Try and sit up straight always, and keep your attention on me and try and keep your eyes on me because you can't really draw energy otherwise. And, you never move once you are in the class. I mean, you sit down and you adjust yourself. No moving. No fixing of hair or anything. You just sit quietly, and try to stay very, very open. One of the problems with us as people is that we always work from within our own atmosphere. The problems that we have are really based on our own atmosphere, because the ecology of the human being is that he's living in his own garbage. So the atmosphere is poisoned with that.
What we really have to do is to open beyond ourselves, not inside here (with) this little effort you make of taking a breath and opening. You have to eventually open and open so that you get outside the immediate atmosphere of yourself,
You all sit in about a foot and a half of electricity or energy, which is the contact between your soul and this creative flow. You have to really ask inside to open deeper and deeper each time. You really feel this opening; really go deeper until you feel as if you're drilling a hole inside, so when you open you're really breaking down outer tension. It is very much like a coconut. You have inside you this milk and you have outside you the capacity to break through it and if you just keep touching the surface and making these feeble efforts, you will never break down all the stuff that keeps you from living.
All your organs, all your muscles are limited by this tremendous tension that is in you, not only from this life, but from many, many past lives. From your parents, from your culture, from the religion and race that you come from.
We all take a little of the energy, but we take all of the tensions. So we live based on very little nourishment. We have all kinds cultures represented here and in our life and in our past. But, the one thing that you always get is the curse or the tension of this culture.
We never dig inside for the energy. We always accept and talk about all of what we are, or reject all of what we are. And we experience none of it. It's a ridiculous thing, you know, because we never try to feel inside us that in us which was Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or black or white or anything else. And we continually have the tension and the rejection of ourselves to these energy flows that we come from.
In every sense not only are we that which we come from, but we are also everything else because we have a history of continually being reborn on the same place and we change from life to life.
We become white and black and male and female. And all of these prejudices within us really represent the total accumulation of all of our past that we haven't been able to open to. So when you find somebody that you reject you really are rejecting yourself. When you find somebody that you hate, you are hating yourself. When you find someone that you can't feel inside a flow with, you are also rejecting yourself.
That is why when they talk about compassion of the Buddha he really felt for everybody. He never denied anybody. He never rejected anybody. And you have to within yourself, realize that, that which you cannot relate to and open to, be quiet. You absolutely have to save your energy. You have to grow inside stronger. Open more. Take in more nourishment. As you grow inside you will break down this wall that's around you one level after another.
And really we are changing our work. Our whole process of working and teaching is changing, and for some of you, if you don't work deep enough, certainly we have to not give you the advanced work. It's not punishment it really represents not giving somebody something, which they cannot absorb. It's like not learning mathematics, you can't go on to algebra and you can 't go on to a more advanced field. You have to realize that. It isn't anything else, but you're not working, and if you develop a personality and a problem then you are just in every way compounding your problem, making more tensions for yourself.
I couldn't keep you here if you were ready to move on to something else, because it would be against the interest of me and it would be against the interest of the class. And if you don't find, then you work deeper, you open and you want more. You express that by opening your muscles by making a deeper and deeper and deeper commitment.
You have to really want very, very much. You ask until you feel inside you a deep sincerity that really really wants, and then you start from that wish that you really wish to know and that you wish to surrender. Then you start and take your first breath and really do the exercise. Then it's your wish and it's the depth of your wish that really expresses the reality of your spiritual purpose. So that if you make a superficial wish, you have a superficial experience. If you make a very deep wish you have a hundred times greater chance of opening. Is there anyone who has a question about the class? Any question at all? For those of you who are new, I work through the eyes, and you just keep your
eyes on me. I'll try to work with each one of you.
End of class.
.... A year later for the price of a meal or two free tickets to something, you can take them and turn them inside out, Where are the values? What is this, and what is this? It's all illusion. And then they say, "This represents free will." But it doesn't, it represents the breaking down in a completely crazy way any kind of value. We really do this all the time. At one moment nobody, at any price, can get us to do it and a year later we are doing it. What is it? It's ridiculous. If we had surrendered here, we wouldn't be over here, we would be here.
We have this tremendous capacity of being inflexible at times when we should be flexible, and having all kinds of will and being stubborn and all these other things. It really is just the structure within us. Where there is a certain flow than there is tension.
We don't feel this thing. We think it's like a stream going over the rocks! It's picturesque, it cascades, the surrender cascades over the will. So we think it's more beautiful. Well it isn't more beautiful. It just shows that there are spots here and spots there where we really can't let go. That is why it's wonderful to be in a situation where every bone in your body is broken and for me years ago, it was that. I mean everything went. It was tremendous. And I've had this three or four times in my life over a period of a year where everything was ground out and it was great. And then of course there is always the person who is trying to reduce you down to a-puddle of butter and tell you that's your will.
