...and I can barely support the pain when I do that. And I think it's the greatest illusion of all, this thing that people talk about spirituality. I've seen more dead people who were presented to me as people who sat fourteen or eighteen hours a day, and that look in their eyes. I don't see any consciousness at all or fire or any kind of movement inside. And working and opening and letting all of your energy flow into the deadness of you does not make for a spiritual life. What you open in the flow has to go into a place, which was never touched before, a depth of opening, a depth of surrender, a depth of wish that has taken this energy and expands. Is there anyone who doesn't under stand?
So that if you can't remove all of this garbage that you live with every day, then you're not having a spiritual exercise, you're just playing with garbage, and there's a big difference between playing with garbage and dead material and having a spiritual exercise. A spiritual exercise is opening something deep and fresh in you and really connecting with this higher energy and this thing has to grow remarkably fast.
QUESTION: Very often, in the past two weeks, I go home and I'm so charged up with energy I can't go to sleep.
RUDI You should stay here and wash the hall. You can do your work in any way.
QUESTION (inaudible)
RUDI: So? So you fall asleep, that's fine, that's very good
QUESTION: You were talking once about flushing when you feel the flow-- does that relate to what you were talking about just now?
RUDI: Yes. Does anyone else have a question?
QUESTION: You're always talking about having pain (inaudible)
RUDI: Because the senses are from the pains, what's the difference?
QUESTION: (inaudible)
RUDI: It's the same thing, sure
QUESTION: This weekend after you were talking about your physical situation expanding and sustaining this possibility for changing, does this physical expansion always reflect your spiritual growth?
RUDI: No. You could transplant from a small pot to a big pot and if you don't look in the soil, if you're putting the tree in and if it's full of holes, then what happens? I mean there's all kinds of pain just as there's different aspects of a situation.
QUESTION: Sometimes when I work (inaudible) down here, something happens. I don't exactly know what, like I go somewhere and then I come back again, I don't know what happens.
RUDI: You don't have to know. I mean, what you're doing is you're trying to free yourself from you. It doesn't matter where you go, it doesn't matter who comes, it doesn't matter what the experience is. It really doesn't matter. It's just that --
QUESTION: It's okay that that happens, then. I shouldn't try to stay --
RUDI: No, you shouldn't try to hold onto it and fight it and understand it. There's nothing logical. The only thing that's logical is that we shouldn't be sitting on this earth, and if we're lucky we'll work ourselves off of it. There's no reason to understand these things. I mean there's millions and millions of books written about spirituality and about philosophy, and very few people ever make it. That's what illogical, that there should have been so much energy spent and so little success. And the reason is that it goes out instead of going in. You should really take the energy inside and feel it building this muscle system in yourself, and going to the top of your head. That's what's going to free you.
Anyone who can go up this weekend, it's important because we're doing a lot of planting and we need people, we really need people up in the country to help and get-the farm settled and we're putting up the deck at the restaurant. So try to come up and ...
People in Texas and in Indiana, more hospitality and more reflection of their good will on the Ashram, people who don't even belong to the Ashram than we've ever had from anyone except maybe one or two people in New York. I mean people have given land to the Ashram in Indiana and in Texas; they have bought cots; they have bought blankets; they have done thousands of small things which I have never seen any of you do And I don't really understand it except that I know that it isn't the nature of people in a city that when somebody moves in next door and makes soup and brings in a box of cookies or a cake.
But you have to understand that having a sense of life in relationship is really having a life and having a relationship. And you need it, and if you can go up there and feel with these people who are really in every way part of you and really work with them and do with them and share something with them, then you'll have a sense of life for yourself.
I give proportionately -- I earn a hundred times more than most of you, but I give two or three hundred times more. Believe me, I find it very easy to give everything that I have, not for any other reason. I really don't think that much of myself, and have to make my conditions so much different. But you look and see and you feel and you understand. I see when I'm in India where people are starving in one part of the country. I've never seen anyone collecting money for relief or food. I don't understand it. I really don't understand the lack of feeling and the lack of humanity in people for other people. And until you can develop inside yourself that capacity to feel and share, to see. I have yet to see anybody -- I'm sure it's happened, but I'm sure it's very rare. You go up and see a kid up there who you think maybe doesn't have something or a woman who doesn't have something, and to really take another human being and say, "Look, I'd like to buy you a dress or a coat or a pair of shoes or a this or that or another thing." I don't understand it. I really don't understand it, that there isn't in a lot of you that amount of humanity that can reach beyond yourself or see a need this way. It's really inconceivable.
