Talk by Swami Rudrananda (Rudi)

Big Indian, October 17, 1972

The first thing that you can do is to really take the energy from the mind and use it to open something inside yourself; otherwise it's just all a surface kind of a tension, and there's nothing spiritual about it. You can drive yourself crazy and everyone else crazy saying how this you are and how that you are. But, it doesn't mean anything. You have to first have your mind inside, really feel this thing opening -- this resistance in you. You can consciously keep your attention here (centered) and feel within the tension. 
It's very hard to sustain anything. The thing that we're doing is not to try to sustain the effort, but really stretch and go a little higher every day, and go a little deeper every day. You really are opening internally, (breathes) and really feel a new depth in you. It's like drilling for water. You have to really go a little deeper to get a fresh spring, and unless you consciously work that way, and really make the effort to reach inside yourself and really surrender deeper, or then you're working on tensions -- you're really only working on surface tensions. Because what you don't dig in, and consciously dig in and open more, then this thing becomes a surface again, it doesn't matter how far you have gone. You could really have had a good spiritual life six months ago and ditched it on the surface of forever after the rest of your life. Because this thing builds a skin immediately, it immediately builds a surface, and then again you're working on tensions.
And you see this with people, particularly with people who do meditation, because they reach a place. They really have a good meditation, the level goes from here to here, and then they stay here and they reinforce that level endlessly. It becomes a thickness, and all they do is feel superior and smug and they start, in a sense, crucifying other people with their attainment. It not only isn't spiritual, it's not humane. 
You have to be open, in a state of flow, and the only way you can acquire a state of flow is to go deeper inside you so there's no crystallization, there's no sense of (being) finished. There's no sense of achievement, because growing is surrendering and going deeper in yourself. And when you go deeper in yourself you only experience your nothingness.

We really see how it works, this inner state of being, this God-consciousness. It works and you're nothing, and your heart will break with it. You really will have a sense of tremendous humility, a sense of gratitude. And when you don't feel this sense of humility and you don't feel a sense of gratitude, (and) you don't feel how remarkable it is, and then you are involved in how wonderful you are. Because it's either a state of ego or it's a state of surrender and a sense of nothingness. 
And the thing that existed last night was disgusting, I mean, it was like a nuthouse. There wasn't any, I mean, one or two people maybe that were (doing) some of it, but the most of you, you had done a certain amount of work and you were trying to work from that level -- you can't work from the level of yesterday much less the level of a week ago. And you have to deeply (work) within yourself, when you come here, the whole thing. I watch you come in off the porch a lot of you, and there's nothing in your attitude, nothing in you that in any way could reflect you going here (compared with) you going to a movie or you going into buy a pair of bloomers. There was nothing opening. There was no sense of you going somewhere to open, to receive something -- you're going to surrender. 
This was your thing, (imagine) what you looked like coming up the steps? This way you could be going anywhere. There is no consciousness. If there is no consciousness, there is nothing that can receive. You walk and you pretend and you say afterward, why, why, why, why, why is this happening, why isn't that happening. It can't happen in you unless you're making a conscious effort, which means that you are opening inside against the resistance of your physical being, which is to close. 
With your conscious will, you're making a conscious effort. It never takes place automatically, and one thing that anyone who does spiritual work would like is that, like a dog can be trained to sit, you think that this inner quantity is going to suddenly obey because it's done it once, it's done it twice. It will not obey; it will never do one single thing. Your inner life will never do one single thing except express resistance because it is 99% of you; it's your unconscious. And your unconscious represents not you as you are, but it represents your soul which could have been around for a million years or more. This sleeping thing is so deep, that unless you consciously awaken it every time you sit. (Will you keep your attention forward? Does it do you any good looking over there? You have to keep your attention inside and you have to keep open -- every time you work.)