It really is that you find in yourself this capacity to really open and it's nothing in a sense that's real in a physical way. But you're really opening and you let everything flow in you. It's like all of your molecular structure can suddenly flow. You finish your exercise; it goes back. You do a little flushing and you free the tensions between the levels of will and flow. And then the flow can increase and it can really go faster. But there is no problem. Nobody is going to grab you or do this to you or that to you. You really are doing it for yourself.
And finally this has to be the expression of growing. What you're doing is expanding the soil or the water or whatever you wish to call it. It's your water; it's your soil; it's your life.
We always have such a sense of "I'm doing something for you." It's ridiculous. You do it for yourself. You have to become aware, that what you are doing is very real and that, in a sense, it's selfish. The other day I had a call from Big Indian, Aaron came up to Margaretville to ask Paul to get them a place along the road, for nothing, where they can hang a sign. And they were going to do the sign and suddenly the competition loomed up. Danny was going to come and paint signs in the Catskill Mountains. As if that would mean anything. He wouldn't do a fraction of the kind of a sign that Paul does; it's a different kind of thing to save us money. It was suddenly like General Motors being attacked by Danny.
Danny was going in and take Paul out of business." All this paranoia started. "Why'd they bring in an outside painter?" I said, "Because he's not charging us anything and you're charging." "It doesn't matter... So he started going over the whole thing and I said, "Shmuck, what are you talking about?
Do you want to give it, or don't you want to give it?" Well, he couldn't. He was using this incident to regurgitate tons and tons of tension of getting his new business going. That's all. It wasn't real. It was unreal. But he needed something and he wasn't going to fight with Angel I guess, and so he was going to fight with the Ashram. He was going to fight with Denny. He was going to fight with everyone else. And something in him knew he was being a jackass so he called me up and I said, "This is not real."
It represents the tensions of starting up your new business and getting all these things going. All I asked you for was would you give then a tip off where maybe they could make a deal with somebody, and get a very cheap or free place to put up a Sign.
Ridiculous! Yet, it's very, very real and very wonderful that he can call me. Because if it was a year ago he wouldn't call me, and he wouldn't have talked to us for two years, or forever. So you have to look at these things. They don't represent in any way, ever the thing that we see. We don't see the reality. We only see where our resistance reaches its ultimate end. It starts to grab onto any energy because it gets to an end.
You can only move so far. You stick and you're stuck, suddenly, energy coming this way manifests this monster, this Frankenstein, in the form of Danny coming up painting a sign. And Danny didn't even know about it until now. Then Greg came to talk about a vacancy. So I said to him. "All you're saying, in very simple terms, is either you don't want to be friends with us or you do want to be friends with us. You can be friends and say 'No. I don't want to give away a space,' or 'I can't afford to give away a space.' But there is no need for screaming at Frank and Aaron." Frank can't stand the screaming; Aaron can absorb it, I guess, and a lot of other tensions. She's big enough to forget about it. But he wasn't expressing hostility, towards them; he was just expressing the tensions of a situation.
And a lot of things we go through in our world represent the inability to release that tension. We can't get there because we stand by them, we look at it, and it's convenient. We really don't want to break it down right now. And we make excuses; we talk about how beautiful that wall is and how necessary it holds back this. "It's serving a purpose." It's all bullshit! You just have to go in there and take an ax and give it one sock and you put a hole in it. And once you start that it really breaks down. But we really become psychic architects. We build these walls and we go around saying how fabulous they are, "Look at the style, the design and the texture..." We're talking about things that shouldn't exist. But because they do exist, we make a science of fooling ourselves about how wonderful this resistance is ... you start talking about it as if it was something extraordinary.
It's this stupidity of the mind. We start discussing things, which represent shit, instead of looking and saying, "All right, it is shit, it exists." You my not be able to do anything, but don't start giving it credit. Don't start stuccoing it, putting spikes on the top and putting doors in it and windows in it and all these other things in it.
If you find in yourself something that you can't do, you say, "Fine, this is a pile of shit that I don't have the energy to face today." Then you go to sleep early tonight. You try to meditate a little more. You say, "I'm going to get up in the morning and rip the hell out of it." But don't start building fantasies around it. Don't embroider it. Don't do all kinds of other jobs with it.
And if you are a coward, you are a coward. If you're a freak you're a freak. Look at it, accept it, and say, '"This is part of my insanity and I understand it." Don't justify it. "When I'm forty years old I'm going to get rid of it. When I'm sixty years old I'm going to get rid of it. When I'm this and that." You're living with it today. Can you use it constructively in the flow of your growth? Does it add to it or does it take away tremendously? If it takes away then start to break it down. Talk quieter. Act quieter; be a little more reserved. Open more, really enjoy, and take energy out of it. This is the important thing. It doesn't matter what the wall is or what the mountain is, if you even begin to mine it. If you begin to draw energy out of it, you are starting to get life out of it. And if you're getting life out of it you are going to eventually destroy it. But when you are looking at it as this great pillar of magnificence and start worshipping it, then you are really in trouble.