Spirituality certainly can't exist until humanity really shows itself, and it's really what I feel has to come, and if you don't want to do it there, fine, but for God's sakes; do it with your own family; do it with people around you; look and see and break your heart and tear yourself open a little bit and instead of spending money on cigarettes or running to movies or doing this or doing that reach inside and see somebody else's condition.
Being poor is not having the ability to take care of somebody else's situation. It doesn't have to do with how much you have. It has to do with how much you hold on to. And being free to let go a little bit is really what makes you rich because you really don't need to crap yourself up inside and fill yourself up inside and congest yourself with six million things which have no meaning. It's another kind of acupuncture, letting lose a little and giving a little of yourself.
And the kids who've come here from Indiana have done exactly fifteen, twenty or thirty times the work of everyone who's shown up to help Bob or to help (inaudible), and it really isn't a very nice reflection to find that outside of New York it is really where we've gotten the in the moves that we've made and in the moves that we will make. It really doesn't make me very happy or very proud or make me feel anything. It's just that the level that a lot of you function on is very small. You can come and ask questions. You can come and ask for help, but you also should come and be able to do a good job. You have to learn that. I mean if you don't want to do it here, then you can leave here, but go and do it somewhere else because until you can really reach and serve and do that work, there's no chance, there's absolutely no chance.
There's a half a dozen spiritual schools in New York that started with my money and started with my effort and I gave and I gave and I gave and I left and I left what I gave. I really didn't care about that. But it's only the nature of giving that allowed me to learn a great deal. And if you can't give one thing then you give another. There are six million rocks in Big Indian, which are yours for the asking. You can take them and move them. There's no reason to not do.
You have energy when you do your exercise and you can go up one weekend and work your guts out, and put it back a little bit from where it came and it will come back again and again many times. But it's unbelievable the amount of help that people want which is disproportionate completely to the amount that they're willing to give. The ones who want the most in many ways are the ones who give the least. And you have to really try to reverse that in yourself. It's very very important because there is a break-even (tape cuts off and begins again:)
... Love thy neighbor as thyself, and it really is the secret to a tremendous consciousness, which is very, very simple if you can understand it. It really has to do with listening consciously to another person when you talk and really feeling from inside and over and over again the teaching has that capacity because it really allows you to talk to a lot of people, to hear your superficiality, to hear the quickness with which you reply and you have to really stop and back up again and again and again and again. But this is not a privilege reserved for someone who teaches, it really should be the same condition for every human being. That you really pull back, you try to feel, you try to open, you try to analyze, you take a situation and you move it up and back and forth until you really release within it something creative, some energy detaches from it and you can handle a situation a little differently. Because otherwise, because of your limitation and will, you limit somebody else and you also limit your own potential.
By working over and over again, by trying to see it differently, by pulling back a little bit, being more open, listening to somebody, feeling in them, trying to understand where it comes from, where the need is, you can find the place to, by detaching, to put a little more energy in the situation and in the person, that you can become more sensitive. Because otherwise it's really a cut and dry thing that you give an answer by rote. This is right and that is wrong and this is good and this is bad. It's only good or bad or right or wrong which is based on the limitation of your capacity to move a situation around.
This whole thing of crystallization. This whole thing of having something stick together in a certain form has to do with the limitation that we put on a situation, that we put on words that we put on emotions. By really taking a deeper breath and really feeling your breath go down and really feel it go all the way, all the way down until it hits you in your sex organs and you can rotate and bring it up your spinal column. You're really pulling back and consciously using the energy that's working you at a particular moment and you're letting it go deeper and open something deeper and it gives you a chance to have a more conscious relationship.
