by
Part 1
Swami Rudrananda (Rudi)
Big Sur Kundalini Class
What comes through me, of course, is everybody who ever taught me, Baba, his teacher, teachers that I had years ago and not only them, but all of the teachers that they had. So you really are getting not just an energy per se, you're getting thousands and thousands of years of energy. And it really has to do with the Atma, this limitless thing, this endless thing that exists. We always receive things and in our mind, we limit it completely to a particular person or a particular energy. But these energies are manifestations of people who lived and cultures that existed for a very long time. Words can't perpetuate God but really the soul of a person can perpetuate God and we live in the souls of the people who love us. And teaching, of course greatest example of that. You love Baba. Baba is in your heart. You love somebody, you have a child, then part of Baba is in their heart. And this is the real way of perpetuating someone. Teaching is a direct line of Truth. It really is something which is handed down over a period of thousands and thousands of years. So what you're getting then is a cultural thing which is beyond your mind and that's the whole reason to take it very simply. If you try to analyze it, you are reducing it down to something which you think you can handle or you think you can understand. But that puts a great limitation on it. I've been with Baba 12....14 years.....something like that and I must say, I find every time I meet him for a period of several weeks, I die, not once but maybe 30 or 40 times. He really keeps cutting pieces off me. It's in the nature of anything else which is organic. We are an organic being. We're given energy from a Guru which helps us to grow spiritually. Well, our spiritual plant that is pruned produces better fruit. It's protected by its natural enemies by the Guru too. You really are told certain things which keep you and give you a great deal of additional productivity. And your reason for working spiritually is to really have a product. It's this thing of saying, "Well, why are you working?" And you say, " Well, I'm working bllllaaahhh, bllaahh, blah." It's ridiculous! You have to have a real reason for working. You want to be spiritually realized. This realization has to take a very realistic form. And it takes the form of being happy, being together inside and feeling a flow, a flow of God throughout your whole being...not just a shot in the heart once in a while, or a vision 20 years ago or 3 years ago or 5 years ago. But spirituality should manifest itself repeatedly every day, every day, every day, not once but hundreds of times a day. And it really is in your mind that the limitation occurs. Because within you, reach for God." And you reach into the air and you don't feel anything. And you say, "Well, that's alright. If God wants to give me, he'll give it to me." It's not true. He wants to give it to you, but you have to reach into the air consciously. It's really that. It's the nature of spiritual work for things to occur consciously. This is no different than a secretary going for a job and everyone wants her to have experience. Well, where do you get experience? Well, unfortunately, they say, money goes to money,....spirituality goes to spirituality. A little spirituality brings a lot of spirituality. And you have to understand that. You can't go out like a cowboy going across the Sahara Desert looking for horses. You have to know where horses exist. And you have to know where spirituality exists. These things exist within you. You need a teacher or a guide, somebody to give you a point or 2, but 2 stars let Christopher Columbus go around the world and discovermillion points. You don't need 6 thousand books. You don't need anything. You need a few points and you have to work your guts out. You have to sit down inside, find your points over and over again and project them. And all of you have done meditation before. You don't go inside and say, " Well....here I'm......" It's like a man looking for his watch in his pocket. You have to really go inside and know where it is. You have certain points that you work with, and these are your chakras. You have a mind, you have your heart and you have your sex. If you studied yoga, you know that there are other points. There's the top of the head. There's the point in the throat. There's the chakra below the heart and there's the chakra in the sex center. There's one between. These are your points. So if you're going to look for something, instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, look inside yourself to these places which are supposed to exist, which you might have had an experience with heart. You certainly had an experience in your mind, and you certainly had a sexual experience. Well, how can these things do anything for you? They destroyed the world, they destroyed mankind since time began actually. And the reason they destroyed is because they operate through the mind, and the mind is the slayer of the soul. Well, if you can turn that around, and yoga is based on transcendentalism, it's to transcend the situation. So if the mind is the slayer of the soul, you just turn it around, and if you can subjugate the mind, and make it work for you, then it also becomes the thing