create the receiver. No identification with being the parent, because then you create the child. No identification with being the therapist, because then you create the patient. No identification with being da da da da—you keep creating the polar opposite, the complimentary role, every time you identify with a role. So what is giving where there is no giver? And giving through love, since love is—and you and I come into love, then I will serve that love. It’s a very subtle path. It turns out I hadn’t realized that. It seemed very gross to me. Like seva—is a word, that’s a Sanskrit word, it means service—and the people that are part of seva, for the most part, are very gung-ho people. They’re really out to save the world and to get rid of blindness. There’s an interesting question of whether or not—how identified you have to be with the polarity to juice up the action. Can you, as Don Juan says, huff and puff and make believe it matters, even though you know that it doesn’t? Is that too scary for everybody? Cuz when I meet righteous people, I see an opa in their eyes—cuz they are busy being good, and it isn’t good enough. It doesn’t liberate—bbys—it means anybody—it doesn’t liberate. It subtly serves but—ent—traps. And you’ve got to see that your act of service is really an act of service to the extent that it liberates. The minute your act of service defines who the recipient of your service is, you immediately imprison that other person in a definition. You serve because you serve because you’re serving God, which comes in all forms.
This is a routine I’ve done before, but it just—beer—it’s so delicious, and it just fits into this—into Petaluma—so well. It’s the one where you taste and touch love, and you feel you are in love, and you walk down the street, and you see somebody, and they are in the same space, and you look at each other, and it happens. It happens—the magic happens. Do you believe in magic? Yes. At that moment it happens, and you say, “Would you like to build a nest with me?” And you build a nest together, and it’s all cuddly, and then you go to the grocery store to get soy burgers and—sir—and at the checkout counter you look into the eyes of the person doing the checkout, and it happens again. Have you ever considered a Minaj ATA? You ask soon thereafter. There are communes, but after a while you begin—dense though you may be, and lusty though you may be—you begin to realize that that feeling you’re having does not really require that you collect that part of you that just arouse—that feeling—awaken that feeling—again—that you are the feeling, and you’re seeing it resonating in other people. And you get—so you can walk down the street and look at your beloved and say—you see, at first you don’t quite—you’re ready to not collect it, but you can’t really not affirm it, so you—and—and say, “Are you experiencing what I’m experiencing?” Or “Hello,” or “Wow,” or just—and then after a while you just walk down the street and you just look at somebody, and you can walk right by, and it’s not walking by with denial; it’s not walking by by turning off your heart; it’s walking by by recognizing what is—that we are all in love, but there’s nothing particularly to do about it. You don’t have to do anything. We’re so busy being doers. You got to do it, affirm it, just be it. It’s enough. And in that quality of love—you know how you feel when you’re in love, and you would like—there’s one orange, and you make it into juice for your beloved when you really wanted orange juice, cuz you want more for them to have juice than you want to have juice. And since I’m a Jewish mother, even if they don’t want [Applause] juice—serving is serving your beloved. That’s who’s blind in India; that’s who’s frightened in Atlanta; that’s who’s starving in Africa; that’s who’s imprisoned in El Salvador or Russia or the United States. And what I experienced when I was at that Jewish hotel, and what I experienced in death row, and what I experience at this moment—it’s here: we are in love. There’s no seduction; it’s not entertainment; there’s no collecting. This just is. This is satsang; this is seva; this is the community of the spirit; this is the recognition of our being. It’s no big deal. Where two are gathered, where one is gathered. Few hours from now, this will be a memory, just like it’s a dream, just like your dream was last night. Did it really happen?