If you're making a deep, conscious effort, you're not lost externally in your energy, you're not caught up in this automatic pattern because once you're detached consciously, once you feel inside you this movement, you feel your heart open, you can look at something and see the amusing aspect of it, you become freer, you can really work with somebody differently, you can really work with your own energy differently. And it's really like a painter who doesn't have to use primary colors. He can mix and get different shading. He can get different depths.
We really work with this raw energy and it comes out of us. We do, this is the way I hear, that's the way I don't do, this is what I take and this is what I don't take. And it's not true.
It's a brutal expression of your limitation. By being able to pull back and grind your energy by taking it through all the chakras consciously with your breath, you really are destroying
yourself, you're destroying your will, you're destroying the attachment that you have to all of these second-rate and fifth rate values, your principles, your ideas of how something should
be or how something shouldn't be. It really is the expansiveness of grinding up endlessly your energy. You are freeing it. You're making it lighter. You are able to change, and the thing
that I've found through all the years, that my work has always been my limitation, not the limitation of someone who comes as a student but my inability to reach deep enough in myself to reach deeper in somebody else. And so things are free to change that way. They're free to change and not be clumped into the ego, because you realize that all of the creative good, all of the consciousness comes about only when you can pull back and detach and really look at that energy flowing through these chakras, through this extra ordinary mechanism which is in every single human being. And by not using it, we express the brutality and the limitation of ourselves, and all that's asked of you is to take your energy through your mechanism and break down these bonds that really bind you, that really make you a person.
This thing of always knowing, of always having an answer, of always being right, this thing suddenly has to stop, that you're accepting your limitation, your expressing your ego, your expressing your fear, because you're afraid to open the door, you don't have security inside yourself, so you're talking only from tension. And until you really feel life flow, really going through every chakra and coming through and completing this circle and the energy coming to the top of your head, you really are not talking from yourself, you're only talking from tensions, and all the advice that you give, all the feelings that you give, all of the expressions of your existence do not represent something from your depth and something which is creative, it represents something off the top. When we're born, the second we're conceived, this force comes in from God, from the cosmos, from creation whichever way you care to look at it, and immediately the thing that makes life is the tension between your parents, seals this little one drop of semen inside and makes a seed. If your parents brought you up, there would be no possibility for them to give life. You would not be here, because if something were pure, it would not have within it anything, which could reproduce. It's a very, very simple way of understanding. And so we are the product of creative energy, which is pure and wrapped around, it is this tension. It's pretty ghastly, but it has in that second the whole test of your karma, the whole capacity of this particular thing that we come with. We come with everything coated and this coating continually grows and grows and grows so when you do your breathing, you have to breath below the level of tension, below all of these external conditions in you, and you really feel deep, deep, deep inside you this breath opening energy and the energy working with your breath going down, down, down, down, down, down, and you hold it as long as you possibly can until you really feel your energy, the life force that you're trying to bring inside you, go beneath all of your tensions. So any thinking, any work that you're doing except working and surrendering becomes another tension which stops this flow from taking place. Is there anyone here who does not understand? QUESTION: I'd like to know how I could become simpler so that I can (inaudible) RUDI Well the thing that's not simple is the thing that has to do with emotions and tensions. It means that you have to breathe deeper, you have to really surrender deeper, and so instead of asking and opening, you ask and open and take a breath and hold it until you feel the energy. You see by surrendering, going in, in, in and this is the lowest chakra. The breath has to come in and down and down and down until it really hits this and gets underneath it. You have to get underneath the shell. I mean I sold someone a skull-cup today and it kind of looked very much like a nut, like the shell of a nut. And inside you see all of the places where the brain and other things hit the skull, and it really is just another shell, it's just another shell like a coconut, like a berry, like any piece of fruit, it really is the coating and we are locked in under that, we really have most of our energy coming off the top of our heads, off the top of our emotions, we
Until you can ask and really feel inside, I mean you talk about spirituality. I have seen things in India that makes your heart wrench. I saw a man hit by a truck and his whole body was crushed like you'd crush a cockroach, and people were standing around by the dozens. It took me years to forget it. It struck such a shock inside my system. There was no spirituality. They were looking at him like he was a chicken that had just had his neck wrung. Nothing. So what does it mean? They were detached to such a point that it was no longer a thing of feeling for a human being. And these things you have to feel and be consciously above, but not to be hardened against. There's a difference between being cold and being hot and then cooling off, then being detached.
