Growth and Transcendence
A child within its mother’s womb is a physical-spiritual being in an ocean of life chemistry. As the fetus develops, the chemistry changes to fulfill the need of the life within. When the child is born, he is surrounded by an outer ocean of energy, which is the electrical field of creation coming through the atmosphere. At that point, it is not the mother but his own consciousness that produces the nourishment that feeds him. It is his ability to absorb and refine this outer ocean by recycling it endlessly within himself that determines his growth potential.
The refining of outer energy uses up the instinctive forces, which support the coarser needs of survival. It also allows each person to live on whatever level of development he attracts with a sense of security. The inability to survive on a given level is due to the failure to sustain those lower aspects of nourishment that it requires. A person who marries after a very intense physical relationship must have that experience perpetuated to sustain the emotional connection. Changing needs produced by a new situation, such as the birth of a child, require awareness to balance the energy flow between the people involved. In any situation, all partners must feel the nourishment held to a necessary level.
The wish to grow necessitates the continual excavation of physical restrictions to extend the openness of a person to the ocean of creative force that flows through him. This flow only builds in a person through conscious service to others. It is doing, not through your will, but through surrender to God’s will or the will of your own higher creative energy, that allows you to recycle your energy so it can rise to a higher level. This recycling is essential in order to remove ego, which can limit your growth at the moment of its expression and become the limitation for others who are influenced by you.
After many years of recycling the life force, crystals of creative energy begin to be formed. In India they are called "siddahs" or gifts. If they are given away, it allows the crystals to break down and the deep energy from the gifts can then be recycled into the life force. This energy will continue to develop and bring forth deeper "jewels."
It is unfortunate that for most people, finding such a rare jewel becomes the reward. It is only fool’s gold, energy that we use on a certain level instead of giving it away as a present to one’s friends so that they can also grow to a higher level. A person who can transcend the pressures of life and continually expand on all levels must expose himself to many influences. In a spiritual person, because of the additional need to serve others, a particularly strong mechanism must develop. He must be able to refine energy for his own evolvement, and to simultaneously absorb the tensions of those he is helping. It is possible to perform these two actions simultaneously.
To refine one’s own chemistry and consciously work for less developed people brings great pain to the teacher. It is like a machine designed to mill potatoes, having peach pits put into it. It is possible for the machine to function, but only if it was built with this in mind. The consciousness required for a person to undertake his own development, and the growth of others at the same time, is complex. It is impossible to stay on your own level and teach another person on a lower level. It is also impossible to reach someone else’s level and teach them there. It is only possible to do both acts simultaneously. It is for the teacher to raise himself to his highest level and connect with the student on their level, transcending and feeding the student until the level of consciousness of the teacher is reached by the student. The effort on the teacher’s part is great, but the student must be willing to surrender in order to allow the process to occur.
Teaching in depth for a long period of time requires the ability to consciously suffer, by absorbing the tensions and pains that make the student immobile. These blocks are karmic and can be removed by someone willing to undertake the karma. They constitute a deep and powerful force that must be burned or absorbed by the teacher, usually with physical pain due to the intense nature of the material and the impurities it contains.
Refining any material and extracting a product requires intensity (heat and pressure), as well as time and consciousness. Modern technology allows men to extract treasures from the earth. Spirituality consciously teaches a man to take from life what he wishes and needs. It is karma that teaches him to take what is right for his nature.
An example of positive energy transfer is the laying on of hands, as utilized in Christian healing. It is a beautiful and simple way of being an instrument through which God’s force is allowed to flow through one person for the good of another. The energy stimulates a current that allows accumulated tensions and blocks to be washed out. These blocks are like puddles of dirty water; water sprayed from a street cleaning truck connects the puddles, causing a stream that cleans the street. Each contact with another person or situation either washes away tension or adds to it. Only by consciously using our own energy can we succeed in making our contacts increase our life flow. There is no situation that cannot be made positive in this sense. It is only our own limitations that cause the tension that congests us.
