It's really essential for all of us -- when we start to work spiritually we work three weeks, five weeks, a month, and we really forget completely the purpose for which we began our spiritual lives. We forget that our dedication is supposed to be a permanent one.
People who work a year or two start thinking of themselves as being teachers or being experts. That really has to do with the greatest of all stupidities because we really stop having a creative spiritual life, and start talking about things, which we're not doing. To really have within oneself the objective of wanting to grow spiritually, and to really have the capacity to keep to the very simple fact of why we're working and what we're doing.
Because anyone, you see it in marriages, and we see it in friendships where somebody calls you and everything is more important than this relationship, or we really have the chance to go to the movie or the theater and we really try to fill in and rush our spiritual life. This is not a thing that you can do by neglecting it and tearing it apart or making it a secondary part of your life, but it really is a thing that you can keep in a quality way, in a very deep way, as your prime reason for living. Then it frees everything else, because you don't lay the tensions on lesser situations and on people who you love. Because if you can't open to this higher thing then you are most likely not open to all of these other things. We're choking and destroying people by denying really what your ultimate potential should be.
The thing of growing, whether you teach one day or you don't teach one day in no way exonerates you from the very basic fact of your responsibility, your attitude and your direction. To not be inside in a condition which represents open and flowing, and in a situation that allows you to transcend the ordinary, in no way justifies your living. It has nothing to do with reality. You really get caught up in the tensions of the day. You get caught up in the emotions of the day. You completely forget that a spiritual life is a higher and finer thing.
We have to continually make those judgments in ourselves; we're to continually work.
It's a simple thing too of just taking a breath and really feeling the energy go down and rising above anything which has caught us. It's the simplest thing in the world. It doesn't require even intelligence. But to see people who have intelligence, who have capacity, lose their direction every single day is nothing short of appalling. And this goes on and on and on.
When you tell a human being, and you speak to them, and they make a dedication, and they can't even brush their teeth in the morning, and remember that they can take a breath while they're brushing their teeth. They can wash their mouth, and really wash it a little deeper because they're really getting rid of poisons. They can take a shower. They can move their bowels. All of these things, when you have just a thought that it isn't just your physical function but you're trying to cleanse yourself so that you become a vessel through which a higher force can flow. It allows you to consciously, and only consciously can you get rid of these deep forces, which really hold to your body, which hold to your mind, and stop you in every other way from functioning.
It's getting caught up in the emotion; getting caught up in the ideas and all of these thoughts which we think are so brilliant, and meanwhile we haven't really flushed the toilet in our psyche, in our heart, and in our soul. We live with this filth day by day. We live with this glut day by day. We become ground by it and become lowered by it, and become stinking in it; and become oppressive to the people who we love, because we can't make a very simple conscious effort. There is nothing in the world that justifies that. I mean there are times when you can go through a crisis; but you certainly have to go through the crisis working and in a state of surrender. Then if you're tortured and these things are going on which you can't got rid of, fine, it's understandable, at least you're not here, but you're on a higher level. As you burn, and as you're warmed through and as you wash through, then at least these lesser things can fall away from you. But sitting in a bathtub of your own shit and urine and splashing around, and talking and complaining, this has nothing to do with the abysmal stupidity to forget that you have a consciousness that can raise you above that.
Life is exactly this thing; it's all of these by products of our growth, all of the filth, all of the garbage, everything that is emitted from us. We live in this kind of atmosphere continually looking for a little aura around us, saying, "Oh, I can see your aura," that's a lot of crap. Everything has an aura; even sewer gas has an aura. Because anything that has energy, anything that in giving off energy has to have an aura. This little light around it, which means that something living is taking place in it.
