Talk by Swami Rudrananda (Rudi)

January 9, 1973

The miracle of our existence is the fact that we as people sit together in incredible, abysmal ignorance of really our potential. We have nothing in us that can really understand how deep creativity is and how infinite the capacity for every human being is to grow. And it isn't until we pass through the doorway and go into another that we really have a sense of rebirth and a sense of fulfillment. And so we play like some animal in a mud hole, and we throw at each other these little things on one level.

And growing is really to allow yourself to take the nourishment, to really reach from where you are into a totally different universe with different energies and different rules, and certainly a different consciousness. And growing is only that. It is only taking in of nourishment, the ability to see, to really feel inside yourself the connection that one feels between, say a mother and her child. It's an umbilical cord, and it really is a drawing, and this is basically what it is. And it's a mutual drawing because my growth has to do with feeding you and taking back what is being replaced.

You can't fill something unless you empty something from it so that you can put into it and again take out and put into it again and again. And it's impossible therefore to really study intellectually, or in any way, can the mind learn because you only make a conjecture; you only thicken the content and thicken it and put it under more and more pressure.

Growing is an emptying out and a filling out so that you begin to refine and purify and in every way nourish so that the muscles in the body, these chakras, every muscle and tissue and every organ in you, through nourishment begins to sprout and grow.

And it's essential to rid yourself of the congestion as you grow, because the very nature of growth is the fact that you are re-fining your energy, and if you don't flush out, and all of you should have this exercise of taking a deep breath in your heart and surrendering negative psychic tension and congestion. Because if you don't flush out then this thing forms back again, and you can't change a pattern in your life, you really can't free yourself unless as you refine your energy and it separates that you get rid of the unassimilated energies (this is the lower form of energy); so you slowly rise.

Every time you work you break up continually all of your energy and it separates just like you churn milk, and the butter you keep and you throw away the lesser product. And the lesser product is really what we use or what we should use to live with. We work in our ordinary day, we have relationships; all of this is the byproduct in life.

The real product of life is the ability to take our creative force and raise it to a higher level continually. And so we live an organic and very natural way, the change that takes place doesn't take place from your mind, it takes place strictly from this churning of your creative energy as you bring it around and around and around endlessly, and you really separate and you really create eventually what is a state of being.

And this is the thing that is unique in India, when you go and see someone who has a tremendous spirituality. It is not their wisdom; it really is God's wisdom, that detached from them, this state of being that is all conscious.

If one asks a person, he can't in every sense possibly have an answer, which isn't correct, but from this force which doesn't have a voice, as we understand a voice to be. It doesn't have a mind, as we understand the mind. But it communicates from itself. You don't have to talk. You just have to surrender and the consciousness of this higher energy, this will function.

And so when you went to someone like Nityananda, if you were open you heard. It spoke in you. It advised you. It nourished you. It fed you, and in every way it was your teacher. It wasn't the man. It wasn't the voice of the man. It wasn't the intelligence of the man. It was a state of being that came from energy being used consciously, and that separates and creates in a sense another dimension and another level of life.

And it is only when you get involved and you get into this need to think, and need to rationalize and emotionalize that you really begin to understand the limitation of a person and you learn to understand the remarkable quality of a state of being. It is. And we continually try to understand something which is in the mind or the emotions or somewhere within our physical body, but it is this detached energy, the state of being that really is remarkable.

And that is really the first stepping-stone into the cosmos because it allows you to remove yourself of the earth and take this nourishment and from that. You can begin to attract on all of these higher levels.

There is nothing rational about spiritual work because spiritual work does not exist on its true form on the earth. It is the nature of a lighter and refined energy, it has a different density, it exists in a different world completely and the only way you understand it is by the results that you have in your life, by this feeling of a connection that nourishes you and feeds you.

And when you understand that you are working correctly, it's when you succumb to all of these tensions in your mind, all of the talking, all of the things in you that are trying to utilize the energy. It is to leave it alone, to really work and drink it in and rise above, continually rising above yourself that really is the advantage of a state of being or a state of spiritual energy that is moving.