Digging into an area of energy always requires working from the point where the unknown touches the known. In the case of the laying on of hands, it involves the areas between the fingertips and the palm, and the forearm and upper arm of the healer. It is like clearing a canal that goes into a river. The congestion is emptied from the junction of the canal and the river by digging and opening the area nearest the river. It is possible to move slowly up the canal, clearing as you go, allowing the congestion to flow back into the river.
In order to initiate this process, place the wrists together, fingers facing in the air, with middle fingers straight up, like tracing a river to its source. At the base of the hand, just above the wrist, there is a valley between the mounds of the hand. After feeling an energy flow in one’s internal psychic system, place the fingertips of the left middle fingers (reverse for left-handed people), with the index finger in the middle, on the mounds of the right hand. This is where the flow into the palm from the arm can be felt. Continue the contact until the flow becomes well established. Then repeat the process for the other hand. This will help to clear the channel from the palm back into the forearm.
There is a tendon on the inside of the elbow where the upper arm and forearm meet. After feeling the flow from the forearm for some time, place the thumb on one side of the tendon and the index finger on the other. The flow from these fingers should then enter the upper arm if the whole arm is at a relaxed right angle. The fingers will send energy into the upper arm until a descending flow is felt. Thereafter, when using the laying on of hands, this flow will be felt from the entire arm into the hands, and ultimately from the heart to the arms and fingers.
Spiritual students using the laying on of hands are bringing into themselves the tensions of the person touched. The accumulated congestion is then removed by surrendering the negative psychic tension through the open hands. This not only removes the psychic poisons, it also helps to make conscious an awareness of the flow in the hands. Not using such an exercise will cause tensions to back up and produce great pain, and possibly disease, in the individual. It will certainly limit their capacity to function in helping others.
You have to constantly relate everything you do to the basic question of what you really want in your life. The essential nature of a human being is that he can make conscious choices. It is only when such decisions help to establish the flow of higher energy in the body that they represent an approach to freedom. A man has to fuel his mechanism. He has to open his system and feel energy coming in from the cosmos. This is how he grows. All the metaphysical secrets are just ways that people use to represent energy flow. Unfortunately, a human being can’t attain anything in a simple way. That is why sacrifice exists as a part of every kind of religious ceremony.
When you find yourself in a difficult situation, what you’re doing is making the situation worse than it is in your own mind. You have to overcome this tendency if you are going to find a treasure in yourself. Getting up in the morning and facing your existence can open you. A truly sensitive person can look at the sun, or a flower, and feel the adventure of life. If you really enjoyed a day, you would find out what paradise is all about. We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s taken away.
I had close to forty students when I left this country to go to New Zealand, and all of them wanted to follow me there. It shocked me, because nobody showed that much loyalty when I was here.
I find a great deal of happiness and joy in myself; I don’t have to depend on anybody else for it. At the same time, everyone has to nourish and be nourished by the people that they love. It’s through your own ability that you’ll have everything.
I know that many of you have had things come about that you couldn’t believe could occur, but how much of it do you feel in your ordinary day? You’ve all been enriched tremendously. If you don’t nourish these gifts, they’ll cease to grow and will vanish like an unattended flower. You have to find something in your day that is marvelous, and have a zest for life. If you’re chewing on one peanut, everything in your body should respond to the taste of it.
A day for me is like a hundred years. It holds so much richness. When you become one with yourself, you have enough inside to become one with someone else. In your ability to expand your energy, you begin to share with all that’s around you. You should be in the midst of a symphony of energy. Look at the colors. Feel the force that’s being given off. It’s yours to reach into, yours to share. People are afraid to expose themselves to life. But life begets life and love brings love. All that people require is love. A mental disease is a symbol of a very sick ego. A person will try to change everybody else, but won’t change himself. Nothing can satisfy him because he doesn’t want to be satisfied. You have to want to share and be happy. Anything in you that can’t be happy represents the death in you, and you have to begin to break that down. You have to learn to laugh and do good things. Play at being happy, until slowly but surely you become a happier person.
