At The Breast Of The Mother

This is the first of a two-part SUN feature on the Prison-Ashram Project and its journal, Inside Out.

The project is an undertaking of the Hanuman Foundation, set up by the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and begun in response to letters from prisoners needing help and guidance for their inner awakening.

In this first installment, we’re reprinting a lecture by Ram Dass given on September 26, 1975 at the University of Kansas and originally appearing (under the title, “The Game Becomes Very Interesting”) in the second issue of Inside Out. “We feel that it is a useful overview of the spiritual journey that we are all sharing,” the editors of Inside Out declare. We agree.

Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert in 1931, is the Harvard professor turned psychedelic explorer turned Hindu devotee who remains the teacher. His own story can be read in Be Here Now. Another, more recent collection of his talks, is The Only Dance There Is (Anchor, 1974). His importance — or more accurately, the importance of the message he conveys — has been inestimable for many of us. We are honored to be able to share that message in this way.

The Prison-Ashram Project itself has been a success, as the excerpts from Inside Out which will appear in next month’s SUN attest. The journal itself is free to all inmates, prison staff, and prison-yoga instructors. Others who request it are asked to make a contribution to the project.

You may write to Bo Lozoff, the project director, at:

Prison-Ashram Project
Box 395, Route 1
Bahama, NC 27503

In a gathering like this it is no longer sufficient to just talk about it, now we have to become it. For the transmission that you come to receive is in truth not a conceptual one. What I know I will share with you, but what I am you must take, and for you to take what’s here you have to acknowledge who you are. For if you come with the certainty that you already know and that what you have is enough, then though you will hear the words, you will not receive the transmission. If we transported this evening to a cave in the Himalayas that you had all spent months getting to, and you entered the cave after much purification and sat before me, you would be ready to receive the transmission. Now it is a question of whether in this structure, in Lawrence, Kansas, convenient to your home, in the course of the evening whether the same space can be created. For by the time you got to the Himalayan cave you would recognize that what you’re seeking in the transmission has very little to do with time and space, it has very little to do with your body, with your personality. It was only when Don Juan had destroyed Castaneda’s personal history that the transmission could occur. But when you sit in an auditorium and there is a speaker, you tune in one set of receiving devices, your ears, your eyes and your conceptual analytic mind. But to receive this transmission requires much more than the mind. It requires a desire in you. A desire in you to use this birth in order to become who you in truth are. It requires the desire that you become free of the kinds of clinging and attachment that keep distorting and narrowing your vision. It requires that you truly desire to know what you are doing here, what your function is here on earth. And in truth to be saying: I want more than the reality that is available to me through my senses and my thinking mind. It requires that you take those moments every one of you have had in your life when you have been in tune with the Tao, with the harmony of the universe, with the flow, when for a moment you set aside your separateness, your self-consciousness. You have then become part of the process, in the same way as a tree or a brook or wheat is part of the process. Take those moments that all of you have had and bring them into the foreground at this moment and make them figure so that they stand out and put the rest of the forms of your life into the background.

I was raised by a Jewish middle class woman, my mother, who was very busy being just that, very concerned with propriety, the appropriate food and the way to raise her children and I reacted as an appropriately neurotic Jewish son. And then my mother died and I met my guru. And he, Maharaji, was talking about my mother and said, “You know, she’s a great saint.” At the moment that he said that, my entire conception of her shifted and I saw the few moments when she and I had met in the spirit, as spiritual entities, and suddenly the whole way we had inter-acted as mother and son in this particular round fell into the background, a reversal.

Your daily life is full of this and that, it’s full of pulls and pushes, it’s full of clingings of mind. You are literally at the mercy of your senses and your thoughts. And those senses and thoughts just keep recreating your mold or model or view of the reality. It keeps reassuring you that you’ve got it all pegged, that’s just the way it is. But every one of you had a moment, had many moments when you broke through, as if you stuck your nose through the veil and you saw that wasn’t who you were at all. But then because most of you had no context in which to put it, you pulled back out of fear. You reassured yourself that the world was the way it was and you referred to those experiences as hallucinations, “I went crazy, it was far out,” as something discontinuous with your daily life. A statistic reported in The New York Times magazine section about mysticism in America said that two-fifths of the population of the United States, eighty odd million people, have had a transcendent mystic experience. Of the sampling of those two-fifths, 80% said, “Yes, it was the most profound experience of my life and I never want to have another one.” Because it upset the apple cart, it blew their scene apart.