Everything that lives, everything which is breaking down, whether it's a compost heap or a human being, gives off energy and has auras, It's really ridiculous to degrade us as people by thinking this constitutes a living and functioning human being. The ability to consciously raise yourself from the gutter that you're in and really get above it, regardless of what state you're in. You are taking it consciously so that the energy, the transformation that's taking place, even if it's a burning, you are assimilating that growth. You are assimilating that change consciously so that it doesn't lie in one area of you. It doesn't become a restriction, it doesn't become a limitation. It becomes something, which is positive because your entire system is drinking in the energy change. Your entire system, then, can consciously surrender the negative psychic tensions. And if you work any day and you have an incredible experience, or if you go through a tremendous shock and you don't do this negative psychic tension exercise, then you're a horse's ass. Because, you work from one level to another, you rip it apart, you tear it apart, you suffer with it, you go through all this agony, and all of this gets torn loose. It's like millions of molecules and you don't do anything, and then you pay the price for days. Later this thing becomes solid again. It becomes exactly what it was.
There is no such thing as growth without breaking down in the growth the by-product. It should be growth, which has been digested and allows the breaking down of energy and chemistry so you can wash out of yourself. As after, you eat food you wash out the poisons. You psychically wash out through any creative process the unassimilated energy, so that you grow back in a different way.
You are a changing human being. Without ridding yourself of some of your chemistry consciously every day, you will never change. Your mind will be fanciful, you will have illusions, but you will not be a human being undergoing a creative and spiritual change. This is essential. It's absolutely essential, that you understand that your spiritual work is nothing unless your chemistry is consciously breaking down and emitting part of its changing quality and its structure.
Is there anyone who doesn't understand? If you sit here being ignorant, it's fine, but if you don't raise your hand and stay stupid then you really don't deserve anything in this life. You have to really within yourself.... Yes'?
Question: If your life is going through a lot of changes very rapidly, and it creates a lot of tensions, how can you deal with that tension?
Firstly, tension is very strong energy, yes? It's very strong energy, so if you breathe deeply and you draw the tension inside, it's just like chewing food, you have the sucking of the life energy out of the tension. What you can't suck out you drop out a couple of times a day. So you're eating food, right? Digesting inside what you can of this food and then you're getting rid of the by-product. It's the only way you can grow consciously, is by eating in the tensions of your day and then allowing what you can't eat to wash out so that your life becomes compact and it becomes strong and you really are structuring inside.
As you grow creatively, if you consciously assimilate the energy in the flow of your life force and you're washing out the negative psychic tensions and congestions, then you're creating inside yourself a mechanism. You really are. You're taking yourself from a little wigwam structure and you're really making a building inside. You're making a compressor. You're making an extractor. You start building all kinds of machinery inside you. You build wiring inside. You build a little sewer inside. All of these things are building in you and so this structure is going on.
Once you finish the structure, then the structure demands another chemistry. So your processes of growth, and the growth bring in new energy. The new energy destroys the old structure and you get a new mechanism again. So when you go through these various stages, the horizontal that in structure, the vertical is the new energy, the new energy destroys the old structure, and creates another horizontal which is the new mechanism. That mechanism gathers the new energy and the new energy goes up again in the horizontal. It becomes a death and rebirth. This is what our life is about, not to work and be so grateful. We have to be grateful for each and every day, but very grateful that we can live and die and be reborn over and over and over again.
Karma is only a spiritual moron's limitation. They're trying to justify their existence by having somebody predict what you could do and what you couldn't do. The American Indians took crude oil and rubbed it over their faces. We use it to heat a house. We use it for many other things. It has to do with the capacity of the mechanism to refine any product and turn out something, which is more capable. So what you're going through is a generating, which is opening you up, opening up your raw materials. If you don't use raw materials, what happens? You become impoverished. If you use them, then you can open more and more and more. It's really how you face a situation.
