... up your spinal column, to that you look at yourself as you find your breathing in and you'll find a great deal of agitation, a great deal of movement of any kind. You have to find out how to look in a simple way and unwind. If you find there's a great deal in your head, then open your heart. If there's a great deal in your heart and you find you're moving a lot; your head is trying to say go to the next chakra and open. It's like having a two-inch (pipe) from the brain to the throat to the heart. Then you find this constriction there that puts your attention on the next lower chakra and consciously open it so that this two inch pipe doesn't go into a one-inch pipe and blow out a great deal of energy.
We are nothing more than a mechanical system that we either consciously take in the energy from the atmosphere and from our own evolvement and we use it consciously to grow by refining it endlessly. It really goes from this mechanism going down the front and up the back to the top and then it comes from the top of the head down the brain and then it comes down as a refined energy.
You're distilling and refining energy continually. That it becomes dramatic, that other things happening externally, this is obvious.
As any energy changes, so will the manifestations change. But to get continually caught up in the outside effect or drama of your life is only because you have not remembered the simplicity of what you're doing and what your purpose is. Your purpose is only to open, breathe in and harness this energy consciously.
If there's a rainstorm that carries the rain into a river and the river carries it into the lake. It doesn't matter whether there's a cow standing in the lake or a cow standing in the stream or somebody sitting on a mountain screaming. It doesn't affect the channeling of water.We continually are getting involved with everything outside us and forget that it is simply a channel that we are working with. We're taking something from outside, combining it with something inside and using our breathing to channel this energy. Nothing could be simpler. That we continually get involved with this emotion or that emotion or this tension or that tension is only the complete manifestation of our endless stupidity; where we keep putting value on effect and value on manifestation instead of remembering the simplicity of what we are working for.
And so anything that happens outside, you have to stop and look at the situation and sit back and say "How can that catch me, how can that be important?" It is nothing more than a manifestation of energy in you trying to be magnetized outside instead of (being) brought back inside. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. And it is only because we make it matter and matter is only materialization of energy.
What is matter? It matters, this is matter, and it is the same stupid thing. We identify because we can't channel very simply this force. We can't stay inside, so we cry; we scream; we see things that are dramatic; we have things in our life that take place which aren't happy and we let our energy go outside so that we take a tragedy and we rape it because we don't have the capacity to internally contain ourselves with our discipline and with our consciousness.
So if somebody dies and we scream and carry on and this poor soul is trying to go to another plane of existence, is starved and raped because of our lack of discipline and our lack of control.
Anybody who leaves the earth should leave with love that you gratefully open up and give them from within yourself consciously the sweetness and love and the honor and respect that they have earned in this life.
We don't treat our dead correctly, and we certainly in no way treat the living correctly. You should always give from inside the best that you have for someone because they're gathering the seed of their next life. And we never let anyone leave this earth with consciousness, with contentment, with happiness or with joy. And that's basically the reason that people come back and have such a hard time.
Any time somebody leaves you should pack up in their leaving all that you have that is good inside, good wishes, good feelings, good thoughts, love and sweetness so that as they leave their soul is gathering together this richness. But we starve them because we express a lack within ourselves of consciousness, a lack of discipline, a lack of dignity and a lack of any kind of consciousness.
All we do is go from one type of existence to another, one manifestation of existence to another and we certainly, when we make a transition, a voyage from this physical life to the next one we eat a good take-out package. And the only good takeout package that we need spiritually is really the love and the good wishes that people can give us. Very rarely does anyone have within them the ability to love someone. They use it always as a way of expressing their own tensions, their own lack of humanity. It becomes a barbaric and thoroughly disgusting situation, that we don't know how to treat the dead and we in no way express a way of treating the living. We can only give inside this sweetness and gratitude.
Somebody is leaving; somebody else has a chance to come back in a better way to do a better job of their life. And we have no right to rob them of their natural inheritance, and this is exactly what we do. So in the Bible when it says, "The sins of the father are vested on the child." It's true, and the way we unconsciously get back is that we starve the people who bear us when they leave by not giving them from within ourselves the depth and the sweetness and the nourishment they require. It's a continual vendetta on the dead to the living and the living to the dead.
