Transcription
[Music] See, this is the advanced seminar we're having. It's like mysticism 101, and the people that came for the introductory lecture, they are trying to decide whether they're us or whether they're just watching them. Very interesting evening, most unusual. And he said, [Laughter] well, yeah. [Music] The transformation that's going on is the transformation from realizing, from thinking, from ignorance to wisdom. It's the transformation from thinking it's out there or up there, to realizing that it's right here. And that transformation takes quite a while, because even after it's happened, after you have started to tune in on the right here, all of your ways of thinking are based on it's out there or up there. Or see, and the, the really fierce problem that most of us are realizing at this moment is how to alter our ways of thinking about who we are and how it all is, to be in tune with something inside that already knows. [Music] Problem is, we keep bringing ourselves down. Running a film through consciously means being so centered that you see your whole drama as it's happening. Tim used to say to me, "Dig your own legend," which is an astral statement. It says, like, realize who you're being. Don't get caught in, so hung up in the game. See the way, way the game is being played. I'll tell you what getting high is. The way it works is, first of all, you begin to see that your own life is a game. Then you figure, well, man, I don't want to play games all my life. I'm going to look and do something real. See, okay, been through that one. I'm going to do a real thing. So you start to define what you do that's real, and you start to do it, and you're right in the middle of doing it, so for all your worth. And along comes Leo, or whoever it is, and he just punches the balloon. He just says, "Man, that's a game too." Of course, I'm going to become enlightened. I see all other games are traps. The only, as Mayababa says, the only game worth playing is to become enlightened for everybody else. So the first step is, you dig, you're in a game. And then when you try to get out of it, you see all out is game as well. Then you realize everything's game. Then you can keep doing what you were doing before, right? And it's all, all right. You know that feeling? It's not enough. I didn't get enough, like the way they cut the pie at dinner, you know? I didn't get quite enough. He got that extra whipped cream. Or, you know, do you think there'll be enough for all of us? I mean, there's only how many loaves and how [Applause] many? Don't worry, there's enough. There's enough because it's a state of mind. Enough is a state of mind. It's not, oh, too much. It's just [Music] enough. He just lays something very heavy on you. Oh, man, just enough. Just a mantra. Just enough. See, you go outside, it's raining. Just enough. Go outside, the moon is out. It's just, just enough. Barry Farrell wrote an editorial in Life Magazine about the Woodstock festival, and he talked about how he stood there with all these hippies and, um, he said, um, and it was raining, and there wasn't proper sanitation, sometimes couldn't hear the music, and there were all these drugs around. He'd look at these young people, and he said they'd all be sitting there smiling. And he said he was deeply [Music] concerned that what was emerging was a generation characterized by bovine passivity, cow-like passivity. Do you ever see a holy cow in India? Wow, just hanging out, being a holy cow. Scary feeling to think about large segments of the population feeling it's enough. [Music] The horns and the baby, these are all energy, free energy in the system. It's all being handed to you. I did three weeks in a sculptor's studio in New York City a year ago on Third Avenue, and the fire engines will go up street, and everybody would think, damn fire engines, why don't they stop? And they were so busy in the "we-them" place, they never got any of the free energy because it's like New York City is handing you the whole thing. And they hang here, man, here's all this energy we're sending up the street. You, you move it up your chakras, and you just go, "Wow." The game, finally, is getting high off everything. You dig that? See, everybody's got their model of how they'll get high. I can't get high off fire engines, man. I need weed, I need whatever I need. I need my woman. I [Music] need. I can't get high off fire engines. Nonsense. That Teresa Nyon, the Christian mystic, she ate one Eucharist way for a day for 12 years, and she was a good ascetic. She was so. All these scientists came to figure out how she cheated, and they'd all follow her into the bathroom where she was cheating. See, and all they concluded was they couldn't find where she was cheating. And when somebody asked her, she said, "I live on light." But if you can't live on light, what do you think about somebody that says, "Yeah, I live on light"? I mean, well, I can't live on light. I don't know what you must be a hustle. See, we're all still in it. We're all still into the high and low, going up and coming down, because we're still all hooked on being