But what it touched and what you have touched and what they touched is something that you can’t quite push back under the rug, it keeps pulling on you. And as you get further on with this incredible journey, there are many times when you wish that it had never happened. But the problem with all of you is that once the door is opened you can’t quite close it again. All of you know too much, you’re trapped. You don’t even know what you’re trapped in, but otherwise what would you be doing here? I mean, this would have no relevance to you, this would not be part of your reality. You could be where the action is. You know there’s been some seed planted in you that’s making you do this weird thing. I mean, there’s no status in coming here, nobody’s counting. And that seed ultimately is going to do nothing less than totally, totally turn your life around. You may drag your feet, for a day, for a year, for a lifetime, for a few lifetimes, but you’re hooked.

So what is required here besides the desire to open, to know, to find out, to become, besides the recognition of that seed which has been planted, what is also required for this journey is an open heart.

Sit now, sit straight, and breathe in and out of your heart five times deeply. I’ll tell you what to do before you do it. Each time you take a breath in, just make believe, we’ll just make believe now, make believe that this room was actually loaded with some substance, it’s a very fine mist. You can’t see it, you just have to trust me because I’m up here and I’m telling you. See. We’re just making believe now. There’s this mist, we’ll call it a golden mist, what do you say? It’s a golden mist and it just permeates this whole place. And since you’re going to give me poetic license to be as crazy as I want, let us further imagine that there really are beings on other planes of existence and that they have been called here because of the purity of our seeking. Remember what Christ said, “Where two are gathered . . .” that one. Say there are some beings here that are waiting to fill you, to feed you, to bless you, to give it to you, if you would but acknowledge it and allow it. Let’s say there is a mist surrounding you and there are beings here and every breath you take in you draw in this mist by focusing on it. You start with the heart though, focus on the heart and then later let it go through your body and then when you breathe out let it clear out all the stuff within you that keeps you from having the transmission at this moment, all of the “Well I don’t know about that,” “What is he, some kind of a nut?”, the anger that you have left over from what happened earlier today, the frustration because you’re not making it enough, or you’re making it with the wrong person, or you’re flunking, or your dope supply ran out, or whatever, you know. Frustration, anger, doubt, all that heavy stuff which keeps you from being once again simple, open and almost naive in your openness to the universe. All of your sophistication you can breathe that out too; you can have that back as you leave. So take in a deep breath, breathe in the mist, really close your eyes and really do it, as deep as you can possibly do it, a slow deep breath, and when you breathe out, breathe out all the heaviness, the tension, all the stuff you’ve collected in your body and your mind, all the doubt, all the ill will, just let it out, breathe it out again and then take another breath of the mist. Just keep filling yourself. Do it through the heart so the heart keeps opening. Five deep breaths. Make as much noise as you need to make. Pull in that mist, pull in that light as if you were pulling in a very pure energy and filling your body. And then breathe out all the heaviness, all the doubt, all the confusion, all the anger. Take one special breath for all the unworthiness and self pity that you all have. And then stay with your eyes closed when you’ve finished the five breaths.

Now imagine that you are a being who was born into this body that you’re in at this moment. Imagine that you’re sitting in your heart and look around at your environment which is your body. Experience the body now as surrounding you rather than you. Look up to that huge head above you, the control center which is full of the structure of your ego, of who you think you are. Look around at all the muscles, all the nerves, at all the organs of the body. See it as a very exquisite temple, as an edifice, as an extraordinarily intricate device. Your brain alone, if we tried to create a computer like it, would cover the face of the earth. One brain. And you sit, you, this essence, this being, you sit right in the middle of your chest. Where did you come from and what are you doing here? What are you doing in this edifice which has its life unfolding? Who you are in truth is formed out of that mist. Who you are in truth came originally from the substance. Though the word will upset many of you, you came from the substance of God. And you have entered into these edifices time and time and time again. Each time you’ve entered into an edifice at the time of birth, the veil has descended once again and you’ve identified totally with the structure it felt and you thought, “I am this body, I am man, I am woman, I am of this religion, I am of this nationality, of this color, of this background.” And even though many of you are Christian, the Father Christ referred to as being not of this earth is not real for you. For in the illusion, your father was of this earth. Time and time again, you’ve been born into a body just like one. And certain work has happened in the course of a lifetime and then you died. Again and again and again.

You want to know how long you’ve been doing this?