This whole thing of ancestor worship that existed until the last hundred years was a way of bringing back cycles of life which had a better capacity to deal with this living energy that you need to live on the earth. people always worshipped and loved their departed people. They visited them in cemeteries. They put flowers. They put fruit. They put all kinds of sweet things and continually poured into the spirit of the human being who had departed a richness to this life, which helped ease and bring back somebody in their recycling of consciousness. But we've lost that as a folk-practice as we certainly previously lost it as a consciousness. We have to understand that we have to perpetuate this nourishment in a physical way and certainly in a spiritual way. And the whole reason for keeping a candle and burning incense in front of some of these saints is a way of feeding them. It's a way of fulfilling our responsibility to someone who has given us life. And we have to within ourselves, perpetuate our own parents and anyone we come from. We have to really in every way accept our root system, our religion, our background, all that has fed us, all that allows us to come into being.
And this attacking of oneself through ones parents, ones religion or ones culture is the most depressing and deprecating way to live. Because we are destroying the roots and we're certainly destroying the creative continuity of our own existence.
We are what we are because this is how God wanted us to be and we have to feed what we come from in every way regardless of our background, regardless of our religion or race. It is right because it was given us to honor and cherish and nourish, and not doing that certainly destroys our spiritual capacity at this moment. And studying anything with anybody should never take you away from what you were, because what you were is part of what will make you be a better human being and a better person.
You have to listen to your own body, you have to feel your own body, and keep-- this is a very simple consciousness that you are trying to increase the flow of spiritual and conscious energy through your body and let it rise and come through as a part of your harmony and gratitude. You show your respect for creation by honoring the energy that exists within you, and drawing from the atmosphere the additional energy, to allow within your own being every muscle and every organ to become right and full so that it really exudes the sweetness that has to do with creation and maturity
Growing is only manifested by maturing and ripening. Ripening of anything in nature is something turning to a sweetness. This kind of sweetness spiritually allows for the separation and detachment. We don't see that because in the cycles of growth this maturity doesn't take place. This is one thing that you have to become aware of within yourself, that you don't waste your energy, that you don't create unnecessary tensions. You don't fight, and you try to breathe through with your conscious energy, the tensions, and absorb them. You continually eat away and use all of the tensions in life as nourishment. This is exactly what they were made for. They weren't made as the expression to waste creative energy. Tension is not anything more than energy under pressure and it is very strong spiritual food and you have to use that food constantly. You
draw in, you absorb, you digest, and you rise above, but you really remove these tensions and levels that separate you from your own growth. Tomorrow we're having a party at the house and it'll start at 8 o'clock and go on until about 11, and all of you are invited, it's my birthday and you're in no way required to bring a present, it's nothing like that, it's just a way of sharing my ability to be alive tomorrow, which is something I'm very grateful for. It's the last one I'll celebrate I think for a long, long time, but it really marks the end of a very difficult period in my life. I'm very grateful for that and this is the reason we're having this sort of an open house. It marks the end of a certain point of tension. I will try from this point until my 56th birthday which is many years from now to try to store in me consciously the energy that will be mine, because these tensions won't be in existence for the next 11 years. I really wish to store them so that I have in me, consciously, built up a tremendous reservoir to take me to the next stage. And I'm very aware of that and this is the thing that you must become aware of in your life, that just as the rings of a tree show the lean years and the fat years of growth of a tree, we all have cycles in ourselves and we should try to relate to ourselves in a conscious way so that we know as we need more energy, we know when we have to live a certain way, and when we have a certain pattern of consciousness that is at our disposal. I am fortunate in knowing that I have eleven years of grace, which is again a very easy way to be seduced. When you have eleven easy years, it's easy to fall asleep and to assume that you can pick up again ten and a half years later. I will consciously try every day of my life to store up within my body the sweetness that will be mine to use it to live from when I go through the next state, because between these cycles, one grows and then we have to be completely destroyed again. When I'm fifty-six I will burn up and everything in me will really turn to dust. I'll be aesthetic and skinny after that, I guarantee you. But as all things such as