You have to work at things that expand your energy. You have to begin to realize that if there’s a bridge in your life between you and somebody else, you have to do whatever you can to open and love them. What difference does it make what you have to do? You’re supposed to be a more conscious and spiritual person. It’s not always easy for me to break down energy blocks for hundreds of people. You have to put out for me. You’re responsible within yourself for an immediate love quantity. You can’t let a day go by or an hour go by where you can’t open and love the people around you. If you feel a lack of communication with me, then get dressed and come in my store and wash the floor. I can break all of you down, but if I go away for two years, you’ll all fall away because of your inability to break down that block between you and your own creative energy. You have to learn to break down your own chemistry. Go inside and bring your attention down and make it expand inside you. I’m telling you things that should go deeply inside, not just stay in your brain.
Everything is based on energy. People come in the store and I ride on the wave of their energy. You have to begin to relate to everyone you meet in this way. You have to want to work so that the force is going into every muscle of your body. You must feel one with yourself and with every person that you contact during the day. You have to understand where you’re wrong; where you’ve done something to close the other person. You’ll find that every conflict you have with a person is satisfying a need within you to fight. You can’t go to sleep mad because you’re closing energy patterns that you need. Your anger at someone else is just a manifestation of your inability to transcend yourself. When you’re free, things come to you because you are open. The thing that draws most is a vacuum. A human being can be an instrument for God. If the force flows through you, it fills you and keeps cleaning you out. You’re just a tube through which this higher force moves. In class, your whole effort is to expand yourself. As your heart opens and the force flows, rise with it until you’re free and open. You have to be grateful to function as this kind of instrument.
If you see the expression of God within somebody else, then that force will expand you. It will come down into your heart and help you grow. But any energy under pressure keeps getting smaller and tighter, until you eventually go crazy. A God force has to be continually flowing through an instrument. Energy without love isn’t a God force; it’s a manifestation. Not only do you have to relate to everything in yourself, but you have to realize that you have to be inside when you talk to somebody else, so that you’re nourishing and being nourished. Spiritualism without love is a kind of magic. It isn’t being one with the whole cosmos. Real knowledge encompasses everything. Understanding that doesn’t have a basis of love and humanity becomes a destructive experience. You become so protective, and your need to be supreme in it becomes so strong, that you eventually become crazy.
You have to be able to encompass through love everything and everybody that comes near you. You have to let your heart expand. Then you will find that your spirituality flows into the atmosphere and becomes one with God, and that you love God. Your need for a restricted way of doing will cease to exist. If you don’t feel love for the people that you are close to, then you really have to sit down and work to open to them. If your energy doesn’t manifest as love, it will manifest as another energy force. Your inability to work and your inability to love represents your failure to be a completely happy person. It’s good to know that you’re in trouble. It’s better than thinking that there’s nothing wrong. Nobody says that you have to love everybody, but at least see within yourself what has to be done to help you open. If your heart is closed, then you’re fighting with yourself and you’ve gotten an innocent person involved in your inability to express yourself. You must begin to see where you don’t function.
God is love. A spiritual person who can’t love cannot nourish another human being. If you can’t find the oneness in a relation, you won’t find it anywhere. You have to begin to realize that it isn’t that one person is good and another is bad. We usually tolerate people because they are like us. When you begin to live with and love people who are not like you, you break down your own energy and start to live. You can’t be a prisoner of the psychic forces that live within you. There are no special conditions that make one kind of life better than another. Basically, everything is all the same, but certain things manifest in a way that you find easier to take. Breaking down difficult experiences frees you. Your inability to encompass somebody else’s life represents your inability to share your life. Everyone wears the face of God.
One of the major reasons for working for a long time is that certain energies only come into being once in a hundred years. If you are not open to them, you have lost an opportunity that will not occur again in your lifetime. People represent the manifestation of different types of energy in the cosmos. Difficult situations come to test you and to tell you that you need a new and greater energy. You have to look in people and see what God is projecting toward you. You cannot accept any situation as not being good. You must pursue it and try to clarify what is happening. You either attack people because you can’t accept what they are telling you, or you love them and go above the situation to find out why you were previously closed. You have to surrender all of your effort and all of your ego. If you won’t accept someone else’s situation, it is because it threatens what you’ve done. You have to open to everything. It’s only a fool who goes to someone with his knowledge. You must go with your surrender. To really have a spiritual life is to let go of what you have in order to take in something else. You have to be strong enough to surrender. You should be able to take in energy, as well as be willing to change.