You’re not Johnny Come Lately. You wouldn’t be in this room if you were. I don’t care how young you are chronologically in this life, that isn’t it, or how old. Buddha describes an image, a mountain six miles by six miles by six miles, and every hundred years a bird flies over that mountain carrying a silk scarf in its beak and it runs the silk scarf over the mountain. In the length of time it would take that scarf to wear away that mountain, that’s how long you’ve been doing it, birth, life, death, birth, life, death, and here you are now in another one. The only difference is that in this one you are beginning to awaken out of the illusion in the middle of the birth rather than after the moment of death. Do you know how many rounds you’ve had to go through to get to this point?

And while the edifice, your mind and your body, desires — it desires food, it desires sex, it desires security, it desires gratification of the senses, do you know what you want? What you want — you that’s sitting inside? You want to be part of the harmony, the mist, the flow, the living spirit. To put it in Christian terms, your soul wishes to return from whence it came. And you keep approximating in life all the techniques you can to experience something that’s like it almost. Every orgasm you have is a transcendent moment. Every time you lose yourself in beauty or in music or in food, as you take the first gulp of the perfect milkshake, as you ride your motorcycle on a fall sunny day, as you play with your baby and get lost in the beauty of that child. But the problem is that all of those last only for a moment because they’re in time and space and what your soul is yearning for is not a momentary experience. You’re not interested in just getting high again. You are interested in becoming. You are interested in not loving, but being love. You are interested not in just seeing truth, but in being truth. Not in just enjoying beauty, but in being beauty. Where your every act, the movement of your hand, the conversation, your breath is always in the flow of things. That you are not angular and separate and feeling cut off and trying desperately to love and to grab and to collect and to possess because there is no need to possess because you’re part of it all. And the desire of that soul is not just to know that, but to be that. Not just to know the universe, but to be the universe, not just to know God (here’s the heresy) but to be God. That’s heavy. I mean you with all your unworthiness? Grandiose desires for that soul.

And as you look around at yourself and all the other beings around you, you see that to the extent that they identified with their bodies and their personalities, they kept trying to grab at that perfect balance and harmony and flow and they grabbed it for a moment and then lost it again. That is the suffering that Buddha talks about in his Four Noble Truths. That is what Christ talks about when he says, “Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt and thieves break in . . .”

For who you are is not who you think you are. You are so brilliant, radiant, luminous, divine, that you can’t stand to even think of it because it’s too inconsistent with who you think you are. But you sit down and meditate and quiet your mind and open your heart and sit in stillness and slowly your being will become figure and the edifice will become background and you will start to recognize the truth of your existence.

What I look at when I look at other people are souls screaming to be free. For the eyes are indeed the windows of the soul. Look into another person’s eyes and what you see looking back is another being just like yourself saying, “I’m in here, how do I get out? Why am I separate from you?” Sometimes we try to make love with each other’s bodies to overcome that separateness. But the attachment to the illusion keeps casting us back into the separation.

You have all read by now of enough psychic powers, of enough miracles, of enough awesome phenomena that human beings can perform. All of that lies within every individual in this gathering. All of you. Every one of the great saints, be it a Buddha, or a Moses, or a Ramana Maharshi, or a Ramakrishna, or St. Paul, or St. Theresa, all of them are just like you. The only difference is they wanted more because their soul was trying to get out of prison and that became their reality rather than their fantasy.

And here you are in this peculiar predicament, inside this being in Lawrence, Kansas. And you grew up thinking you were this being and that was the only reality and now because something happened to you, you recognize that maybe that isn’t absolute reality. It’s only relatively real. For you’ve experienced, albeit momentarily, other realities and somewhere inside you sense that they were equally as valid as the one in which you’re sitting in Lawrence, Kansas. Deja-vu. Meeting somebody you know you’ve known before but you’ve never met. Feeling that you’re living a life that isn’t quite who you really are.

Our Western culture treats all of this as pathology. It was interesting that in my life I spent most of my time fighting against my neurosis, fighting against my sexual pathology, my unhappiness, my tensions, my dermatitis, all my stuff, psychoanalysts, medicines. And then later, much later, I began to realize the perfection of the universe. I began to understand the statement that suffering is grace. Because I began to see that every aspect of my life has fed in me the process that was bringing me closer and closer and closer to awakening. It’s an interesting flip around when suddenly all of your suffering becomes the stuff that forced you into the predicament you’re in now.