high. See, we're all hooked on being here together. So every time you get to that place in your head where you think, "I wish they'd keep away," "Oh God, do I have to do that again?" Yeah. Place, the place where you're caught in your own thoughts of like the horrors, the depressions, the loneliness. How about loneliness? Eleanor Rigby, all those places in your head you get caught. I'd sit in this cabin in New Hampshire, and I'd be all alone. See, and I'd think, "Wow, man, I'm weird, you know, 'cause I'm sitting here all alone and I'm not lonely." Isn't man a gregarious animal? Why aren't I lonely? I must be defending. Pretty soon you take everybody's karmic package that they hand you, that we hand ourselves, and you chomp it up. And here we are again. Now, in order to do that, you have to have a calm center of your own. See, what happens, a lot of people gather these evenings, and we all get stoned together, right? We all come here, we're all here, it's all enough, we're all, it's okay. I mean, the seats aren't perhaps like, you know, you'd like to lie out. Be nice if there were no pews. We can all lie around. But that's just the body. And after a while, you get so you can cool your body out because it's just a big capture of consciousness most of the time. You know, if you take care of it, take care of the temple, keep it clean, neat. That's why you do Hatha Yoga so you can put your body like you can put your body in this triangular position and leave it there for about 8 or 9 hours, and it doesn't say, "Hey, I hurt," or, "You know, I'm your knee going to sleep for, you know, like your spine is bent. I'm telling you, message from your spine, I am bent, I am [Music] bent." You get, see, turn your body off and cool it out and be here. Let's go here, Ramas, and get high. That's a good idea. Nothing else to do tonight. Oh, we could go. Yeah, go to Boston Gardens and get high. The Moody Blues. One high is a high as a high as a high. You haven't figured that out yet. But the thing is, that's all still a game of dualism. It's all like you're going to come somewhere to get high. Who was that that was deciding? Where were you at the moment you said that? Aren't you here now? The point is to figure out how to take the feeling that you could be feeling right now of, "Yeah, right, that's the way it is. Wow. Sure. Ooh, yeah." That feeling, and have it so inside yourself that it's always there, and everything that happens to you just gets fed into that feeling. You run for the bus, and the door closes, and you go, [Music] "Wow." I mean, it's all a message, isn't it? It's all teaching us something. It's teaching us attachment, about attachment. So you were really hung up on getting on that bus. You can do your life exquisitely without attachment because at the moment the door is closed, that is the new reality. The four bullets have been pumped into you, and there's the reality now. You can sit around. It's like the beautiful, uh, thing from Zen, "Flesh and Bones," about the, uh, guy that's being chased by a tiger. Most of you know this by now, I'm sure. That's part of the hip bookstore repertoire. He's being chased by a tiger, and he comes to the edge of a huge, uh, precipice, and he climbs over the side, and he's holding on to, um, two twigs. And down below, another tiger comes along that's waiting to eat him. There's a tiger above him and a tiger below him. And just then, two little mice, one black mouse and one white mouse, come along, and they a nibble away at the branch he's holding onto. He is now in a most precarious position, which is the position we're all in. And at that moment, he espies, right out here, a wild strawberry bush on which there is one strawberry. How sweet it tasted. Every moment is the wild strawberry, and every moment we're in that same place. We're right in the middle of like, you know, and here you can be busy, ah, or or you're going to be in the same place while you're, you know, that's what means living in the spirit. Living in the spirit. It's a vibrational rate. It's a, it's a take of it all. It's a vibrational take. In order for it to work, you've got to get your head so centered. It's got to calm down. Center. And it's really fierce to do it in the marketplace. And sometimes it's cool to go off and do it in cycles. So if there's times you sort to go off by yourself to cool out, see, you now there are techniques of centering, and there often one of the techniques is called meditation, which is a formal technique of [Music] centering. One of the techniques of meditation is called Satianavāsana. I don't think I've talked about that. Satianavāsana is the method used by the Theravada Buddhists, the southern Buddhists. If you went to Ceylon, you'd say, "Well, man, I'm not going to stay in the West. I'm going to go get enlightened." So you go and you get your passport, then you go to the Visa office and you get your visas, and they take you through a whole trip about that. And then you figure out a way to hustle your way to Ceylon, and you finally get to Ceylon, and you go to a Buddhist monastery, and you, and you come to the door, and you knock. This is the big