Unless you are consciously aware of waking up this thing inside you, that you are opening it, really opening it and feel this thing open and open and feel the struggle between you unconsciously and it being asleep, being dead. And you could be dead in a very nice way. It can be a nice day for you, but that's not a conscious day. It's a nice unconscious day. Or you have a day where you have pain, that's a painful unconscious day. All of the energy in a good day or what you call a bad day, it's still laying there, not doing you one iota of good because it's not going inside, it's sliding off the surface, and it's giving you reasons and you can talk and say all kinds of things which to your ear sound wonderful, and to somebody else's ear it might even sound wonderful, but none of your life force is getting inside you to allow you to grow. 
You have to (breathes) open. It's just like taking, a knife and cutting the skin of a melon or cutting the skin of an animal. You have to get below the surface with your consciousness and your mind. Your conscious will is the knife that really opens, that you feel the flow underneath all the tensions. So all these tensions on the surface will fall inside instead of staying on the surface, and they are used consciously to build up and really make you grow a little higher. 

Because all the surface tension in a human being either makes him more surface, which locks you away forever, or you take that surface which is your day, all the tensions of your day and you use that as fuel. 
These outer impressions, these outer responses that (are) either internalized and burned or they're absorbed and digested, and the energy within them is absorbed - in our system and we really feel them expand in us. This whole fight of it, carrying you outside or your being able to go inside and draw inside you this outer tension.

This thing of being caught with this one or being caught with that one or this idea or something like this is really what we are here to fight -- to take inside ourselves all the time. And the thing that protects us as people that (has) survived this long is only a state of innocence. And all of you, regardless of what you do, regardless of what you come from, have one thing that is really valid as far as God is concerned and as far as creative energy is concerned, and that is innocence because you're unconscious. 
So you don't have to have a fight with your unconscious. You don't have to have a discussion of why you didn't do. You just stop, sit down, open, and bring this force inside and feel the chakras open and you bring it down and you bring it up and you start taking in the energy in a conscious way. You start absorbing the tensions inside, and you extract from them the force you need to grow. So that you either are a human being living with all of the outer energy in a conscious way that's using that to build you inside to structure one thing, not a structure -- something like soap, but to let you grow one layer on the other. 
And as you grow, you become free, because these outer things that really give us our tensions represent all kinds of prejudices, all kinds of stupidities, all kinds of innocent attachments. As you absorb them and digest them you will grow beyond this, and suddenly this thing here will fall off you -- you are free of it, you have used the energy of that internally, inside you to grow beyond the level of that situation. 
And then you will hear your head wanting to return a little more inside. You'll find your head wanting to in a sense recall something, and it's finished. You really will understand you have finished that level. You're no longer attached to that level. You're no longer attached to that person. You're no longer attached to that idea. Otherwise you're locked in your mind forever, you will never, ever, ever have a chance to be free, because you have not transcended the level on which that particular energy sits.

 
And its like a ruler that goes up to a million million times, and every time you move a little bit up, something in you will be freed and something in you will grow because of that freedom. When you say, your ultimate is to be realized, to be happy and free, these things are the three things that spirituality is supposed to bring about, and that only comes by growing. 

You can't reason in your mind really, on this earth. I mean, the Bible says this very simply: the mind is the slayer of the soul. It was the instrument put in a man. It's the one chakra that has to be completely used as an energy source. It has no other function, and if you can really use the energy of the mind to open here and here, then you begin to bring it down and then it comes up the spine, bring the energy to the top of the head will feed into the brain, and then you have a spiritual mind.

 
Because the energy that is feeding the mind is not physical energy, it's purified energy because the energy has come through every chakra, through the sex organs, up the spinal column and it's refined and a detached energy. It's a conscious force, and the real mind, the mind of a human being, cannot be nourished any other way. Because the mind that you all have in an ordinary state is the mind of a very sick animal. It's a very warped, very strange, very illusionary mind because it's the mind that is given a physical person to allow him to survive on the earth under the conditions that exist on the earth, and the conditions are horrible. 