We either rise with it or we try to get underneath it and underneath it are the tensions of this physical life. And growing is exactly that. I mean,

I was very, very, very fortunate when I was the age of most of you that I really had the ability to live with a great saint. And there is nothing to talk about. I couldn't step into a room in his presence, I would put my (foot in). I would lie on the floor, put my foot against the doorjamb and push myself into the room.

There was such an energy for me, and there was a double resistance in me to go in and it was, in a sense like being in a wine press, I just felt me being squeezed out and this force going in. And it was really my wish to put myself under that kind of pressure. I lived under this for some thirty years.

And all of you, and certainly there are many of you who are beginning, when you fight then you are fighting inside yourself to not allow this energy in, to not allow it to be assimilated so that it can really render from your being, you. And it is you who are the conflict. It is you who is really against your own growth. It is your ego and it's trying to fight for its existence and it makes a million stupid reasons. It is a thing that allows you to attract a theater date on the night that you should come to a class; or it allows you to express your energy fighting with somebody because you will not open and absorb that energy and rise above the situation.

There is nothing rational about fighting because fighting and tensions only destroy creative energy. And the ability to fight, the wanting to fight is only the unconsciousness in a human being that will not draw in the energy and rise above it.

The same energy that is wasted externally, drawn in and internalized will raise you above the situation and you look and the situation is ridiculous. It's the ridiculous that we really use our energy in any way except as nourishment and as growth.

And we're in a very vital time for this ashram at this time. And those of you who are here now are very fortunate because we will be really loaded in a very short time. We have lots and lots and lots of people coming after another month or two. And it is your ability to fight for your relationship and for your position that has to do with your wish and your commitment and your ability to get close. And that closeness is really within you.

I've had people come back who've been away for two years and they look around and say, "Oh, look at that, there's all these new faces!" Well, there are new faces because they're not here. And we don't play favorites. You can earn your way. You have every right and every reason to be recognized. You'll be recognized by the effort that you make, the depth to which you work and the depth to which you grow.

There is no favoritism. I have plenty of favoritism in me and I've learned that it has no reality. Reality has to do with the person who grows and the person who stays. And so you get a Christmas card from a favorite, and the person who looks across from you at the breakfast table that's the person who was there. That is reality. And for all of you who feel inferior, who feel in every way that you don't qualify, this might be very true. But if you're here five years from now, not only will you have qualified, but you will be heads and shoulders above anyone who was superior and who was here last week or the month before or six months ago.

It is only your work. It is only longevity. It is only the wish within you to take that qualifies you to grow. I mean I lived with many, many saints in different parts of the world, and I sat with them with weeks and months and weeks and months doubting myself, and I'd look at them, and I'd say, "Who asked a question today? Who wanted? Nobody." Nobody.

And you can sit all over the world in temples in Japan or in India or in China or anywhere and you listen to the stupidly that goes on, on a day-by-day basis. Nobody comes who has a wish inside. Nobody has in them their heart tearing apart because they have such a desire to find the growth that is available.

It is only to that you qualify. It is only through that that you express your wish. I am going to be forty-five years old in two weeks and I'm still burning inside and I still have this wish and it drives me crazy; this thirst inside to grow.

And I can qualify it and stand next to anyone, but who wants to measure oneself against anyone else. The only one to be measured by is by God and the only thing to work toward is to get there. And this competition on a stupid low level of existence has no meaning.

It breaks my heart only when I see people not wanting to grow and not reaching for that growth. And every day for me is a burning that I really in my heart and soul never wish to inflict on anyone else, but for me to serve you.

I have to within myself completely destroy everything that existed for me from yesterday today, and from today tomorrow so that I don't crystallize. I don't become within myself secure enough to think I've gone far enough for what somebody also calls enlightenment. I don't want that.

I want to die open and I want to go up and all of the intelligence, all of the crystallization, all of the intellectualism, and all of the everything else can stay here and be eaten by those people who want to eat like jackals, the truth of yesterday. It is only a dead truth.