moment. And a little old man answers, and he says, "Ah, so come in." And he says, "Say, wow, man, it's so easy. I'm like," and you say, "I would like to study and become enlightened." He says, "Very good." He says, "Come along." And he takes you to a little room. There's a mat on the floor, and it's nice and clean, and you sit down on the mat. He says, "The toilet is next door. Your food will be left outside the door each day." And he says, "Is it all comfortable?" And you say, "Oh, wow, yes. Anything you say. I've come to become enlightened." And he said, "Now, you will notice, you will notice that right in your chest, below your rib cage, every time you breathe in, one of the muscles, they're doing all kinds of things, but one of them just goes up, just a little bit. You notice that?" And you go, "Yeah, right." And he said, "And when you breathe out, one of them goes down. It's the same one. Notice that." "Yeah, that's right. That's pretty cool." And he says, "Right." He said, "Just notice that." "Say, yes, very good." And he leaves. Okay, two weeks later. Okay, now you have done a lot of examination of your model of coming to Ceylon to get enlightened. You've received no further instructions from the Great White Brotherhood, see? Nobody's saying anything to you about like, "Do this, you will now levitate." You know, everybody's just left you. The only instruction you got, the only instruction you got was, "Notice it." And then he drops by and he says, "H, how are you doing?" And you're inclined to say, "With what?" And he says, "Oh, I thought I made myself clear. You notice these muscles that go up and down?" You say, "He said, 'Just notice them.'" "Was that all?" "That's all." "That's what he means. That's all. Just notice them." You think, "Well, I'll give it a try." Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising. "It'll never work." "It'll never work" is a thought, right? It's what's known as a demon. And you say, "How do you do? Come on in." And then you keep right on going. You don't hang around saying, "I wonder why I had to think that," or, "I shouldn't have thought that." Those are two more thoughts. See, those are the demon and his friends. See, he brings his friend, which is analytic, you know, the analytic one of the same one, you know? I mean, the horny thought is one thought. The psychoanalytic interpretation is two thoughts. See, and then they have friends. And before you got the whole mishmash, you got the whole, you know, you got thousands of friends. And all the demons have come and they've taken you over completely. And, wow, heavy trip. And you forgot. See, and two days later, you wake up. Uspensky used to say, he's a, he's a writer. He wrote "In Search of the Miraculous." He was a student of Gurdjieff, but he was a pretty hip Gurdjieffian in his own head. He's very intellectual, but he said, um, that he decided to be cool. See, and he'd go down the street and he'd meet somebody, or he was telling a Gurdjieff story, and he'd meet somebody, and the guy would bug him. See, and he was going to walk down the street, and he'd be saying, "Gurdjieff is walking down the street. Gurdjieff is looking into the shop window. Gurdjieff is turning his head. Gurdjieff's left foot is lifting. G you know," or Uspensky, whatever, whoever it was, they're all the same guy. See, and he'd say, "Uspensky is now turning the corner." And then he'd meet this guy, and the guy would get angry, and he'd get him angry. And Uspensky would forget the whole routine. And why you, you know? And then he'd go on down the street and he'd do other things. About two days later, he'd remember that he was going to watch the whole thing, and he'd say, "Well, that one's not going to get me again." So now a new and more subtle demon comes down the street, gets him angry in a new way. He gets really angry, he's really uptight, and he's just about, "Oh, wow, dig this. Uspensky is angry." But at this point, Uspensky is so angry that he says, "Yeah, I know Uspensky is angry, but he deserves it." See. [Music] And see, that's the place many of us are at most of the time. See, you dig that? You hear all that? I mean, we know Uspensky's angry, but I know all that. I understand everything you're saying, but after all, man, like life to be lived. It sure is all game of up level. Pretty soon is Uspensky gets so good at it that he's going down the street, and the new guy comes along that bugs him, and he goes, and then he says, "Uspensky is getting angry." And then Uspensky is short-circuiting the whole trip. He stayed conscious. And then Uspensky does what he does. And the game of centering or witnessing or centering through meditation, you can do with just the rising and falling. So you sit down in the morning, and you get up, and you wash yourself, and you go to the toilet, and you have a little corner in your room, and you hang out in this corner where you don't bring all your stuff. See, you just sit down there, and you sit down, and you go, "Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising." Then the, "It'll never work" is a thought. And you say, "Wow, there's a thought. That's a thought too." See, but it's okay. These other ones will sneak in for a while. They're really subtle. But you think of thoughts like clouds. That's very helpful in this meditation. See, so you say, "It'll never work," and you see, "It'll never work." Go overhead. Who knows where they come from? Who knows where they're going? They're just thoughts. It's like a hamburger machine. It's just turning out thoughts. Just thoughts. And you go, "It'll never work." Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising, falling. "I'm hungry." "I'm hungry." Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising, falling. "For this I got a PhD." [Music] "For this I got a PhD." Rising, falling. See, that one could take you for like a few days, you [Music] know. See, they're all invitations. Say, "Come on, come my way again. You know, you haven't been there enough, have you? Don't you want to go through the whole thing about rising, falling, riseing?" "What was that? What was that? Rise, rising." "The one that gets you, of course. Beautiful one. I such an exquisite demon. I really love it." So like, "Rising, falling, rising, fall, rising. I think it's happening." [Music] [Applause] "I see you've been there too." Oh, that's a very far-out demon. See, it's hard after that one to say, "Rising, falling." See, you because you've been on a very lean diet, low schedule of reinforcement, and suddenly, ah, big shot of bliss pours through you. I do this thing called pranayam, breath control. Now, most of us in the West are under the illusion you have to breathe. See, I used to teach human motivation at Harvard, which, no, I mean, I did that. It was all right. And, um, I taught about social motives, and I taught about basic physiological needs. And while we as psychologists could sort of screw around with the social motives in our laboratories, you know, you accept it as sort of god-given, the physiological needs. So I started to do this pranayam, which is a technique of controlling breath. And in order to do that, what you do is you do a lot of basic breathing things first for a number of months until you've opened up certain nerves in your spine so that you're able to bring energy up your spine. Since most of the energy for most of the people in the West stays localized in their lower chakras, and you get to move it up, and you do it through these breathing things. And when you finally got these channels open, this whole thing is based on one-pointedness of mind. If you can't keep your mind in one place, you're not ready to do this kind of stuff. That's why meditation becomes such a powerful device to bring the mind at one point. In this, we're going to think about that, but I'll tell you how far out this game is that you play. So I'll just describe it, even though don't you don't do it without a teacher, and really, you can't do much anyway unless your mind is one-pointed, and if your mind is one-pointed, you're already so advanced, then you know. At any rate, you close off various openings in your body with pulling in on various muscles, by activating certain nerves, you make a container out of your body, and then you bring air in, and you hold it up in here, up in your chest, and you close it off like putting your neck down in your chest and pulling up on your stomach, and you bring the whole thing into a huge block of air, and you just hold it there. And all the time you're holding it there, you focus on a place right inside from the bottom of your spine, and you think about, I'll take you the whole far-out trip. You can read it in, uh, Sir John Woodruff's, uh, uh, "Serpent Power" or something like that. You focus on a triangle, an inverted triangle of flame, in which there is a lingam, a phallus, with a serpent wound three and a half times around it with its head pointed down. Got it? So you're sitting there holding your breath, and you're focusing on the serpent. So you're going, you can do it like, one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four, three, two. Some of the Vedic books suggest you go around your knee and snap your fingers. So you go, two, three, four, five. It's like seconds. So you start to hold your breath, and you hold it. You get to learn, like, you take in on a count of four, and you hold for 16, you let out for eight, and then you're taking in on counts of 16 and holding for 32 and letting and so on. That's not exact, but I'm just giving you the feeling for it. Finally, you get to the point where you're holding your breath for like, uh, two minutes. Now, those of you that have been swimmers or things like that, who had done any swimming, you know that feeling when you dive too deep and you can't quite make it back to the surface, and you can't make it, right? You're sitting down at the bottom and trying to get back, and your lungs are exploding. So you get to that place in two minutes, and your lungs are exploding, and you say, "I can hold it. I'll get through the whole thing." And then you realize you've forgotten to focus on the serpent in the bottom of your spine, because if you were focusing on the serpent in the bottom of your spine, you couldn't