Coming back from Atlanta, I was sitting on the plane next to a very little old lady who had one hand bandaged and covered up in a knit glove. There was nobody there between us so we started to talk. She said, Oh she really dreaded coming back East because she'd lived in the South and the last time she came back she had come out of a 63-day coma. This is how life is for some people. She was out of the coma; she turned completely black because her whole system was dying. It wasn't functioning. It receded only until her fingers, and she was fine except every couple of days her finger fell off because it was rotted. It just fell off and they had to cut the bone and this kind of thing. She asked me-if I minded if she showed me her hand. I really was amazed to see the courage in this woman. She said the last time she made this trip she came up to bury her father who lived in Big Indian. While she was burying him, this was a week after her sixty-three day coma, while she was there, her husband died in Georgia and she had to come back and bury him. This was a few weeks ago, and now she's back to go to see her eighty-three year old mother, who's not going to be around terribly much longer. You feel for a person like this. You look that they can talk, they can face life, that they can even share such a thing and be open to it, has to make you deeply ashamed of your own life and your incapacity to face the issues which you have.
This woman is without a husband, she has one parent, the other one ready to go, and she has to go back and help set up and clean out all of these things. I looked at her and it was really amazing to me the openness with which she treated it. She said, "I'm really a little tired." And she said, "Could you order me a V.0. and water," and I love it. We talked a little more and I said, "I know it sounds stupid, but I really feel that you're going to have a very good life at the end of this year. And she said, "Well, it's strange to say it, but I just had my astrology chart done, and it said starting in December my life would pick up." Well, It couldn't very well go Down. I mean, where do you go from there? But that a person in this condition can have a positive attitude... I mean there is no justification for any of us to not look at life, and not feel, and reach above ourselves, and open up ourselves, and be really deeply grateful for what we have. She had this one sort of withered hand, the other one her fingers were already gone from there down, and I said, "Can I carry your bag?" And she said, "Well, you have a bag." And I thought, "This is ridiculous." I mean you ask a twenty-year-old blond if you can carry her bag, and if you had fifteen bags between your teeth, they'd let you carry it. This to the whole difference of someone who has suffered, someone who understands life and someone has given in themselves. She obviously was going to miss her connection because we were two hours late going and two hours late coming. She was quiet; she had quality to not make life difficult for anyone around her. She wasn't demanding special attention, but they had a wheelchair waiting for her. They had to push her from United in La Guardia, no stuff, and no noise, no anything else.
We have to begin to see and understand that life is very difficult for every single human being. It's rare to find someone who walks through without problems. When we can stop identifying with ourselves and really deeply understand that there are people who need help, people you can open to, and people you can look to with respect. That you can honor them, because of the way they live and the attitude that they have. These are people who aren't coming to a class and aren't exposed to a place where they can get help. This woman has nobody to give her what you can get here. That you don't open inside yourself, that you don't have in you the ability to ask deeply and open and want to grow and ask this over and over again.
Larry, what are you doing with your stupid head, you're really straining for no reason. It's a simple thing of taking a breath, the tension is here, and the opening is here. All of this stuff you do in your head, so many of you, does nothing but give you a headache; it doesn't help you. You're drawing energy from the mind into the heart to open. It's a simple thing. Relax your shoulders, it doesn't require tension, it requires absorbing energy and eating away tension.
There should be a simple joy to be alive, a simple gratitude to be alive. This place we have in Georgia is a defunct Civil War Plantation. The rooms are half the size of this classroom. There's about twenty of them. Our kids, who are really wonderful, lived there on a 250-dollar a month thing. The property is half a million bucks away for the town of Athens to move out and make it into a subdivision. In a six-window room they have six and a half different kinds of drapes hanging there. It was amazing, you know, to see the simplicity with which they lived. They didn't have money. They were talking about having to lay in provisions for me because I was coming as a guest. I had a little salad waiting for me, a little tiny bowl of salad. They had soybeans and all this kind of stuff, because they really didn't have money. But there was no poverty of soul, there was no poverty of attitude, and there certainly was no poverty of spirit.