Truth is the destruction within yourself continually of everything that existed one moment before. And if you have a need in yourself to hold onto anything, then you will probably not have realization, and you will not have within yourself the sense of service to other people. You will be a person who is offering death to other people because you don't have the capacity to go through the cycle of rebirth and death in yourself continually.

Either you want to grow in such a depth that you feel the cycle of death and rebirth in you at all times, or you don't qualify to really do this work. And I would rather have people leave early on then to sit here and become a limitation for any one else or a limitation for myself.

We have undoubtedly the most difficult spiritual work that is available. And you have to make up your mind whether you really wish to grow; whether you really wish to surrender you; or you wish to hold on to six million extraneous things, which haven't nourished anybody for two thousand, four thousand, six thousand or eight thousand or ten thousand years.

It is not the past that is needed, it is the moment that is needed; it is the capacity within you to assimilate the energy as it comes into the universe fresh; and it has to go into you and root out everything in you that existed not only in this life but in every past life.

The only thing I promise you is an extraordinary life, a very remarkable life that you will see in yourself, and in the connection that you have with other people a very living and creative experience, that you will see and understand; and it will break your heart thousands of times; and you see how deeply people say they're looking and how extraordinary they are in their creative capacity to avoid finding. And most creative capacity to a human being is in their unconscious to not find what they say they're looking for. It is unbelievable how people can make a stream that is million miles long of coincidence to get them out of doing, and they can't cross the street to do.

It is really that that has continually destroyed people who say they're growing and wish to grow and they stop growing because they don't have within themselves the energy to sustain their search and their evolvement.

And I promise you as long as you're here, not only will I give you that way, but anyone else who is here.

It is really a dedication within yourself to reach towards this endlessness, which has to do with our creative capacity. And we have to be like any other organic thing that lives. We have to live fresh every day and not try to in any way live in the past, but to really open and allow this energy to come into us and to allow ourselves to burn whatever was out.

It is really this compost heap of life that we really see this smoke rising and we take in this energy and loosen up deep within ourselves in this unconsciousness that's so strongly embedded within us and free ourselves and find that we can breathe, and that these chakras that we have are not limited to our physical bodies, but they really reach out into infinity and we can draw from thousands and thousands and thousands of years and millions of miles the energy that we need.

All of this thing of spirituality and cosmic consciousness should not be so many words, but it should be a living reality that we within ourselves can come to every single day, and that we can see our world expand. We really can feel every muscle within us open and that it becomes nourishment, which frees us. It frees our hearts. It frees our eyes. It frees our mind. It frees every chakra within us so that we're not the slave within ourselves of these organs, but we really are free to see them and have them expand and have them flow one to the other and really bring us the nourishment that allows us to get above the earth.

And if you ever have questions, you really have to ask them. If you have within yourself the inability to follow the exercise come every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30 until you understand. It is not wrong to not be bright. It is not wrong to not be clever. It is only wrong to stay stupid, to not question again and again again and again, that you have the right to be free in this life.

This is your ashram; you have a right to all of it. You come and bother us. We are grateful when somebody really wants to know. And this doesn't happen often enough.

You have to think. You have to feel inside. You have to have questions. You have to really inside want very deeply, and that will make a vitality, which will feed all of us. But to sit complacently, to not wish, to not want, to not burn inside, this is really the limitation.

The only thing that doesn't burn is a wet mattress or a wet newspaper.

You have to really open inside; really bring in you this wish. It's the most heartbreaking thing of all to me to see in so many of you that you don't have enough depth. You don't ask and open and open and ask and want.

I have so much energy. I have so much to give you, and this thing is like watching these trucks backing up to the Hudson and pouring millions of gallons of milk. My energy goes out into the atmosphere because there isn't among all of you enough people to want what I have, and so I work and I grow because I keep going around and around and around in myself. I really need communication. I really want people who want to ask, who want to take and who want to grow.

And in yourself it is your wish, which is really your mind, and your heart wanting so much that qualifies you. Not being superior because some of you are ten lifetimes ahead some others of you, but it doesn't mean anything. In six months of working you can be ahead of somebody who may have been five hundred lives in front of you.