that, it takes tremendous energy to bear (the) shock, and this sweetness, which I feel growing in me, is the perfect answer to the shock. Because sugar is a wonderful way of fighting this kind of shock and tension. If you don't have the consciousness to save inside yourself in gratitude, and the only way to save it really is in layers of gratitude. You really store in your being and contain yourself more, the potential of growth, because when we destroy ourselves or we're destroyed to free ourselves from whatever growth we've attained; we have to consciously have the raw material, that which we have saved in our life to go on to the next stage. And this endless growth certainly goes on from day to day, but there are certain periods of enormous change, and to grow and attain some sense of achievement or you can call it a minor enlightenment, one can only break down completely, completely break down the crystallization and burn out so that you free your energy to be recycled to go to a higher level. And so all of your growth must be down on an everyday basis too, that you are growing consciously and as you grow consciously you are detaching every second of your day, and you must realize that, otherwise you are lying to yourself, you're keeping your growth down to a certain minimal point so that you don't have to detach as you grow. And it doesn't mean that you lose the people that you love. You might lose them and you might not, but you are allowing them to grow with you. If something doesn't grow with you then it must fall from you as you evolve. And it is much better to have it as a consciousness so that at least you are on a higher level and you can attract something on a higher level then to have to lose these things in the dark. Losing things in the dark certainly is not credible. It's only losing things through conscious effort that allow you to understand and allow yourself to grow as a disciple. Does anyone have a question? QUESTION: Rudi, what's in a yawn? RUDI You mean what is yawning? Well, it's the opening to take in more oxygen. It means that your system is coming to life and it's reaching so that it's taking in more and more oxygen and it's coming to life. It's waking up inside. It's like sleeping beauty inside you is yawning. QUESTION: If I feel the urge in class to yawn is that okay? RUDI: Of course, I used to sit in class and yawn like a water buffalo. I used to bellow. I mean it was just a deep opening inside to take in more oxygen, feeding something in you, which is coming from love. It's very, very real. QUESTION: (inaudible) RUDI: You know a perfect guru? What are you talking like a horse's ass for? Do you know anybody? The only perfect guru I know is God, and if you really attach yourself to God, then you continually grow. I mean I am not trying to replace God for you or anyone else. You only take from me because you don't have the capacity to function. Spirituality is after you have detached from any teacher, that's your ability to detach here and go there, then you can become, if you grow that much, a friend. I don't have to have disciples, I need people who can consciously be independent and we can reinforce each other's consciousness and share each other's creativity. A perfect guru, self-acclaimed, is an endless limitation for himself and everyone else, and also a perfect bore, because energy is ever-changing in the atmosphere and if you were totally enlightened this second, five minutes from now you'd be an acting neurotic pain in the ass for everyone, and only the potential to crystallize everyone by your own limitations. perfection should come in the two minutes before your death, as you burn alive on your way up to meet God. How can perfection exist on the earth in a physical body? This piece of shit that we walk around in only expresses manifestation, it only represents that which you can't surrender, and so that our preparation is to leave it when we're ready to depart from this earth, not to be wrenched out of it like somebody squeezing a tube of toothpaste, but to really surrender it just like a snake sheds its skin. We leave it at will, and anyone who ever claims perfection or enlightenment is only telling you about their limitation. There are people who are more conscious than others but there is no enlightenment on the earth because this place is too heavy for that kind of a thing. You can be a little more light and a little more light and a little more light, but the minute you claim enlightenment a shell comes over you, which represents your limitation. And it is only that kind of situation; this is exactly what makes the endless stupidity that walks around calling itself spiritual or enlightened. You refine your energy. Your energy can refine and refine and refine and refine and when it refines to a point that you can't stay within the body then you burn alive and the body falls away from the spirit. So if you see somebody in a physical body, they certainly are not in any way spiritually enlightened. You can teach and separate the body from the soul while you're teaching and that's anyone's potential, this consciousness. But if you don't understand your questions then you certainly have no right for that. You have to really understand energy (to) grow in yourself, that perfection is only the complete separation of the physical and every other aspect that we know of. But when you have a moment when you feel this spirit leave you and you feel nothing sitting in your seat than you're out of your body