I've told people in our world how, if you had a really purified mind, could you survive it? So you're given a mind which allows you to live with that, and it's a mind which becomes secular. It (the mind) becomes prejudiced. It becomes warped in a million ways, and it can only become free one way, -- that's by completely surrendering within the mind and using that energy internally to grow and eventually to have a new nourishment feed the mind, -- and that gives you the equipment to go beyond a certain level. 
But it's true of everything. Everyone who even succeeds on a higher level than this world that we live in is someone who has a trained mind, whether it's a professional person like a doctor or a lawyer or psychiatrist or an engineer, somebody who has trained the mind. 

It always is this thing that is first taught in Zen where you learn to sit and keep the mind quiet for 12 or 14 hours a day. Everything that has to do with (being) spiritual has to do with controlling the mind, so you in your ordinary day have to use your mind for one reason, that you can go inside and open and transcend the exercise that you did previously. You have to feel an opening and a deeper sense of your being because of your conscious effort, so you are opening a more conscious energy, and the thing that was very obvious last night was that everyone was trying to work off a level which they felt was good. 
It's your mind telling your mind what it can do, and of course then it stays in a completely dead state. You feel wonderful but everything else suddenly turns into garbage, because you haven't transcended, for that day, the level that you are capable of transcending, and you're living in yesterday, and of course it becomes an illusion. Unless you have fresh energy every day through a conscious effort, you begin to develop illusions; you become crazy. Because you either are reaching a deeper place and taking the energy with consciousness, or you really live in a dead condition. 

You start thinking and feeling and you start fighting with everyone around you, because you haven't made the effort that a human being needs to live with consciousness. And so then you have to live with tensions, because either you are opening and drawing a deeper force and a fresh force internally, or you have to create more surface tensions. You become right and everyone else becomes wrong and you know and nobody else knows, and you are developing a stronger and stronger ego. Because either you survive with ego, or you are obviously degenerating, or you are regenerating, the only two alternatives. 
You have to feel every day; you really have to make that as a very, very conscious effort. While you're working you are consciously breaking through the surface of the tension that is part of your life. You have to consciously go inside through the skin of tension, open, feel the opening, feel the resistance too, and feel the expansion and feel the energy come in and feel your energy coming up your spine. Then you know that you have produced a new and a fresh force to work with.

By doing that, you have to understand that you will only be revealing something of a lesser nature of yourself. You'll see how nothing you are. You should have inside you a tremendous gratitude for that, because if you see that it means you are taking enough nourishment to expose part of your ego, part of the paranoia that is encrusting you. And so you walk around with this ego stripping away. It's like this, as you move a little ego, a little more of your soul comes out. So you have more soul exposed, less ego need, and a tremendous sense of gratitude. Not one of you would have the intelligence to do this by yourself.
You have to feel that inside you. You really feel indebted. You have to feel grateful. You have to have a sense of humility. You can see this only by the expression, deeply within yourself, of these higher factors, these higher expressions of energy. But when you're boom, boom, going around making a lot of noise, being efficient even if it is inefficiency. Then you only in a sense ( are) building more tensions. 
It doesn't matter how hard you work, that's secondary to the reason that you're here. You're here to break down the surface, not to add to the surface, to open within yourself, to take internally the nourishment from the atmosphere with your consciousness, with your breathing, and grow. And only by growing can you see the nothingness that you really are. Because when you take energy inside, then you are freed a little more to see your nothingness. So when somebody comes and says, wow, did I blah-blah-blah and you can hear this is all superficial -- everything they're going to say has to do with superficiality. 
This person can suddenly become the authority. This person suddenly comes who can't blow their own nose, who can't earn their own food, who has no capacity for friendship, who has no humanity, who has nothing, and suddenly they will come and tell you that they saw so-and-so speak, or so-and-so do this, and you get fantastically involved and tremendously interested and caught up in that kind of tension. 
You have to use common sense, you have to use some control with somebody who you wouldn't let use your car. You wouldn't let them stay overnight at your house. You wouldn't give them the price of a meal, and then you will allow them to drop on you a whole spiritual trip. What value do you have? What value could you possibly have that you will accept anything because it's spiritual, because it's a mystery, because it's what? It's stupidity if you can't feel with somebody nourishment, if you can't feel growth, that you're getting more and more and more here, then the situation is driving you crazy. And that you're building more tensions and you're getting more externalized, and you're getting more this thing that you want to run and you want to run and everything's going to give you a trip. This does not express growth. 
Growth is an inner quantity of opening, taking in energy, overcoming the resistance of all of these external things and growing in spite of everything. Consciousness and conscious effort is the only expression of spirituality. It is your overcoming resistance and opening yourself. Because you can do this with effort, you can feel what's involved in your overcoming everything within yourself to open, that will allow you to grow, because you're consciously using energy which will otherwise be used externally. 
It's your ability to break down the tensions around you, it's your ability to feel someone else's need, it's your ability to recognize in you the fact that you're crazy, that you are crazy at this moment and you have no right to inflict that insanity on somebody else. But you take one nut in a group of 50 people who are half-balanced and he can close everybody, because the tensions are so easily magnetized in you because you are so weak in your conscious ability to go inside and open. And you have to become strong enough, you have to understand that the ability for something to pull you outside yourself is not somebody else's strength; it is your weakness. And you all are just about in the teething stage; you'd suck on anything that comes by. 