which frees the soul. So throughout your meditation, the minute you go into your mind, you take your mind and you stick it in a chakra. You don't let your mind wander, if you can help it. If you keep throwing it out and it comes back, then you just leave it alone and let it just wander out. But you are always better off if you are working, you bring your mind into your heart, like you keep your attention here,.....and I've used a hundred times a very crude example. People say, "Well, how can I keep my attention in my heart or in my mind or in a chakra or inside me?" And it's very simple. If you were making love to somebody on this floor and somebody was dancing upstairs, believe me, your attention would be on making love to somebody. You wouldn't hear one thing up there. Nothing! Because you're really deeply involved in what you're doing. So it means one thing....that you're absolutely full of baloney, that you're not doing it with any real attention, you're playing at it. So if you really love what you're doing and you really feel when you're with God, it really is like with someone who you love, then your attention stays there. And this thing of it wandering off here and wandering off there is because you don't care enough. If you don't care, that exists in the mind and it also exists in the heart. You have to, really, before you start, before you sit down, do what anybody does to check your instrument. You can't sit down, like a jack-ass on a stage and say, "I'm going to now give you a solo." And you find that there's one string broken, or you forgot a pick, or you forgot to tune the piano. You have to do the same thing. You have to bring some consciousness to your effort before you even get started. You have to sit down and make sure that what you're taking out to work with isn't still in the freezer or the refrigerator. You have to thaw it out. So an hour before you go to meditation, you try to breathe, you try to feel inside yourself. Have a sense of yourself as an instrument that is coming to sit and meditate for a purpose. You have to express the value that way. That you are about to go and have a religious experience. So you don't come running in after a fight with your girlfriend, or a fight at work, or some kind of a stupid situation. You have to begin to surrender an hour before you appear on the scene.students running in like they were catching a 9:14 express. It's ridiculous. You can't do that. You have to really go easy and be open inside. The nature of spiritual work is the nature of surrender. You can't walk in a door and suddenly drop 20 hours or 10 hours of bad vibrations. You can start grinding it up an hour or 2 before you go. So if you belong to an ashram somewhere, you start in breaking down an hour before the class. You take a breath, take a drink of water, wash your mouth out. Do a few simple acts which are acts of consciousness. They don't have to be profound acts of consciousness. You wash yourself, you go to the toilet. It's silly to sit down and have to take a crap when you're in the middle of a meditation. It's stupid. It's absolutely stupid, that you don't have enough awareness in a simple way to have prepared yourself. And what you receive is nothing compared to holding. When you finish your meditation you also are responsible for holding what you've received. So start talking with somebody before you are out of the door, or start getting hysterical because somebody may have taken your pair of shoes, or somebody touched something of yours, or somebody bumped against you, and I've seen this endlessly, where people get up from meditation, and someone hits by them accidentally and " ja-blrrrr-blrrrrr-blahhhrrrr" ....and everything comes out......completely....they completely have wasted the hour. "Here I was sitting there. I was God. And suddenly somebody touched my - And I've dumped the whole thing." And this goes on tremendously. It's the smallest way that it manifests. So when you get through with small ways, you'll find bigger ways. It's holding an experience which is everything. Anybody can pour into you. Only you can hold what you've been given. It's absolutely essential for you to know that. And if you get something great, there's absolutely not a chance of a snowball in hell that within 24 hours something wouldn't come to try and take it away from given by God, by a teacher, by anybody, that doesn't immediately bring with it the test of holding. Holding is even more important than receiving. Because if you learn how to hold, you can get from nature, you can get from everybody. You have to begin to understand that. When you receive anything, spiritually, love, anything, it's to perpetuate it. This is the whole thing. It's like a marriage. Everyone can be passionate. Very few people can work at a marriage. Because it takes consciousness, it takes holding and remembering what you have. You love this person and 6 weeks later you start screaming, " Why didn't you come home from work?" .....They may have been hit by a car on the way home but you can't even see it because you're so involved with what you think you want to give them, instead of seeing what they want. And spiritually, it's exactly the same thing. It is what God wants, it's how God wants to test you, not the way you think you should be tested, not the