Now, just to give you a sequence of where you’re at. In this lifetime the awakening has begun. It’s not completed or you wouldn’t be in this hall at this moment, unless you just came to bless us. For lifetime after lifetime you were looking down and ahead and your whole world was based on collecting security, gratification, more security, more gratification. And then you looked up — (or in, it doesn’t matter where). Now what happens is a whole new set of problems because you can get so drunk on what happens when you look up that you forget to look down again. You become a God intoxicant. You become somebody that’s a Buddhist that goes around saying it’s all perfect and empty and there’s nothing to do and therefore you can screw everybody. That’s not Buddha, that’s a misinterpretation of the truth — there is nothing to do. There is a moment when you have looked up to the peaks of the Himalayas and you see the snow, the pure white snow, the pure mind of the Buddha, the diamond-blue-white, crystalline-clear, pure love of the Christ; but you have to also, if you’re going to make the game perfect, look down and see the blood on the snow that comes from the bleeding heart of Jesus. You have to see the suffering. You have to see your incarnation. You have to see all of it, with strength, with compassion. For only that person who simultaneously looks up and down can stand before God, can stand in God, in perfection.

Until your every breath is truth — the inbreath consumes the Mother, the universe; between the inbreath and the outbreath you sit with God; and in the outbreath you feed humanity. Until that balance is met, you will not be living in truth. You get too caught in righteousness, in being a good person, in living in the world with man’s morality, and you forget that truth. That truth which says it’s all perfect including war, including starvation, including violence, including it all. It’s all the wild dance of Kali, it’s all of God in tune with the devil as the creation of God. “He who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is but the other face of the King of Light knows not me.” Who knows not that Krishna takes many forms as he expounds to Arjuna in Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita. The looking up is seeing the truth, the empty, full, nonjudgmental totality of it all and, having the eyes that have been burned out so that you are the living dead, to look upon this truth and say yes — that was Job’s predicament — and at the same time to remember that you are in an incarnation for a reason. You look down and when the child cries you comfort the child, and when the sick are sick you heal them or help them, and when somebody’s hungry you feed them. You keep it together on this plane, not getting lost in that. That is the balance. It is the balance between truth and caring.

For this journey that you’re on is a series of the most delicate balances you’re going to have to learn and the lessons are going to come very hard. For example, if you sit and meditate and do some breathing and get very strong, you will start to have a lot of power, it’s called shakti, and you’ll start to develop powers. You can do things with it. But shakti without love is just Hitler all over again. And love without shakti is very weak. So there’s another balance. In your sadhana, in your spiritual work you will develop the powers and then blend them with love, until ultimately you get to the point where you are in the highest space, where love and shakti are exactly the same thing. You’ll have to be very careful along the way because the power is something you always wanted. Oh, you’ll be nice with it, you’ll say I’m going to do good with the power, but beware. Balance. Buddha calls it the Middle Way. Now you’re in an interesting predicament because the awakening that’s happened to you has made you recognize at least in part that there is a plan, there is a natural order to things.

If I may presume to use words that still upset some of you a lot, there is the Will of God. And then there’s something else, there’s your will, man’s will. Remember the Garden of Eden? What God did there was create the perfection of it all and then, within that perfection, he added one ingredient — man’s choice to go against God’s will. And that was the instruction — Don’t eat of the apple which will make you separate. For the minute you take a bite of the apple of knowledge, you no longer will be God and the universe, you will begin to know God and the universe and that knowing will make you separate and that separateness will give you power as a separate entity, but it will take you away from God. That’s why in Buddhism it’s called No-Mind. Enlightenment is called No-Mind. Adam and Eve had No-Mind; except within them, within that perfection was man’s choice. And you are all the progeny of the choice to go against the Will of God. That’s what you’re doing here. How did you get here in the first place? Why aren’t you in the Garden of Eden right now? Up until you recognized your predicament, which unfortunately has already happened now for you, you could cop out and get away with it because you were just doing what you thought was the decent thing to do and you didn’t know about anything else. So then it was okay. There was no karma that accrued from all your errors. There was karma but it wasn’t the same kind of karma that there is once you know how it is and then go against it. Then it gets interesting. Once you have had that vision where you have looked at other human beings and see that they are just like you only they’re in different bodies. And then you go out and rip somebody off. That’s a different matter than if you didn’t know that in the first place. Then you were just totally identified with your separateness and were busy surviving. And the far out thing about these thousands and thousands of incarnations in which you have again and again used your will, sometimes in harmony with the Will of God and sometimes not, is that God doesn’t care because God doesn’t live in time. And if you don’t live in time, what’s the rush? You’ll get home sooner or later. Another hundred million incarnations. Who cares? We’re all here anyway. As Buddha says — nothing happens. So what’s the rush? You’re only caught in an illusion. It’s only you that wants to get out of the suffering, God doesn’t care. God isn’t in the suffering in the first place.