I had this funny experience just day before yesterday. I have an old friend from earlier days in the ‘60s that we were connected through a number of dealings of one kind or another, and he was very kind to me in those days. And then he fell on hard times, and I was visiting him once—not terribly hard times—but at one point, maybe 3-4 years ago, I loaned him some money. I saw that he needed rent money and all, and I said, “Look, I’ve got an extra $2,000 in the bank. If you need to use it, go ahead, cuz you know.” And he didn’t say anything; he just said, “Okay,” because his—and his lady said, “Yeah, we really need it.” So I wrote a check for $2,000, and I put it on his kitchen counter. Years have gone by, and in the meantime he’s done very well, and everything’s going fine, and all kinds of people come and ask me for bread, and there’s only so much to go around, and I suddenly figure, well, maybe I should tell him it’s time to pay the $2,000. So I go to see him, and I say, “Say, by the way, uh, those—that $2,000 I loaned you, if at any time you can get it together, it would be nice, cuz some other people could use it, and I got some debts I could clean up.” And he looked at me, and he said, “What $2,000?” See how real the story was up to that moment. Now immediately—you—I don’t know—maybe there was no $2,000—cancel checks, things like that—let go lightly. [Music] Wow. Well, if you don’t remember it, let me tell you what happened—happened. And I told him what happened that evening. He said, “Uh, well, if my lady was here, she must have heard it. We’ll ask her.” Okay, I said, “Look, my trust in you is so strong that I would just as soon believe you as me. I don’t trust me as far as I throw me most of the time. So if you say that there’s no $2,000, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no $2,000. You know, it was just a thing in my mind anyway, so I’ll change my life a different way.” And we went about our business talking, and after a while he says, “You know, I’m beginning to remember that incident.” And by the end of the evening he had remembered it, and he said, “I’ll get the bread—TOA—I’ve got the money.” Is that interesting?
I went swimming over in Marin the other day; came back, and my car had been broken into, and all my clothes have been stolen—a duffel bag with all my clothes. I’m on tour, so they’re all my best clothes. [Music] My toilet kit. It’s interesting to watch yourself in those moments. About the second thought I had was, “Wow, I can have a whole new wardrobe.” I’ll still lock the car, and I won’t leave the suitcase or the bag so people can see it, and I feel compassion for the person who did that, or people who did that. I mean, I wished I lived in a world that was conscious enough where people didn’t do that to each other, but this is what it is. And you have property, and you’re attached to your property, and you’re running afraid. It’s only clothes. And what Christ pointed out was, it’s only a body—no big deal—not worth getting all excited about. This situation we find ourselves in is so breathtakingly exquisite, because this period of time, which is so fascinating, and with—there’s so much change—change in the air, and so much realignment of all kinds of stuff, and breaking down of systems, and awakening of values, and real deep transformations in the culture, in the woodwork, and all of that—and to stay a little conscious in that, allowing you to delight in it and keep your heart open in love, becomes the actual catalyst for the transformation of energy continually through you, so that the fear gets turned into a creative life force; it gets turned into light, because you can eat fear because you’re not afraid; you’re not making believe you’re not afraid. See, the reason I work with dying people all the time is because it keeps me so straight, because it’s really hard to be a bullshitter when you’re dealing with somebody that’s right close to death, cuz they got nothing to lose, and they’re really listening. I get incredibly high from being with people just as they’re about to die.
By the way, I gave you a gift. I hope you all got it. This is an expensive two-tone color reproduction—he—about 5 cents apiece—of, um, my Guru in one of his more fetching poses. He looks the cross between a kind of a—an imbecile and—what gets me is that one breast hanging out. That’s really what I like, cuz it’s really the mother—that giving quality—and U—and then out of his fingers—it’s fun, cuz those fingers that hang out and it—and his toes. At any rate, on the back of that are all kinds of information. The number two is the Dying Project, which is part of the Hanuman Foundation, which is the monkey. And if you just want to know about the Dying Project, by any chance, you can write there, and you can get a newsletter. If you’re dying and can’t wait to write, you can do 2B, which is the hotline, and you can call up, but you only call if you want to awaken through dying. If you’re just dying, don’t bother calling, because everybody dies. I think you should know that that—no matter how immortal you may be, as William Blake said—he thought he was—you—you’re going to die. And so, uh, what our project is about is, if you’re dying and you would like to use your dying as a vehicle for awakening—realizing it’s just another drama—and you would like to awaken through dealing with some really heavy drama like pain, call us, because that’s not a sest—uh, we won’t create the pain, we’ll just—because we like to—or we can put you in contact with people who like to hang out with people who are dying as a vehicle for working on themselves. There are no professional Dyers. We don’t have a—a dying club, or you’re not a trained Dyer or something like that. And then this guy just bought a building as a real estate investment—a house—which he is letting us use very kindly, and that’s so our—we have now a dying center where you can come and die. You got to promise you’ll die if you come. You can’t go and get healed, which is a—and you’re going to do it soon, so I don’t know how they’ll select the people, really. I mean, it’s a—it’s clearly a problem. I don’t think we—we’ve figured out how to do that yet.