be the guy who was running out of breath, since he's a thought form. Okay, this is the, how far out it is. See, and so when you've become able to put your mind somewhere independent of things, you put your mind on the bottom of your spine, continuing to hold your breath, and suddenly you go through this little place, and here you are, and you're not breathing, and you're not holding your breath, right? And right at that moment, you feel a great wave of contentment, feeling of bliss, and you start to feel this energy start to come up your spine. That all happens right in that little period there. Now, when that happens, it blows your mind, of course, and usually that's when it's so strong, it's so, "My God, I'm not breathing!" Like, "It's all true!" You know, and that brings you down, of course, because you're immediately gone back into, "He who breathes." The fact is, when you enter into samadhi, the "I" thought and the breath both end simultaneously. But the thing is, you can never do this until you're ready. See, the thing about the Westerner is he's so busy doing things, and he's got such a big intellect that he figures out what he's supposed to do, and then he tries to do it. And you can't do it that way with this game because trying to do it is just another hype. It can only, only happen to you. Enlightenment happens to you. Awakening happens to you. It's beyond the trying. The world is only one when you realize it's beyond the trying. As far as I can see, every form of yoga is based on one-pointedness of mind. Take Bhakti Yoga, singing a love song to Rama. It only works when you can make your mind so one-pointed on Rama that you and Rama become one. Rama and Hanuman, the monkey, the perfect servant, are sitting and talking. And Hanuman, Rama says to Hanuman, "Who am I?" "Who are you?" And Hanuman says, "When I don't know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, you and I are one. I'm part of a servant sect." Rama, "Do Das" means servant. Rama is one of the names of an incarnation of God. It's a Bhakti sect, and the character that represents it in the Hindu system is a monkey, Hanuman, the perfect servant. Hanuman is such a groovy servant, he can do anything because all he wants to do is serve. See, you got to dig that. In Bhakti Yoga, there are 11 different ways you can get into a groovy scene with God, with the spirit, with your higher being, that you can get high. One of them involves serving. One of them involves making love to God. As was in the temple, the, uh, Guru one day said, he pointed all these beautiful Indian chicks that were sitting around, and he said, "Who are they?" And I looked, and I said, "There, they're your devotees." He says, "No, no, no, no, no. Who are they?" And I said, "They're beautiful Indian women." "No, no, no, no, no. Who are they?" I said, "I don't know. Who are they?" And he says, "The Divine Mother." I said, "Oh, why yes, the Divine Mothers." I looked at them all as the Divine Mother, and I just learned that lesson, and I was pretty grooved about that. Then he points to the Sadhus, the men devotees, and all that are sitting around. He says, "Who are they?" And I said, "I don't know. Who are they?" And he says, "The Divine Mother." What? He just took me one more level out. What are the Freudian implications of that? It's all the Divine Mother. See, engrossed is the bee of my mind in the, the blue lotus feet of my Divine Mother. Wow. Finally, if you're going to fill your mind with stuff, fill it with seeing how it's all divine. The game, as I said, is to get high off everything all the time. And you've got to dig that if you can ever say, "That brings me down," you are under the illusion that there is something outside of you that can bring you down. When I was traveling in, in Afghanistan with this very super intellectual cat, the first part of my trip to India was in this very fancy Land Rover with this very far-out guy. My, I may have described, I don't know, he went to, yeah, I guess I did. We were going across the desert, desert of Afghanistan, and I said to him, "You know, David, you really bring me down." And he looked at me and he said, "That's your problem." That's a very wise thing he said, very wise, because anything that brings you down means that you're attached in the illusion in the wrong place. After all, it's all the Divine Mother, isn't it? The Guru said it was. I trust him. He knows. I mean, when you find one that knows, you don't sit around say, "But not that." You mean, "Yes, that." How about suffering? That the Divine Mother. Wow, man. You don't know about making love unless you know about the whole trip. This beautiful short story by Salinger called "Teddy." Teddy is this young boy who is a very high incarnation that happened to be born into a nice middle-class Western family, and he doesn't know what he's doing there any more than they do. He was probably an old Tibetan Lama who had to finish off some stuff, and they sent him through this round. So he was on a ship, and he met somebody, and they was saying to him, and he was telling them how it was like, 'cause he knew. And the guy said to, "When