It is the nature of the energy and the universe at this moment that has such richness in it. that has such a capacity to feed and nourish you, that there need be no limitation, that there need be no time lag because you re grow from your ability to take in at this moment.

What last year was, what ten years ago was, this has nothing to do with the moment. We are living in an expanded consciousness, so the milk and the energy that is in the atmosphere today is richer than it was a day ago or a week ago or a month ago. And so it is easy to break up inside all of your patterns and all of your limitations.

There is no reason not to work and not to grow, so you sit here, you drink into yourself and really feel your muscles taking in this energy in a hungry way and growing inside and feeling yourself open, and if you can't make yourself hungry, if you can't express that then you sit at night and you ask and you ask and you ask and you ask.

In the Bible repeatedly it says "Ask and you shall receive" and you have to ask endlessly. You can ask for four hours, you can ask fifty thousand times until you find in you such a wish to grow, such a wanting to grow, such an openness that your hunger allows you to take in a thousand times more.

There is no limitation, to the capacity of a person to take in and grow. It is only necessary once you've taken ten times that you have to do that for the rest of your life. You have to sustain any increase for it to be something, which stays within you. In other words, if you want to work twice as much tonight then you certainly have to work twice as much tomorrow. There is no such thing as a spiritual cram course.

Anything that has been attained has to be sustained by as much work as that which went into the attainment. And you have to increase your work every single day to have a real result. You can't work twice as much on Friday because you want to stay out all weekend. There is no such thing.

Spiritual work is a conscious flow of energy through the chakras every single day. And it takes at least a half-hour effort to get the chemistry flowing through you that allows this thing to grow in you.


QUESTION: I really want to grow. I feel I really want to grow and I'm willing to do anything, but I sit here like a dunce.


RUDI: You know I've spoken, I wouldn't say more than five thousand times, and I'll say it five thousand and one time. If you want, then you sit tonight and you ask inside and you really bring your mind inside. It's the same way as if you had a child, which was dying. You really would pray and you really would ask God, and you really would find that the emotion which would open your heart, and you'll ask, even if you claim you don't believe in such a thing, understand?

And you have to ask and ask inside and you keep asking and asking and you hear yourself and you say, "I want to grow," and you keep repeating that until you hear the superficiality of it, and then you hear the emotionality of it, and then you feel your heart really breaking open, that you've asked so much that you're bringing energy into your heart chakra, and you keep asking and asking and asking and asking and the nourishment inside suddenly expands and your heart opens. And then you have a place to grow from. You have really opened your heart to your wish, not here, but here.

So you take it from here and you bring your mind here and you say inside here, "I want to grow" and you keep saying this out load until you hear the tone change in your voice, until you feel the emotion change in your voice, and then you keep saying it until you feel your heart break open.

I'm burning now, really very much for one reason because something happened which really broke my heart and I understand and the only way to get above it is to do this. And this just happened within an hour, and I will not live with that block in my heart, not only because of the other person, because if I live with it as a block in my heart I am limiting somebody else and I don't want to do that, so I would rather burn it out of me and free myself from that.

There is no reason for it to become a limitation for anybody. Understand? Do you understand Norman?


NORMAN: (inaudible response)


RUDI: Well, try to do it. Try to do it and keep asking and asking and asking until you feel the emotion drawing into your heart and then you'll feel this thing going in deeper and deeper, and you keep drilling as long as you can, and you breathe in your heart and you let this thing really pierce in there, and it really cracks it open just as if you were trying to break open a coconut


But it's nothing you can understand until you do it. How can you understand it unless you do it?


QUESTION: How can I begin to be unattached?


RUDI: Well the best way to not be attached is exactly what I'm telling you that I do, is go into your heart and you open and so any hurt that you have or any attachment you have burns out. If you take a breath inside and you say, "I really wish to transcend that attachment" and you keep doing that and you really feel inside you whatever it is when something starts to take fire and won't burn out.