It’s a funny one about dying and healing. You know, uh, about a year ago I—uh, it’s another perhaps repeat story—I was out in front of the hospital room of Gregory Bateson, who had had a heart—had cancer around his heart, and it was expected to live for two weeks, and he lived for about a year or more. And, um, I was in the room helping him—he just finished surgery—and I was PR there to help him die, which was a little bizarre since Gregory could talk me around in circles about everything. And I came out, and there was Ken Peltier ready to go in to teach Gregory how to fight the cancer and live. And I said—Lois Bateson was standing there—I said, “Um, Ken, look, uh, I don’t want to undermine your work. I mean, uh, I want you—should heal. I like Gregory; I’d like to have him around for a while, you know, uh, am I undercutting him by your work? You know, do you need to have him real angry, like he really thinks he’s at cancer?” And we reflected in the corridor, and we realized that the optimum place—of the most conscious being—was the best space to be in for healing, or whichever way healing went, whether it was dying or living. That’s the story of my Guru saying about somebody that’s dying, and he won’t go see them, and he says, “Here, give him this banana. He’ll be all right.” And they take home the banana, and they mash it up, cuz it’s from the Guru, and they feed it to him, and he eats the last mouthful of banana and dies. That’s my Guru. If you got a good Guru story—of your Guru screwed up every time—all he said was, “He’ll be all right.” [Music] Where was I? Huh. Tibetan Book of the Dead. Let me just run you through—just—I’ll do this in five minutes—should take 49 days, but we’ll do the short [Music] form. See, you’re dying—that’s given—and, um, as you’re dying, you—the Earth element starts to leave, and you feel heavy, and then the water element starts to leave, and you feel kind of dry and thirsty, and then the fire element leaves, and you feel cold, kind of clammy—cold and dry, I guess—and then the air element leaves, and your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, until pretty soon you don’t in-breath anymore, and the—the breath and the Consciousness principle then start to separate, and at that point the male and the female principles, which came together at the moment that your Consciousness entered, break apart, and the male part of it goes up into the head, and the female goes down here into the belly, and then the two of them come back together, and they meet in the heart, at which point there is like an atomic explosion—there is only light—and that is the entering of the first bardo, where you enter into the light. And if you are sufficiently surrendered—that is, if there is nothing you are clinging to at that moment—then you become one with light, and that is the end of the reincarnational cycle. However, if that, for any reason, is quote too much, you black out during that period, and you come back into some semblance of awareness in the—in the fifth bardo—the next bardo. And the fifth bardo is full of the 10,000 horrible visions and the 10,000 beautiful visions, and so all of the things that scare you come, and all the things that attract you come, and if you are conscious at that time, you see them all as apparitions created by your own mind. But to do that, you would have to see all that now. And if you don’t see that, you grab at this or push away that, and then you start to get reborn into various planes of their six-plane system. You can be a daa, you can be a Hungry Ghost, you can be an animal, you—and etc.—be born into the hell realms, or the demon realms, or [Applause] human. Now, if you’re going to be born a human, as you come into the sixth bardo, you start to look for a birth, and the way the Tibetans describe it at that point—of—you point—you become aware of your mother and father copulating, and you are attracted to one and repelled by the other, and that is the definition of your sex. And that, at the moment of conception, the Consciousness principle enters, and you start the incarnation. At any time up to that moment, you are free to become so conscious that you are aware that you are the Creator and not the created, and you are free at any time in this life or in any subsequent life or at any time between lives to step off the bardo mill—meaning the islands in between—the space—you can stop island-hopping, because this is just a bardo—anytime—there’s no time in the game of Enlightenment. It’s a hype. I’m not going to be enlightened for many