I want to expand my life. I want to grow and be happier. The whole concept of growth is nothing if you don’t find sweetness within you. One should really have a taste of God today. That joy and that happiness should exist now. You have to do things that prove to you that you’re capable of experiencing love. You have to feel God spread in your heart. If you can’t enjoy today, you’ll never realize God tomorrow. What you’re working for is a projection of what you have earned in all your previous lives. Begin to enjoy it now! You should have heaven on earth as much as you possibly can. You have to attract from the sweet part of yourself to fulfill your own life. You work hard, you have the right to enjoy your life. You must look around and love your atmosphere.
What I have now is my realization. I want to enjoy that. I don’t want a hundred ashrams. I only want what God brings me. Success for me is sitting in a park, reading a book, and watching some children go by. Unless you consciously reach for the things that you love and enjoy, and consciously taste and consume them, you’ll never know the sweetness of realization. Enjoy the drama of your own life! Enjoy the air, the sunshine; ENJOY! It’s your life! Feel your face, feel your hair; you have to consciously be aware.
None of you are enough for me to reject God. When you let somebody come into your life who distorts the joy and bliss, they’re taking you away from God. Nobody has a right to deprive you of that. When you sit down in your meditation to tap higher energy, it should fill you. If it doesn’t, then you should feel the deadness inside yourself. Breathe and try to open.
You have to learn to love God by not just opening one way, but every way. On the earth, the greatest way of contacting God is through absorbing refined energy and by feeling love. You have to make yourself light inside to reach up to God. Everything that you do has to expand your inner being. Then you will feel the energy begin to open your heart and rise into the cosmos. You have to raise your level of love so that it becomes an expression of God.
Continually taking in higher outside energies and experiences breaks up the crystallization that limits a person in his capacity to connect with God. Regardless of the height to which anybody goes, this process of dissolving karma must be active in them. Only such openness allows us to reach and connect with the oneness of creation when we die. If this occurs, there is no rebirth, but freedom from this physical life.
Since I have been teaching I have had many thousands of students, and feel I will have as many next year as I have had in all my previous years of teaching. It is my growth and detachment that allow for this increased flow. It is not the number that is important, but the increased ability to serve a large number of people. Many people claim they want; very few want. I have never had someone leave because of a lack of anything but their own depth. It was their game to find something, and then it was their game to avoid the responsibility that comes from the commitment to working.
I have never relaxed inside with anyone, unless I knew them extremely well. I have learned to be as a warrior prepared for battle, armed to the teeth and aware that the enemy is on all sides. This is not an act of aggression but an act of consciousness. We must be totally within ourselves, ready to defend the accumulation of our achievement. Either our next situation adds to our growth or endangers it. It is the responsibility of a human being to understand that only through his consciousness of the life energy flowing in him can he have a sense of whether he is receiving or losing his own vitality. This is the only culture-free criteria for appraising good or bad. Good feeds; bad depletes.
A wolf will not usually attack the master of the house who is capable of defending himself with a rifle, but he will attack the geese who are the expression of the wealth of the farmer who owns them. The real wealth of a teacher is his students. They represent his flock. If they are attacked, and he does not have the consciousness to defend them, he will lose the gifts that God has given him.
I have watched so many teachers treating their flock as if they were roosters to pit against each other so as to enjoy the fight, rewarding the one who is capable of mutilating the other. It is not only unconscious, it is a cruel and totally destructive system whereby the energy of a student is used for the amusement of the so-called conscious teacher. There is a law against vivisection, but there is no law against the misuse of human beings. There have been endless writings by teachers expressing their spirituality and claiming great attainments. There has been very little written about the need of the teacher for the student. The student is the direct expression of the capacity of a teacher, and it is only through the proper use of the student and the student’s growth that the teacher will also grow.