and that represents spiritual enlightenment. The minute you come back in your body that represents the endless limitation because your body can always close around your spirit. If you identify, then this encloses. If you open-- it's a breathing thing, you can open and you're free; you're spiritually there and you become tight and it closes. It's really the nature like a heart. It opens and it closes and it opens and it closes. To be aware of that allows you to leave when you want to leave. And I really don't care to leave right now QUESTION: What's the relationship between openness this way and this way in terms of your energy? RUDI: Openness this way is to be open to life. Openness this way is to be open to higher levels of spirituality, because you can go from one level to another and as we grow stronger this way, your base is stronger. You can take from the cosmos different energies, and energies are structured in the atmosphere, like the first floor, second floor, third floor, you go to different places in the atmosphere consciously and bring back different energies, different conscious ability to use your own energy. QUESTION: So do you have to be open to people and thought and RUDI: Sure, because otherwise anything can close you. If you don't have an ability to open and take in nourishment this way, then you're working and a car backfires in the middle of your meditation what happens? You go clink, right. You react because your muscles are so tight you don't have muscular control, you don't have the conscious ability to control yourself. QUESTION: I should see my relationships with people then as a miniature of the energy (inaudible) RUDI: Because you still have a lot of tensions within you David, you understand that. And slowly but surely you eat more and as you take more and more energy in you have to dissolve. It's your barometer of knowing what relationships you can afford, what relationships you can't afford. QUESTION: You mean afford if you want growth. RUDI: Yes. I mean, when you look at somebody and you say fine, I've taken care of this and I've taken care of that and I can really work on this. It's a consciousness. You can't work on this very deeply and work on that very deeply and this very deeply on a day. You can say fine I'll do this and I'll be a little quiet here. So you really consciously use your energy for your own purpose, not to be compelled or driven to do things but to work consciously, so that you can work with this person and this person and get a result, that you can draw in and refine that. If you can't control the energy then the raw material in your relationships this way, by refining it, by internalizing it and breaking it down and feeling the life flowing in you, then you're going to get congested. What happens is you're taking in and taking in and not being able to refine it. The mechanism stops, and that's why we have to work deeper all the time so that we can burn it up, completely eat up inside ourselves all of our outer experiences, understand? QUESTION: How do you deal with someone's cleverness and feel that your technique is constantly turning yourself against their morals RUDI: You walk away. QUESTION: Is it a technique to hurdle yourself against the situation? RUDI: It's stupid, particularly when you have never been successful at it. What does this mean? It's repeating a pattern endlessly because you have an ego. One of the things that continually mystifies people and they don't understand is that a lack of competency on a horizontal level of life allows you to repeat a pattern endlessly. Why do you repeat a pattern endlessly? Because there's more ego than there is consciousness. Consciousness is a vertical level, a rising level of energy, so it's better to take a quarter of a pound of meat in a one-pound grinder and you reach fifty times a day for a quarter of a pound of meat and what happens is that you get twelve and a half pounds of grinding done but (if) you take twenty pounds and you try to push it into a five-pound grinder, what do you have? You have something that stops in about three seconds and this mechanism doesn't work, and you're pushing and pushing and pushing so it means you have to work slower and slower and this mechanism really can grow because you work based on your capacity, not pressing, not pushing yourself against the wall, but you work a little bit at a time. I had a man who came today who wanted to start to study and I wouldn't take him, and he's been three times. I mean I could not put him inside the mechanism that I have without affecting every one of you. It would be very, very difficult and there's no reason for me to take somebody who will cost every one of you a great deal of energy. He would be excessive in what he took and certainly nominal in what he gave back. And there's no reason for me to do it. So you have to work your relationships as consciousness. If you put a lot of energy on that and it sucks your business life and your spiritual life and your personal life, then what are you doing? You're being a fool. And when you're foolish this way then you blame it on the person instead of taking on the responsibility in yourself. QUESTION: (inaudible) RUDI: Yes, you blame them for your stupidity. You make a victim of yourself and then you blame somebody for using you badly. It's ridiculous. If you want a big situation there's a wonderful mathematical proportion. If you want a big situation and you don't really qualify, then you sit quietly, and you reach and little bit and you become invisible, and you take a little bit at a time, you can take and take and take until you can afford to be visible one day. So you don't go against the situation without understanding your capacity. QUESTION: But if you go with it, then you can flow. RUDI: Sure, then you can flow. It's only the psychotic who makes the most noise in any situation. But a psychotic who can learn to control his mouth can sit in a rich situation and grow strong. So we have the same problem. You go somewhere and the situation is more than you can abide. You go to a fine dinner party and there's twelve or twenty pieces of silverware and you've never eaten with more than a pair of chopsticks or