births. It’s just astral fun and games. All of the bardos are illusory, and they are all real. They’re real if you make them real. The lamas were describing to me the franticness with which beings are trying to get a human birth—franticness looking for a space to climb in between to grab a human birth. That’s part of my learning to understand what the Tibetan—what the Buddhist talk about when they talk about a precious human birth—meaning a birth in which all the ingredients are available to us—all the sandpaper—all of the stuff is necessary for us to do—to awaken, to become liberated. That’s why somebody who commits suicide sort of a moment after realizes, “Oh, not bad or good, but geez, I just kind of blew it. I got to wait around now, or I got to try to get another one to get on with it.” The older being you are—meaning the less attachment you have—the more conscious you are at the moment of death, the more you are part of the conscious creative force that creates the form you manifest in next—the more you, in effect, choose your parents, choose the environment, choose the time and the place. The less conscious you are, the more willy-nilly you fall into form. When you begin to tune to death enough, you hear what Don Juan is saying about keeping death over your left shoulder as the way to be fully alive, and you live as a warrior fighting your last battle every moment—nothing special, nothing dramatic—but that you are ready every moment, and you are right there. When Gandhi is shot, he doesn’t say, “I’ve been shot,” he says, “Ram.” When the Pope is shot, he says—he calls out to the Madonna. When Reagan is shot, he says, “I forgot to duck.” [Music] Laugh if you will, but when John Lennon is shot, he says, “I’ve been shot.” Everybody’s got their work to do; everybody has their moments. There was one dying woman we were with up here—up in—down in Marin County—who had been using the Jesus prayer for a long time, and then she got to the point where she couldn’t use it anymore because it was made her too distant from Jesus, and she just started emerge into the heart, and she just went into light. You could watch it happen. It was like—in going.
Into water, but with all that imagery, let me just add to you one little more ingredient. Since this is the way my mind works, I'm just playing with stuff. Emmanuel says, I say to Emmanuel, Emmanuel, when I talk about death and talk about people dying into the one, people get frightened; they don't want to leave their separateness. He says, "Oh, you humans and your dualistic minds, why do you think that dying into the one has anything to do with losing your separateness?" Oh, thank you, caught again.
Okay, for two hours you have sat here. Imagine that. We're going to take a break for a few minutes, and then we're going to reconvene, those that wish to. If you are going to leave now, let me assure you that there is nowhere that you can go, see? Cuz we're right here. And if you go home and go get undressed and get on the toilet and say, "Where am I?" you will be forced to answer, "I am here." And that's where we are. We are right in your toilet with you. There's no way you can get away. You're just doing your dance, and it's okay, cuz there's nothing to be gained here. Obviously, there's nothing you didn't already know.
Those of you that would like to hang around afterwards, we will play a game called The Answer Man, in which you make believe you have questions and I make believe I have answers. All right. [Applause]
It's very nice being with you all. I want you to know, uh, I I really feel it's okay to be quite nonlinear and quite heavy duty, uh, just the way I feel tonight. Uh, I trust you as an audience because I recognize you. It's nice because it doesn't make any seduction happen in me at all. [Applause]
Let's just, before we take a break, one thing, just just a whim for me. Okay, starting over there: Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the stream. Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the stream. Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the merrily. Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Life is but a stream. Roll, roll, roll your dream gently down the merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Roll, roll, roll your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. Ro, row, row your dream gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily. Life is, life is a, life is b, a life is b, a life is b, a Life Is, Life Is, Life Is, Life Is, Life Is, life is, life is. [Applause]