way you think you . God will test you as He wants to test you. But you say afterwards, " Why did he do it that way?" He did it that way because it's exactly the way that you can't hold on to it. When I was with Baba, for years, nobody talked to me in his ashram. Actually, I was like some kind of a leper. I looked at people and they....... looked at me like that. And it was nothing. It never bothered me. It was their way of testing me, it was not their way of testing me...I didn't care about it. I really used to go to the river and sit and take a bath because we had beautiful hot springs along the river. And I really sat with Baba's teacher, who was my teacher, Nityananda, and I talked to him. I said, "Well, these people don't want to talk to me. I'll talk to Nityananda." And it made me go inside. And all of these things should do that. If you go outside and blow it, you really have lost what you have been given. You always have to go inside....in any situation. If I stepped on your hand and you had to go further inside to keep your attention, this was God stepping on your hand. And it forces you go to in. If somebody's coughing in your ear, that's God coughing in your ear. Otherwise, it's some son-of-a-bitch who's trying to screw your class. You have to make the choice. It's up to you how you want to interpret your symbolism. So for me, my conditions in the ashram were wonderful. It really kept me from having people say to me, which they do in India, "What's your experience?" Nobody is interested in having an experience. They'd rather know your experience. It's much easier. It's like reading movie magazines....how Jean Harlow moved her hips....it's so stupid because nobody's experience will ever put anything in you. Your whole life is to have your experience and for you not even to tell it, but for you to surrender it. Because no experience is worth talking about. It's not worth talking about because if you surrender it, it goes back into its original state when you surrender your experience, it becomes again energy and that energy carries you from the 6th floor to the 7th floor. And if you keep talking about what's on the 6th floor, you're going to be in Ladies Hosiery for the rest of your life. Talking about...knock, knock, Aunt Minnie is up there and she's giving you the recipe for her brown betty. And this is what happens with people. They bring it down to a very low level. And they stay on that level. You become somebody who's exchanging recipes. Somebody else's recipe not only won't work for you, it will probably give you some kind of indigestion. Because we are individually different. This is one thing God has done. He's got a computer which makes everybody different. You don't come out in the same combination. When you feel somebody is like you, that's the time to walk away. If it stays where it is, it becomes physical death. A human being is born and there's only one thing open to him....that's physically to die.....or to work on everything that happens, everything that comes into his life represents something which must be broken down and transcended. It doesn't mean you lose it. It means you give it away and it reforms. If it's meant to be, it will stay there. If it isn't meant to be, it will go away. So it's a kind of a roulette you've got to play with God. And He'll take what He wants and give you back what He wants. But you have to let go. And you can't trick it at all. And this happens over and over again, where you're saying, " The odds are 9 to 1 if I let go of this will I get it back?" You can't play that kind of a game. You have to give everything away and in the morning you'll find out what you're left with. And it's really where spirituality exists. Because you don't know what's right and you don't know what's wrong. You only know what you want to hold on to and you only know what you want to give away. And what you want to give away is usually the thing you're positive about is the thing that stops you from growing spiritually. Because purity is a gas. Nothing can grow in purity. You make a pure anything and see if you can raise anything in it. It doesn't happen. Purity is one of the greatest tricks in the mind of people. They're all working to be pure but the minute you get pure, stick something in it. And you have to really have something impure to transcend. God made you to be pure when you die. You have that possibility. And you get purer. But nobody is pure. And it's only one thing that you use to inflict on other people. Your purity is somebody else's distress because you keep bludgeoning them with your purity. And if you bludgeon them with it, it certainly isn't pure. You can't ever pull that kind of a trip on anybody. I think it stinks. If I ever have problems in my life, it's when I get too pure sometimes and I take somebody who is very difficult for me, who really has a lot of problems and I love them. A great deal of problems, if you're with them and you stay open, you take in from them, their energy. Their energy will help break down your energy because if you can't get rid of something in you, taking on 10 times more from somebody else sometimes will flush the whole thing out. But you don't do that until you're very, very strong. You don't help anybody until you've grown. If somebody's laying it on you, you just