did you first know you knew you are?" And he said, "Well, I was about 6 years old, and he said, I was looking at my little sister drinking milk. She was sitting in her high chair, and I suddenly saw that it was just God being poured into God. I just saw how it all was." He said, "You, that's the way it was." And then he adds, "If you know what I mean." "If you know what I mean." If you don't know what I mean, there's nothing I can say. God into God. It's a cup, and that's milk, and that's a mouth, and that's reality. Now, where is that mouth? Sure, we all go the illusion. That's why we're here because we needed to go the illusion. But we don't have to stay in it. We don't have to stay in it. The body stays in it. The body is the illusion. The thinking process stays in it. The thinking process is the illusion. The emotions stay in it. The emotions are the illusion. The desire to get out of the illusion is the illusion. That all stays in it. That's all karma. It's all part of nature. It's all totally determined. There's no free will, no choice, nothing. It's all just unfolding, just the way it is. Leaves come, they turn into flowers, you know, buds turn into flowers, flowers, and there's leaves, and they drop off, and snow comes. That's the way it is. Oh, snow. You know, oh, snow. Snow is one of the requirements in Raja Yoga is contentment. Now, that's, you'd think, well, that's a goal. No, that's a means. That's a means. This is the way it is. We start right from here, okay? Don't get holy. Just start from where you are. I mean, you need something. Honestly admit you need it. That is a good beginning. "I don't need anything." I mean, I like, I really get cravings for pizza. I'm down to vegetarian pizzas, but still, I mean, I still like, I got to have a pizza, you know? And I'll think about it, and I'll go by, and I'll see a pizza place out of the corner of my eye. And I'm sitting with people, and they'll say, "We're taking you home, and we have organic carrots." I'm thinking about, I want that pizza. I really want. Now, what kind I do? I could drop them and say, "I must go off and meditate for a little while." And I could take around, get the pizza, you know? Well, I used root beer. Up, we might little start. I used to tell everybody how hung I was on root beer, and then I've been loaded down with root beer incense, root beer tea, Sassafras tea, cans of root beer, everything you desire, you're going to get. See, that's the horror of it. Okay, right? Or even that wild one you had the other day, you're going to get that one too. Sometimes you don't have to run them through on this plane. When you're doing dreams, you're doing a lot of that stuff on astral planes. You're running off old desires, you're running off old karma. And the groovy thing to do is stay conscious through your dreams, you see? Like if you sleep flat on the floor, like, and don't sleep in things that, you know, like suck you into total unconsciousness all of time. You sleep on the floor, and you don't eat in the evening. You eat at noon. So you, you don't spend all your consciousness digesting food all night. Way I do it is, I lie down, and I've got this mala. This is when I'm really doing my sadhana, really into it. I lie there, and I have the mala on my chest, and I'm doing "Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram," and slowly I watch my body go to sleep. They go the legs, they go the arms. Aldous Huxley, by the way, took acid the day of his death with his wife, and then he'd write, "My legs have gone numb." Right? And he just watched it all happen because he understood it was just a transformation. He wasn't uptight about it. But you're doing the sleep, you're going into naval samadhi every time you go to sleep. That's why you get rested because you come into pure bliss and pure light. But it's too much light for you, so you can't remember it. So you go into this deep sleep, and then after about three hours of deep sleep, you come back into dream state, which is like astral planes. And I'll be lying there, and suddenly I'll feel a mala in my chest. I just get out of, and the dreams are going by, dream, dream, dream, dream, and I'm just sitting watching the dreams go by. About three hours, it's the place, you know, which we've talked about, where the alarm's gone on, and you still got a dream, and you don't want to. You turned off the alarm, and you say, "I got five more minutes, and I just finished that dream." Will you do this for about three hours? Between about three and six or something. But I'm not getting rested. Well, that's a model. Sure. You got to see how you keep seducing yourself in with models which you say are like, "That's the way it is." You know, "I'm tired." You know that one? "I'm tired. I can't go out tonight. I'm too tired." Then something happens that turns you on. "Hey, man, let's go." "I thought you were tired." "Oh, well, yeah." Dreams just running by, just karma being lived out. And this one, the big dream in the sky, just another dream. You think this is real? Doesn't look real to me. Doesn't look any more real than the things I dream all night. [Music]