You have to begin to realize the true condition of your own inner life. And so one person makes more noise than the other, and two people get together and discuss something spiritual, and you all have the stupidity and the ego to think you're approaching some great spiritual mountain. You are weak children, you're barely crawling, and you have to within yourself accept that so that you can keep surrendering and take nourishment inside and grow stronger. I have every day of the week, all day long, people come with presents, Situations, positions, all of these things, and there's no -- it's the most ridiculous thing for me to accept from anybody anything. I know how long I have to wait, and I'm willing to wait for this winter to get a few strong people who will grow with me, and maybe in five years, will become something. But how in the world could you respect me if I would allow myself to grow based on you? I mean, you stop and think about it. And you can shine compared to the people who come to me every day and talk about their gurus, their realized souls. It's ridiculous. I would as soon go out in a leaky bathtub with a paddle and cross the Atlantic, as to base my spiritual life on all of you. And you have to understand that, it's not putting you down, it's giving you the opportunity to really grow because I will not use you badly for my own purposes. 
I really love you, I really have value for you, and I'm trying to keep the atmosphere as quiet and as rich and as healthy and give you everything that I have from inside as nourishment so that you can root and start to grow. But until you can accept within yourselves how fragile your being is.

Most of you root in me; you don't even have enough soil inside you to really begin rooting your own soul. You're so tender, you're too tender, and this morning Joan said, how can you be so patient? Only because I'm so aware of what your condition is. I mean, one frost and 90% of you would be destroyed, and you have to begin to be a little aware of it. I couldn't even express this last year because there wasn't even underneath you to take root. There wasn't even that which could possibly survive. And you have a wonderful chance, if you live quietly, if you live with a little responsibility, and you live with a little dignity, and you have just a little patience for six months or a year more; you will begin to understand what it is to grow and grow a little stronger. You represent at this point, it's almost like a hot bed in a greenhouse, a living miracle, beyond everything you could ever believe.

 
I've been to every corner of the world and I've looked and I've studied and I've studied and I've sat and I worked my guts out, and I never saw 4 people, 2 people, 5 people, 3 people who were growing. I saw one person in Japan, I saw a few people here or there, scattered. But you all are like a good group of seeds sitting in a cold frame, for a bit of time, that you're almost ready to be planted, and if you really work this winter and you really have quality here in the Ashram, and you really can surrender every day and go deeper and become more conscious of how fragile you are, and that if you don't open every day and consciously open and feel a fresh flow of force; you can't feel this tension breaking down in you, then you really will have a chance by next spring and next summer to have something really wonderful and remarkable take place. 