If you have a certain kind of capacity, which does make tensions in one place, then draw out of it something real. If you're a voyeur, you can go outside and watch birds ... I mean, you can really turn it into something which in less tense that gives you more pleasure, that gets you out into nature. It's really a very real way of growing. But most people make monuments out of all the blocks that they have.
I had a kid and he was notorious and wonderful about it. He was a very beautiful boy. He was very healthy, very vigorous. He was teaching Karate or Aikido or something. Unusually, he was a Puerto Rican with blond wavy hair, very nice guy. He walks in and after he was in about six or seven times he said shyly, because he had no one else to asks 'What about this thing of sex and celibacy?" And I said, "You know, Joe, I was waiting for you to ask." Because I could feel it in him. He said for three years he hasn't touched a girl. I said, "How often did you got laid before?" "Well, once in six months..." "Sure," I said, "You're now taking an inadequacy and you are making a monument out of it."
And this is what a lot of people do. He was inadequate. He wasn't qualified; he wasn't everything else, so suddenly this becomes a tribute. And he started to laugh. I said, "It shows on you," because you can see on him the fact that he never had this kind of passion. He never had this kind of depths; he never had this kind of interest. It wasn't a tribute. He was lying behind his inadequacy. This is what a lot of people do. They don't qualify here so anyone who does that is suddenly bad. And it's stupid. You're not functioning because you don't function well or because you can't complete, fine, this in a limitation. You work above it or you accept it with a kind of gentility and quality. But you don't have to use it and beat up other people to death with it. And you will always see that an alcoholic will talk against somebody who uses drugs. A drug addict will talk against someone who is a sexualist. This one will be talking about that ... of course.
If you take drugs you really don't have much of a sex drive, they say. You always take whatever kills one thing in you and make it a virtue. And it's stupid. It's very stupid. There is no honor in death. It doesn't matter how you are dying. One is not more honorable then the other. It's how you're living; the things that bring you to life. The things that, in a sense, give you energy become wonderful. So if you don't function here, don't let it create tensions there, because you have to justify it. This is where a lot of people get caught in somebody else's magic, too.
You appeal to the weakness, which has to appear as a strength. It's a terrible thing. There is a tremendous need for castration in this world. So such a thing as celibacy becomes a great virtue. I have had endless numbers of people who came to study with me and they were married. They were bored with each other, or one was bored with the other. So the one that was more inclined to non-functioning would suddenly use their spiritual life as a reason to not function with their partner. And it's disgusting. It's a way of hiding behind something else. You don't kill something to grow. You expand and you live more, and you can be a little more disciplined with it. But it's not a thing of nonfunctioning; it's to function creatively, expand your energy, and grow.
It's a fantastic thing. There are times where celibacy is a very healthy thing, but you have to do it consciously. Not as a way of retreating from life, but to attain this, you let yourself get stronger here. But it has to be in a very real way. It has to be in a conscious way. And this kid was remarkable, it really was written on him very very clearly. This was his way of retreating from life not a way of finding. He was sublimating this and making himself into something very different. It was a weakness in him.
And then of course he brought me somebody else; he brought me a couple of people. They came in and were into the same kind of a field. And he brought in his exact opposite, another fellow who was teaching in the Bronx who was also Puerto Rican; he was like a black Orpheus Charles Atlas. He was knocking out everyone all over the place. There was no one who was as good a teacher as him. I said, "Well if he can do this, if he can do this and he had the same teacher that you had, where is this right and that wrong?" It isn't, the thing is individual choice. And this is the kind of lying, which is very prevalent with people. They allow something to crystallize them because it is convenient to do so. Nothing should crystallize us. If you don't want to don't. If you this or you do that, it has nothing to with it. It should not stop your flow, your creative flow and your spiritual flow, whether you're functional or nonfunctional shouldn't make any difference.
It really is a question of energy, and we always tend to make a ritual out of these things. You know you can breed a dinosaur for a thousand years and nothing will happen. Or you can breed a fly. Does anyone have a question?
There is much tremendous illusion in Hinduism that everything in Maya. They always talk about Maya. And it is very true. There are enormous illusions on every single level and in every single aspect of a person. So you must be careful that you're not studying something, which feeds your illusions in any way. It should always break them down and make realities. These things should come into your being. And more than anything else we have to be able to open more, take in more energy, and feel a greater flow of force. That will free you. It will free you of everything, and certainly it's the nourishment that we live with that gives us the capacity to do this.