If you never had a heart, if you never felt anything, if you never suffered for somebody else, if you never really felt love for a child, if you never really felt someone who was really sick and made an effort, you're not detached, you have never been attached. There's a difference.
And you have to really get underneath and feel that. There's a difference in having been hurt and being callous and never having had feelings, and this thing of controlling your mind, you have to have a mind before you control it. You have to have before can surrender something.
And the way to get through it is to bring your energy and your consciousness and be sure that you're taking this effort and getting underneath it. I mean when you go to sleep at night, you have your body under the blankets, it's not on top of the blankets, and it's the same way when you do your breathing, you have to open and feel the energy getting -- you swallow and you feel it go into the chakra and you let the energy and it goes-- not to touch the outside of the heart, it goes into the heart, it
goes inside the chakra and opens, and you really feel that, you feel that opening. And the same way, when somebody says, "Pass the butter", you really have to feel whether this thing says (inaudible) or you give it dead, or you really look at the person and you feel inside that even though you're not a human being and you don't really want to pass the butter, you know that you should do this consciously, and you try to open and pass the butter to the person, not like this, and not like that and not like this, but you try to make everything part of the connecting life flow between yourself and other people, so that it isn't an easy life because you go through it without feeling, because you go through it without suffering. It becomes a conscious life, when you can really feel inside and this thing is opening this way, not this way, you can't open. You open from inside a chakra. You take a breath and you feel in your heart, you try to feel the energy go in here.I gave you that exercise of really going on the outside of the chakra, slowly, the outer muscles start to tingle, you draw the energy down, take ten minutes to do it. It's better to take ten minutes to open than have an exercise for once in your life than to try to run through it. You see this on every single level. Doctors here have written endless numbers of books that ninety percent of the women who get married never have an orgasm. Well, if on a physical level, somebody can't even have that kind of a sensation, you must understand that there's a good possibility that you never did your exercise in enough depth to bring the force underneath your tension.
There is not good ever unless the effort that you make becomes part of your life force and you feel the connectedness of it. And you have to want that, you have to ask for it, you have to beg for it, and you do this endlessly, that you sit down and make an effort, that you sit down and really try to open and if you have children or people that you love, then you have to turn to them and really feel with them, not to relate to them in a dead way or to hug them like you're hugging a sack of flour. You really hug, you feel, you touch, you feel your fingertips touching for the skin, and feel sensations, really impart life and feel life with everything that you do. And this callousness, this deadness only has to do with something, which took place over a period of years, and you have to reverse with your conscious effort, with using energy inside, that you really begin to feel a flow with everyone, that you touch a statue, you feel with your fingertips. I mean, a blind person is forced to do that, but you are a living person, you should have that sensitivity.
QUESTION: I was going to ask you about, how could I use my emotion in that way you're talking about?
RUDI: You have to surrender your emotions. You have more than enough for five hundred people. Instead of using your emotions to carry yourself and your will, you have to serve other people. You really surrender your emotions. It's the same way - you sat down by me the other day. I didn't want you to sit there. It wasn't that I was prepared to do something, nothing in you looked to feel, it wasn't that I was going to reject you, I didn't reject anybody except the person that I wanted to work with at that moment. But instead of doing what we want, we should and feel and give someone else the right to say, "Yes I want" at that moment. There are times when I'll reach and feel that with you, but we should feel that always with somebody. And it isn't that we have so much emotion that you understand you want to jump, it's like wanting to squeeze a cat or squeeze a child. I have that in my life and I've had plenty of it where I would pick up a child and the child would go crazy, and the child would feel all of that greed in me, this tremendous need to squeeze it. It's not a tube of toothpaste, you know? And this is always the thing, you have to hold back, detach consciously and then reach gently, because you have to make the contact which is wanted and possible, not to express your need, you can't express your need on every situation. Understand? You have to pull back and then slowly you work around it consciously. You can end up squeezing the child, but the child is prepared for it, the child might
want it or you feel the child squirming in your arms or try to push you away. Then you have to lot go. And when we learn to relate that way --
END OF TALK