surrender and just walk away until you're strong enough to help them. Because to half help them means 2 people drown not 1 people being saved. And if you want to serve God, then you have to serve God. If you want to serve people then you go in the Salvation Army. There's a different organization for everything. And you have to within yourself, understand that. You have to get very strong inside to serve God. It's called having a root system. It's called being connected. And if you keep loading yourself up, you'll never get connected, then you can help thousands of people. It takes a great deal of strength and it takes a great deal of maturity to say, "no." That's part of your karma and you watch yourself. Baba talks about choosing people, choosing people to be with, it has to do with that. You have to get very strong and then you can serve a lot of people. But you have to be strong to begin to serve yourself. And the work that I've taught most of my life is Kundalini Yoga. That has to do with taking in a force and bringing it down through the mind, because I don't use the mind and you bring the mind inside, and ask for help to surrender so that you can grow spiritually. Which means that the mind is inside you, and I've always used the chakra below the belly button because it's kind of in a very good place and I would keep asking for help to surrender so that the mind would start to open this chakra. You can then also have your mind in the heart saying, "Guru Om" because the Guru is God. And it's the Guru's what you have. No man can work from himself. He has to take from the Guru. And it's the Guru's energy that makes a marriage with his energy that brings about rebirth. It's the same thing on a physical level. It's the same thing on the spiritual level. And that's why pride is when one rejects the Guru, then you no longer have this dichotomy. You never have these 2 energies working together. One energy by itself is not enough. And it's the reason for people who are married or people who love each other to surrender to each other, not to fight with each other. When you surrender to another energy, then you have 2 energies. One comes underneath the other and it raises it. And that's how you transcend yourself. Baba has killed me, actually, on this trip. He's killed me and killed me and killed me. And I went home last week. For a week I was completely without any capacity to feel, think or act. And I gave away my teaching, too. He said I can never teach and he gave me a higher level of teaching. And it wasn't a bargain. He is my teacher. And I accept what he says. And I surrender to him. I trust him. I have to trust somebody. He's the only one I know that I can trust because he's really extraordinary. And you have to feel that. Because there is nothing that anyone can do because there is no bad in this world. Bad is only in the mind when you're closed. When you close the mind, then this is bad. When you are in a situation that has no property, that's an illusion. So something cannot be bad, it can only be an illusion. And you can understand the difference in situations by whether a situation feeds you, whether it nourishes you, whether it's giving you something. If it's not giving you, then it's taking. And things are leaving you and you're not receiving. That's an illusionary situation. And this is one of the worst things for people spiritually and physically and emotionally. When you get involved with something look at it very simply. It's always given me the courage to come back to Baba. Every time I've ever had a situation with him and something has gone; something has come on a higher level. This is thousands and thousands and thousands of times. So he says "Guru Om", I say "Guru Om." He says "Duck", I say "Duck." He says "Chicken", I say "Chicken." It doesn't matter whether you feel right or you don't feel right. No one is asking you to understand it logically. You want one thing when you work spiritually and that is to have results. You want very concrete results. This thing of faith is wonderful but better than faith are results. Baba really gives you a full stomach. You sit with him, you feel inside you nourishment. It isn't this nebulous thing. He can bomb everyone of us out of our mind 10 thousand times. He's loaded! He's loaded! And you tune in on him and you receive from him. You open inside and you let him fill you where he wants to quit, you open and you receive. That's the nature of receiving, not saying, " I want it in the head. I want it in the head. I want it in the head. I want it in the stomach. I never got it in the heart before." You really just relax and open inside and it will come in you as it's supposed to come because there may be a piece of apple pie missing in your brain. He puts it in there and it comes all the way down. Everything connects. It isn't this kind of stupid thing of going to a hardware store looking for a washer for a sink. You don't know what's missing. Almost all of it's missing.... so he'll give you what you need and then suddenly something you'll understand. And it will be against every kind of logic in the world. Because spirituality is not on the earth. And there is no logic in spirituality. There is only logic in result. The earth is filled with logic and miserable people killing each other.
SR1-1