There will be a few people with a real sense of their nothingness, because you will have sprouted enough to draw in enough energy to be secure enough to see how insignificant you are. 
And then, of course, comes the most remarkable thing of all, this ability to see creative energy as it comes in you, to see the expression of life, the flow of inner force. And it's something very remarkable. And this is really why you're here, because as you grow, as you sprout, you will really be able to pull together something remarkable in Big Indian. As you plant crabgrass to hold soil, this kind of inner reaching out from a higher spiritual place of these little tender shoots will begin to really bring something cohesive and wonderful here.

The whole reason for having gone so slowly and not trying to bring people. We could bring thousands of people here, there's no trouble with that. I can go to Bloomington for one week and bring back 200 people to live here, but it isn't to get a number thing. It's to really have a sense of nourishment and growth and reality, and so in a few months when you begin to see every day how unbelievable the miracle of growth is, that you are strong enough to open, to break through the crust of your personality and your ego and really take in this energy which is in the atmosphere, which is in God. And really feel this thing growing in you, and you have a continual sense of gratitude of your nothingness, then this miracle will take place. And even when it does take place, and it will, it's only because of my purposes, and you're riding on it, and I need you to ride on it because I need a foundation. 

When you can't do for yourself, then you must stop and try to feel enough from me to make the effort, because I need it. And if you can't do it here, then I have to go someplace else and have it done because I am absolutely in need of a tremendous effort by a group of people so that I can grow. Because if I can't give you that capacity to grow; if I can't give you that freedom which can come next year, then my chances for going up and staying up are absolutely impossible. 
You will be growing like the stem of a plant, and as the nourishment comes up in you, certainly it will filter up to me, and I can grow. So what I'm doing for you and doing with you has to do with a consciousness that's necessary for me and necessary for you, and that's why there's really, and shouldn't ever be a sense of bondage between you and me, because it all comes from God in that sense, it's nothing to do with me. I'm just as lucky to have my connection, as you are to have your connection. 
It has to be with a consciousness and a dignity on your part that you want this. And you surrender when you do your exercise in a very deep way to break this whole surface tension, because you either are an internal person growing and becoming free, or you are an external person being turned down by everything, because you do not have the capacity, because you don't have the nourishment to pull back and grow. 
Everyone can turn you on and you have nothing inside you that can judge good, bad or otherwise. You have to have inside you that which understands what spirituality is about, that it's to take nourishment and (you) grow and become free. And until you really do this 500 times a day, 1000 times a day, that you detach yourself. 

If you have to move back or step back from somebody and take a breath. You have to feel you, you have to feel your life force flowing in you and not going to somebody because you have no control. And then when you want to relate, you look at the person; you feel your life force go out; you feel it make a contact; you feel a nourishment and a relationship consciously, not somebody turning you on and turning you around and controlling you by their imagination and your ego. 
These promises, these stupid things that people can lay on you and your mind will grab only represent a weakness and a sickness and an inability to sustain a conscious effort. All these external things have to do with magic; they have to do with illusion. The only thing that has to do with spirituality is an inner condition which is done with your consciousness taking in energy and using your mind to break down tensions and absorb the energy and feel this inner expansion take place. 
You are the barometer, you are the person who can be the only judge of what is taking place, because the only barometer and the only judgment has to do with your growing, and growing has to do with consciousness of breaking-down illusion. 
You are working and you really can sense the breaking down of the tension in you, the opening up, breaking through resistance and taking in this force inside. And this is not something you do when I'm here, it's something you do every single day, so that you don't forget, and you have your mind inside, and you continually feel this heart open; you feel a deeper sense of yourself, the deeper origin of yourself, and if you have to you sit up all night and you ask and you ask and you ask and you ask and you ask. You ask and you go deep in your heart and soul and you say, I want, I want only one thing, I want to open in the deepest possible way, to really feel my soul force. I wish to be deeply responsible for it, and I really wish to work. 