with a knife and a fork. You sit quietly, and you talk to someone very nicely, and you watch what they pick up, and you learn how to eat at a dinner table that way. But if you're so busy and you start picking up the first thing wrong and then the whole dinner is out of kilter. You're always one piece of silverware behind everyone else, and you completely lose the capacity to deal with it. So learn to sit quietly, learn to detach and wait, and this is one of the greatest lessons of spiritual work, wait for the count to go one, two, then you go one, and you are one behind, consciously, you can pick up and learn the whole system always. But when you try to fake it, you get so nervous that you can't possibly qualify ever. So holding back and little bit and being a little more detached always allows you to come in harmoniously with the situation, just a little behind, not enough to bother anyone else, but certainly enough to qualify. This is true in life in every way, that you listen and that you work, and not try to get ahead by pushing your ignorance, but by surrendering and really getting the security by being just a little bit behind and learning how to function. It's really having manners, knowing that you don't qualify is one of the greatest securities in the whole world, because you can wait a little bit; you're forced to wait a little bit, and holding back you can see. You are in a detached position, and spiritually, it's better to be more open and take more energy and hear one-fifth of what goes on in the conversation but taking the energy of the conversation you can grow stronger. QUESTION: Do you have to know whether you're just waiting or just avoiding RUDI: If you're also drawing the energy deeply within yourself you will qualify. QUESTION: But how do you know it? RUDI: You know it because you're working consciously to draw in, you're not passively sitting, and you're actively sitting in a passive way. You're active inside drawing in, not in your head, not in your emotions, but in your consciousness, of your mechanism, you're drawing in energy, you're drawing in energy, you're drawing in energy and this thing is growing strong. QUESTION: What do you wait for? RUDI: You wait for the motion like it's a pattern of ritual. You don't have to be nervously trying to-- I mean I go into all kinds of temples and you must be doubly polite-- you say, no, no, you must go ahead of me, you're more involved than I am, nobody can ever resist that. And so you follow this person who you make go ahead of you and they do this and then you do that. So they're bowing down and as they're bowing down, you're here, they rise up and then you rise up. They move this way, you move this way. So it's almost a harmony, you're using their energy to direct you. But if you're there trying to force an issue in your insecurity, then they will miss that you are here and then this thing gets-it becomes crazy. It's always better to let someone lead you a little bit when you're insecure. Trying to press with your will only makes a very agitated and a very unharmonious relationship. There is no such thing as ignorance; there is only the inability to yield because of your insecurity.
And the most important thing you see about our work, or actually, any work is that you come prepared inside; your inner condition is what you are responsible for. There is no reason to ever ... here, that you haven't done your breathing, you haven't tuned your mechanism up. I mean no violinist would ever appear on a stage without practicing, without tuning his instrument. Your instrument has to do with the amount of breathing and opening and the consciousness of the flow of energy within you. That you sit here like someone racing to place a bet before a horse race, that's ridiculous, it's not what a spiritual place is about. It's to come prepared to function on the highest possible level that you're capable of. And so you ask a question, you don't ask it from here, but since you are in a state of surrender, the question goes down through your mechanism and it comes out. It is refined. It is a refined question. It is a question, which is taken in after a conscious effort. You don't talk raw. You don't emote raw. You don't anything raw. You always make an effort. You surrender it at least once and then you speak, and it comes from a deeper place in you.<\p>
So many of you, even when you sit in the class I can feel the whole thrust of energy out of the top of your head, instead of deeply inside you as a cycling and refined energy. It's a conscious effort that you have to be making. You have to feel flow of your life force come dawn and around and down and around endlessly refining itself so that you are gathering from the top of your head the energy that you save by not expressing it outside END OF TALK