There was no heat, and it was a cold as it was in New York. It was wonderful because they gave everything that they had, with love and sweetness, and I was very happy. I must say, I took my shower and I thought if it were that cold here I would feel it, but there was nothing to feel because all that existed was all the goodness of these twenty people who I really found so easy to love and find an openness with. It doesn't matter if there was a little dirt in the corner and there was a little this or a little that because the real richness was inside. You don't correct somebody by bitching them to pieces and nagging them to pieces, 'Out by loving then they will grow and collect and they will take care of these things in time. Their whole big worry, this house had more stuff laying around than you can believe, and they kept saying. "We wanted to have the kitchen floor done; the landlord promised that we would have new linoleum on the floor." It needed six million other things, believe me, and this was their whole thing. We kept talking about this linoleum floor in the kitchen. It was wonderful. They were oblivious of the other six million things, and it certainly wasn't necessary for me to discuss it.
I received and I took, and I was very, very grateful. You all have to live this way in yourself, to take what is available with gratitude and not to continually attack everything neurotically because you haven't the capacity to be happy. That you find with the people you are with the atmosphere that you are, a tremendous sense of gratitude, and feel the joy that is available. Feel in you the love that is available, and that will give you the enlightenment for today. Then as your energy rises, it will spread and the other things will take place. If we don't begin to see in our life at any moment the things, which are wonderful, nothing will ever happen. It is the collectiveness of the energy, and the love, and the things that are positive about that make for spirituality. But the need to attack, the need to really exercise our will on people, this has nothing to do with spirituality. It has to do with the inability to function as a very basic human being, to really keep the tensions inside yourself, to really use that energy, and rise above it, not to malign the atmosphere not to attack anyone else.
I really never want any of you to come. I don't care how bad your problem is. You have to come with a little dignity. You have to come having worked, and drawn inside yourself, and risen a little bit above the situation. If this lady on the airplane, with no spiritual life, could really gather herself together and travel by herself, then there's no excuse for any of us. Life hasn't been nearly that bad for any of you. You have to within yourself understand that dignity, the simple dignity that every human being should be responsible for in his life, has to do with good manners and consideration. So you have to exercise this in your attitude with other people.
I'm endlessly tired of people hugging me tight and putting one thing here the other thing here, squeezing me halfway to death every time they hug me. They're anxiously hugging me and choking my breath off. This happens about fifty times a week. I never stop being amazed at this kind of an attitude. We do this so many times with such gusto and such love that we cram somebody and destroy somebody instead consciously opening to them and honoring them by a little detachment and a little more consideration before we make this fatal lunge It really has to do with a little sensitivity.
I know when I was younger, too, I would reach for a child and the child would go into a trauma for four weeks because I went like that. It is really the ability to understand that even milking a cow you get kicked right between the legs if you go for it in the wrong place. We all have this kind of sensitivity. We all have this kind of protectiveness. One has to love another person as they wish to be loved and as they are capable of being loved. It's a simple thing and it has to do with the dignity of life.
This thing of detachment is the ability to really consciously draw into ourselves for a split second, and rise above a situation and look at it. If I had a splint in my neck, I'm sure it wouldn't make a difference for most of these people; they instinctively do what they want to do. You have to really feel and see and understand. It's important because the same way this creative energy comes and these opportunities come and spiritually, and they can only be taken as they are, not the way you want them to be, not as you think they should be.
I'm working very hard, I have eleven years to go and I really burn up alive after that, and this is what I'm working for. I'm very grateful that I understand that. I have no hesitancy in doing it. But you have no right to interrupt the thing that I'm structuring in myself. I really will break the crystallization in my life that way; it's the only way that it is possible. I'm aware that for years I've been working on that. It certainly needs to have a little bit of respect, because when I free myself that way I'll be freeing all of you in a very very deep way. I'm really in my heart and soul grateful, more than you can ever believe, for this to happen. It's better than the Weight Watchers; it'll take care of me for a long time after that.
I'm conscious of my purpose, you have to be conscious of your relationship and of your purpose too. There is nothing in me for every one of you that is not for your good and for your growth. I'm deeply involved and conscious of your need and if I wasn't I wouldn't have you here, because I want nobody who's detrimental to me, and I certainly don't want to make any restriction for another human being. I'm trying to destroy all karma from myself.