The energy coming into the universe is constant. We fail to receive it because we are closed. It is only the foolishness of man that forces him to look for other reasons when the answer is so obvious. The moment a person can open within himself, he can feel the flow that is ready to enter him and help him transcend any difficulties. It is therefore our awareness of a lack of flow that should immediately warn us that we are not in a state of surrender. The thousands of books and millions of words written on spiritual subjects are only a complex way of bringing a human being to a point of accepting this self-evident truth. The more sophisticated the individual, the more he must find complex reasons for allowing cosmic energy to enter him and slowly to remove these tensions. He has structured an enormous mechanism at the cost of an expensive education, which thereby requires an equivalent complexity to reestablish the basic flow.
We are so busy trying to share the blame with other people and make them responsible for our ineffectiveness that we are not open to the potential of our existence. When a human being comes to the point of accepting responsibility for his own life, and not blaming anyone else, hen he comes to the beginning of the simplicity that makes it possible or him to be his own master. It is only the fool who blames somebody else, rather than accepting his own ignorance. Even if someone else were involved, our blaming them only lessens our ability to find the benefit in the situation, which is to understand where we are wrong as individuals. There is no collective consciousness. Neither is there collective guilt, but only the holding together of ignorant people who cannot accept their own mistakes. They continually defend themselves, using the energy that should produce change to activate a heavier and heavier logic to justify their condition. It is only the act of surrender, which allows us to use the energy contained in any shock or disappointment, that opens us to the truth. We go into shock when we are caught by surprise, or have revelations that we find difficult to accept. It is only by surrendering to the enormous energy that is within these experiences that we can rise above them. To be a professional in spiritual work means that we are able to draw in all energies that are working against us, so that we can transcend them and benefit from whatever the condition is we have attracted. The need to relax is only the childish reward that we are promised after some difficult piece of work has been done. When something is moving, you don’t take a vacation. It is always the novice who sits with his mouth open while a miracle is taking place. It is the professional who surrenders to the next level, and the next and the next, in which one height is followed by another. It is like driving 200 miles to get to the hills, not realizing that they are only where the mountains begin. It takes great effort to get to the first point, but once the initial elevation is achieved, each successive height is attained with increasingly less energy as you reach out into the cosmos.
When a human being comes to a point of change, it should manifest on every level of his life, physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and professional. One of the prime reasons that people do not change is that they allow one aspect of their life to alter while holding onto the others. A great ocean liner has four or five large cables that attach it to the pier. Casting off one in no way enables the ship to leave the harbor. The ship loosened on one end can only pound against the pier and destroy the pier and itself. Similarly, a human being who becomes endowed with that which should expand and free him, may achieve nothing. By holding onto the past and avoiding the present, he may waste the energy he has received, until either the past patterns reclaim him, or the energy that has been given is destroyed.
The capacity to utilize a great expansion of energy requires enormous technical development, which can be gained only through many years of conscious work. It is not different from a child taking chemistry in high school. The brain is developed to a limited degree, and the level of work being done at that time reflects this condition. The potential in a young person will only be realized by taking many more courses in chemistry, following through in college, deepening from course to course the expansion of technical development, and possibly earning a Master’s and a Doctorate degree. He would then be specializing in a particular aspect of chemistry and have a good foundation in all allied fields. The twenty years that go into the development of a great chemist or a great spiritual teacher are the same. Muttering a few formulas does not make a chemist; muttering a few mantras does not make a spiritual teacher.
Everything must be subservient to the ultimate need for spiritual fulfillment. Everyone that we are responsible for must be made into a laboratory assistant, a product that can blend with our own chemistry and check it by the continual reflection of our own spiritual and physical flow. A bat flying in a cave gives off sounds, and by the echo understands that his passage in the dark is safe. We sound against the people and patterns that we live with, but many times our faulty consciousness does not allow us to avoid crushing situations that destroy our potential. Until we learn to use our relationships and energies consciously to guide us, we do not even have the sensitivity of a bat.
Every difficulty that we encounter may force us to find resources in ourselves which, once we have grown beyond the situation, can remain to develop and deepen our lives. Unfortunately, we are like a blind person who develops great sensitivity to sound, odor, and sensation. Once we regain our sight, we may lose all of the compensations that nature has provided for being blind, in our eagerness to see what we have missed.