If you can have the integrity then half of you get together or a few of you get together and sit one night a week for another two or three hours to really go inside, This should be wonderful, that you really sit for several hours. You can try and get some people together if anyone really wants to work instead of doing these surface trips all the time. And you sit and you ask and you ask and you keep your attention in your heart and you keep asking and asking and breathing and demanding inside. When it says knock and the door will open, that's what it means, you knock in here, your wish and the depth that you express inside to really grow and you feel a deeper and deeper and deeper thing opening in you. I guarantee you. I won't disappoint you. I will grow and I'll bring everything that grows in me and give you. That's really what is necessary. 

You have to have an appetite. You have to really want so that when I come you really can eat, and this has to be a deep thing in you, that you really are hungry, you really have the need. 
You can feel this food which is a very real food, that it's essential. So if you don't see me for a week or you don't see me for a month, you can eat ten times more, you can eat twenty times more.
Until you in yourself have that appetite, until this hunger develops in you, that you sit, and you can feel inside you this food, this nourishment which you can't get any other way except to be very open. And you really pull it out of you, or you will never have a spiritual life. I had when I saw Nityananda. It took me seven years to really digest what I took from him. 

The whole thing that you talk of I come or I don't come, this is secondary. For any of you who really had any real contact with me or any value with me at all, if you never saw me again, you should've taken enough to live with that rest of your life. Those of you who have opened to me, something I love so deeply inside myself is endlessness, in the connection between me and you. 

I remember you individually; you're not a collective mass like a porridge, which is boiled for 4 and 8 hours. I really have individual respect and feeling for you, and every one of you has a different frequency, and you have to understand that. You have to find in you that frequency and tune in on me and take it. I have people who live in Europe I see once in two years that grow from me, and I grow from the love and feeling that they have with me. They're not lost in a cloud, of people who come and go, because a real attachment is a real attachment. It doesn't have to do with time, because it is in time and space, and all of our real attachments in life are that. They aren't always the people we spend long hours with. 

The chords that are struck in us, that we can strike consciously and vibrate and take from that vibration the essence and the energy that's there. I still call on people I studied with 20 and 30 years ago, and they sustain their nourishment, that is constant. It's a constant source of energy. It's a constant source of love, and it's our culture that turns out a car that lasts three years and a relationship that lasts 3 hours. We have this capacity to junk everything, and you have to inside you really express your value by being able to open and take and take and take and take and take and take. It is yours to take, but this inability to open and draw has to do with the superficiality of your effort. It has to do with the smallness of your consciousness, and it has to do with the limitation of how far you really wish to go. The limitation is not in me for you, it's in you for yourself. 

As you open and ask and ask and open, there is nothing in the world that I wouldn't do for you. I have it to give, and I need it, and I would much sooner spend more time here giving you than going all over the place.
I'm not particularly thrilled by that, I am thrilled only by having people with an appetite, with a wish to grow. That's extraordinary.

This is really how my force will go, not with my conscious will, because it will flow out of me. It can only go to you with your consciousness, with that which in you opens to receive it. It is not my force. It is God's force and it will flow through me. I have no control over it. I have no will on it. I have no personality involvement with it. I am very grateful that it's that way, because I am also then not responsible for anything except keeping the flow going. Those of you who really have a sense of value and a sense of need, I can't help myself. You can draw off me as much and as often and whenever you wish, when I'm here or when I'm not here. And the need for this physical thing is only illusion. 

Does anyone have a question? Yes? 

When I'm asking, it's just like my head takes over and ... 

No, but asking is another way of wanting to be responsible.

Right? It's commitment, and we have to make commitment, we have to.

The restaurant is doing nicely. The store is doing well, and there's work being done here. I'm buying another piece of property for the Ashram. Why? Why? Do you think I know why? It comes by, that's how I got this place, it's nothing to do with logic. It's nothing to do with anything except it's part of the flow, so today we signed the papers and I went with Rob and Buford, and we're standing there and suddenly in the middle of a building, I understood why? Cause my thing was to tear the building down and I suddenly look and think, my God, next summer there will be people here. They (will) walk in this house because there will be people -- and we'll need that building for physical accommodations. There wasn't a thing in me that had any idea about that until a few hours ago. And it really is working that ....

(End of this talk)


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