You have to inside yourself have the dignity, which really goes with consciousness and simplicity because our life basically is very simple. When we really open, when we're told by God, not by me, what your life is about, it's there, written, very clearly because that's all we're here for. So, really try to understand inside that the ability to function in a simple way is to internalize your energy. Then wash out every day for sometimes a minute or ten minutes depending on how strong your day has been. A very intense day, a very violent day, you may have to sit for an hour with your hands and feet down trying to get rid of the negative psychic tension. Does anyone have a question?
(Question inaudible)
Answer: Yes, it's very important. I mean my whole life has always been this thing of feeling so much. There's a time when you feed somebody. You love somebody, and you have a background, which gives you such a need for love, and you meet somebody who has such a need for love and yours is like this. You try to push forty pounds of your love in something, which has the capacity to receive two pounds. You're going to choke them to death. It's like a mother compulsively feeding its child. The child is spitting out the food. It's gagging while its mother keeps shoveling the food in.
We have to really look and see. You can see when someone moves away from you, when someone tries to pull back a little bit, and we can't, our need is more than that situation allows, which is only one aspect of it. That's strictly on the physical/emotional level. On a psychic level there are times that people can rate from one to a million. You have a capacity that may be excessive to somebody else, or they may have a capacity, which is excessive to you. So you have first the physical, and then you have the spiritual and psychic. These things really, they really compound. They are very difficult, so you have to really tune in on the person, really make a bridge and feel in them and feel with them, not what you project as an illusion, but what they have as a reality. And see. Have you ever really opened, or do you just meet somebody and just love them. It is a wanton love where they are everything and you either have this whole thing going. But you've never really tuned in and know what frequency they're running on and understand the frequency that we have. Being very different, then we never really connect with them. It really is a very essential thing.
I think the biggest thing that destroys relationships is the cycles that are so different between people. Some people are on a one-day cycle, some are on a ten-week eyelet, and some people have a fifteen-minute capacity. And, we really want people to perform, as we need, not as they can. You could almost cut somebody to pieces before they'll sit down and very simply say, "I like this and this and this and this, and I can't stand this and this and this." And we assume it, you know? So we write on their funny bone and they convulse inside going through traumas, and we want them to open emotionally. How can they do that? We have to really speak very straightforward and say. "Look, I feel this, what do you feel. I want this, what do you want?" And we never do it. We go through life like a blind person feeling his way over the edge of the mountain. It's dangerous. It will never give us the thing that we need. I had a friend of mine in from India today and he, for the twelve years that I studied with this last teacher that I had, was the person that I shoveled all the information that I wanted carried back, so nobody was ever able to say that I was anything else but what I presented. I really made it very difficult. I've always made it very difficult for anybody that I dealt with because everything I had was on the firing line. But it's easier, and it certainly is clearer than to hide inside and assume somebody knows.
We all go through life assuming. It's simple, you know, we don't take the path of simplicity where we talk and we explain and we qualify.
Question: Can you explain when you talk about cycles?
Answer: Cycles? Yes. A woman has a cycle of say twenty-eight days. A man has, I think, a cycle of twenty-one days. But they're different cycles, you know? So this is just one thing; it's just a menstrual cycle, a sexual cycle. Then there are other people who have emotional cycles that go six days; some people have cycles that go eight days. So if you really find that these things come up, a person has a block, or you come home and you have to feel your way in. You come home and you want this kind of reception and you start reaching for something, which isn't there. You can reach for it and can think you're living with it for two hours because you are so sure of what you want. You must then feel that the other person has this to offer. We really have to tune in that way. I mean, I have very obvious energy cycles, and nobody even knows enough or cares enough to relate to it. You all come in and you all touch what you want. I've watched this endlessly all my life, and there were times when I really was moving up and I always wondered (tape becomes inaudible)