See, a wish in a human being is extraordinary. It's an extraordinary property. It is so fine that it can soak through anything. It's so very fine, it can go through bone. It can go through skin. It can go through steel. It has a penetration like this kind of a laser beam and you keep wishing and wishing and wishing and you really cut right through into you into the deepest part of you so that anything that you're attached to you can burn out completely, and then it'll reform-- with, not the ability to hold it doesn't mean you won't have, it means you won't be attached. It's a little different so that you won't stop somebody else's growth.


QUESTION: You've spoken about the perspiration and wastes -- you don't have this with this burning do you?


RUDI: It's a dry fire. It's really a very dry fire. Because it's deeper, it doesn't sweat. It's not a sweaty fire. So when we get to go deeper inside, in a very rational way, if you have more oxygen, then it burns, so breathe deeper. If you find yourself sweating, then bring in more oxygen and it'll be a dry fire in you. You have to breathe more. You're sweating because you're having a nervous reaction instead of having a depth reaction.


QUESTION: (inaudible)


RUDI: It's not that you're not taking deep breaths, it's the lack of you taking the breath down far enough and holding it long enough because that's one of the things that we fail very much. We work and we satisfy ourselves. We don't satisfy the chemistry within ourselves because if we take a little longer in our breath and wait a little longer in our opening, we free a different kind of chemistry. There's a depth in us, which has this chemistry, and if we take a little longer, more of it comes out. And so we're lacking chemistry, this is exactly what this burning is; it's what this asking is about. We do it but we don't do it deep enough. We don't do it long enough. We very rarely do things that have that capacity. We love somebody, we wait for one minute, we feel a little flow and then we look over here and we look over there because if it takes so long to get something moving it makes sense to hold onto it a little more, to really feel it a little more.


QUESTION: While I'm (inaudible) I feel myself open up and this surprises me every time, and I feel I should be able to keep it going with other people, not exactly in the same way but still open, but I can't do that --


RUDI: Well, how can you-- you're talking from here and it's going here and it's coming out, right? You finally have something in your heart, okay? Why can't you have the brains to bring it down from here to here and up to here, and why do you just let it-- you're so happy that it's going to your heart that you bring it from your heart to your mouth and out. Is that doing you any good?

And this to what you all do-- when you finally get something working instead of carrying it the rest of the way around up here, this is where you save energy. But you're so grateful, like a beggar getting a quarter, that you really don't keep you're hat out, the next person's going to drop ten thousand dollars in. So you have an experience, the experience starts to come in and you say, "Oh my God, it's happened" and it's all gone. Breath down, bring it inside, bring it into your sex organs, bring it up your spinal column, hold your gratitude until a half-hour later let it go around and around and around, let it saturate your body, let it feed all of your muscles, then you'll have it for Faith. You'll have it for your children, you'll have it for me, and you'll it for everyone else. It's the limitation that you place on the experience. So you have an experience it means that you have finally worked something to a point where it's beginning to chemically change. Then take it from first base to second base to third base and take it home. Why limit it? Why limit it at that point?

We never work deeper. We never work long enough. We never carry it where it can do us good, because this way it's in your heart, so what happens six months from now? A shot comes, your heart closes and all of it is wasted and you start all over again. It's like mining, every time you want to take out a handful of gold and silver, you have to dig from here to the corner, but if you make a structure, you can go down anytime you want and get out what you wish; so any experience is only as good as your conscious ability to do it at will. So you have to take the energy, bring it all the way down and use this to nourish your whole system, and then if something happens, this focus that you have, this has become your dependency, or then suddenly this focus becomes their energy, and you close the door and you won't be able to it again. And you're a victim of your limitation, understand?

I mean, what we do is react to the situation which is our body, our mind, our emotions telling us and giving us the clue of what it is, and you think, fine, boom, boom, boom, and you go over here and it goes boom boom boom and then you go over there. Only a fool follows his mind. Only a fool follows his emotions. You go the other way and you become free. And it's not to go towards anything except towards nourishment and growth, so that you can feel these things- they're your limitations. Then you go this way and you can work above it and you can encompass the limitation and you can burn the whole thing.


END OF TALK