Similarly, somebody who is an alcoholic becomes more and more expressive. He talks to everybody, feels with everyone. His heart is open. His emotions spill over. The remarkable job that an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous does is to remove the vice but keep the social exchange available. Often the unconscious reason that people drink is because of a deep need for nourishment. Alcoholics Anonymous provides this through their meetings. People who stop drinking and do not belong to such a group, rebuild their walls and lose the source of nourishment, which no doubt caused the alcoholism in the first place.
It is so difficult for people to understand what they want. Their shyness and fear keep them from exposing themselves. Last night during a class, one student complained that he felt a growing tension in himself. He is a very weak boy with an enormous ego. I told him that there were only two ways that the tension could be destroyed. It could be dissolved, or allowed to build to a certain point and then I could remove it. He got very emotional and said he didn’t want me to do this. He wanted to do it himself. I explained to him that this was only his ego. He admitted as much. Ego is the cause of most diseases in people. Those who stay sick are those who refuse help. Unconsciously they don’t want to be beholden to anyone.
We take situations at their face value. We also analyze them according to what we think is human and right, which is exactly what keeps us on a life level. To bring something down to the level of our understanding is to stay on that level forever. To surrender it and allow our energy to rise above the situation is to free ourselves from the pattern of our life.
When the emotions and mind attach to a situation, it is the limitation of the situation that is being expressed, not the capacity that the situation has to nourish and free us. After time passes and we reject or are rejected by the situation, we feel badly used. It is only by having each and every moment of our time express itself as an organic natural process of growth that we are capable of taking from everything and are sure we are not in a dream state. Continual growth means continually detaching from patterns, illusions, and all of the people for which we have value. Then they must also develop or be torn away from us by our growth. This is the reason that it takes real courage to pursue a spiritual life. It is not to pour cement into ourselves to keep everything the same, but to draw in energy and surrender to the continual change. it is when the consciousness of growing and separating as a result of growth is acceptable, that we can consciously free ourselves from much of the limitation that we place on the situations that surround us.
For example, when I was recently in India, I underwent a series of spiritual tests. Each day I felt increased demand on my energy. Finally, I felt I was approaching the limitation of my capacity. I tried very deeply to open inside and ask for help. I remember feeling my energy pouring out of me to meet the demands of the test. It was like a onemotor airplane, going further and further into the atmosphere, straining its mechanism. I have always said I would much prefer to die in a spiritual situation than to fail. Fortunately, there was nothing in me that was concerned about losing my life, though it is one of the great concerns that stops people from growing spiritually. They do not focus upon their objective, which is to be enlightened, but succumb endlessly to the fear that a given situation might take their life away. In truth, it would be an honor beyond anything they would deserve if they would happen to die in the course of a spiritual experience. Thousands of people die from a fall in a bathtub. Only once have I heard about someone who died during a spiritual test, and this only qualified him for a very high reincarnation. You are an amateur playing at spirituality if you do not have within you the capacity to surrender your physical life in the pursuit of inner development. You have to remove all of the physical in order to have a spiritual state. Unless this fact is consciously accepted, we will always be limited by our tensions whenever anything within the mind feels threatened by its physical annihilation, as is inevitable in any death-rebirth experience.
It was during this particular test, when I had exhausted all my physical energy, that I had a very strong vision. I saw a five-block-long dragon lying on the bottom of a great ocean. What had been an extraordinary test of my energy I saw pass over this enormous beast as a ripple. I became immediately aware that the experience that I had been undergoing only involved my surface tensions. It was the first time that I was able to go deeply within myself to the endless energy that is within each human being.
We always allow ourselves to live with the limitation of a situation. If we are challenged, we react by feeling uncomfortable until we cannot bear the situation any longer. Then we destroy it. This is nature’s way of allowing people to go from one level of life to a much lesser level, while avoiding the embarrassment and degradation that would follow if they were still attached to the environment of their past. We subtly prepare ourselves for our death by removing from around us those symbols of life and relationship that are full of energy. It should be the opposite. We should pass from this world surrounded by all the good that we have done.