But if you’re like me what happens is, you begin to recognize how the game was designed in the first place. And by the way, who designed it was you; of course, you understand that it’s not who you think you are, but who in truth you are, so don’t lay it on anybody else. It’s not, “God I’ll get you,” it’s you, you’re it, you did it to yourself and then got lost in it. It’s like designing a game of hopscotch and then you think that you’re the hop or the scotch or whatever it is that you become in the hopscotch. See? Slowly, slowly, slowly. If you’re like me it dawns on you what it is that you are caught in or doing or what is possible and you get greedy and that’s the greed that liberates you. And that greed to come into that Flow; into the Spirit, into the living waters as Christ talks about, to know the Father, to become one with the Father — I am with the Father and the Father is in me, I am in that One. In order to do that you get so that you’re willing to tune your choices to the Will of God, to find the way to flow in the harmony of things. The whole meaning of your life starts to change. No longer are you looking for what it is that I can get here and now, but how do I tune? And your life becomes a tuning, a tuning process. A quieting, a deepening, a tuning, a harmonizing. After a while you get so that when you are in that tuning you are experiencing a purity of vibration, a love that you are part of, a truth, a clarity in your life and the minute your mind grabs or you get lost again you feel the heaviness, the density, and you feel a thickening and a heaviness, as if you just dove from air into water. You go into a thicker medium, like you’re around other people that are sharing a tuning of the spirit and then you go out with people who you have taken advantage of and you feel that paranoia creep in along with the heaviness and the separateness. You’ll be open and free in a situation and then a judgment will come into your mind and as that judgment comes in you will feel the density start. You’ll be feeling very loving and suddenly lust will enter the picture and the density gets heavier.

Most of you know that image that I use: The image of the selector on the side of your eyes that you keep focusing in with. You look through the first circuit, you look out on the world and all you see are people’s bodies and you say — There’s a blond, there’s a brunette, boy, she’s shaped nice, and he’s handsome and that’s fat and that’s thin and that’s old and that’s young. You talk about mesomorphs, ectomorphs, endomorphs, old and young, dark and light, and that’s your focus, that’s your reality. That is primarily concerned with what is called the second chakra or sexual orientation, and it’s your whole reality. All people fall into three categories, those that are potentially makeable, those who are competitors with you for those that are makeable and those that are irrelevant. And everybody’s one of those three categories. And that’s all of reality. That’s the whole world, it’s just one of those three, there’s irrelevant, there’s potential, there’s competitor. That’s standing watching all the girls go by on the street corner. That’s that reality.

Then you flick the little television circuit once and you’re in the world of psychology. And everybody — he’s nice, she’s manic depressive. See? That person is very difficult to get along with, that person is very kind, responsible. I’m a seeker of the light, that’s a good one. I’m a warm, mature person. I’m somebody that needs love. I’ve screwed up my life. I’m confused. That’s all psychological realities right, and that’s a whole reality and a lot of people live in that. That’s what they live in, they dress in it, they clothe themselves in it, they go around seeing it, they study it, they get analyzed, they analyze, they just keep doing it, on and on and on. And that’s the reality. And it is the reality; that’s all. They don’t notice bodies, the bodies decay. They don’t care. They don’t look up, they don’t look down, they’re just all psychology. I was in that business so I know. I mean, if somebody would have a spiritual experience, I was a Freudian, so we just interpreted it as sublimated sexuality. Then there’s another flick. Flick. Now the world is twelve categories and various permutations. Everybody you look at — there’s a Leo, there’s an Aries, I know you, you’re a Libra, obviously. See. You’ve now done an astral fix, a new game of individual differences. You gain all this kind of power because you know more about people ’cause you know their astrology, you know their subtle body now which is inside their physical body and you know the cause of their something that lies behind their personality, a planetary fix. More individual differences.

We’ve gone through body, personality, astrology, flick. Now what do you see when you look at another person? You see another person looking back at you. Inside these packages. You see the body, you see the personality, you see the astrology, and inside is another person just like you. Are you in there? Far out. How did you get in that one? And it’s just these beings meeting inside these packages of individual differences. And no longer are these individual differences the reality that is so solid. They’re just like shirts and jackets and sweaters. That’s a pretty personality you’re wearing. Where did you get that one? I bought it in Gestalt Therapy. It’s primal scream. But it’s still separate. You’re separate from me.

Shall we go the mystic journey and flick once more. Then what you see when you look at another person — it’s as if two mirrors are facing each other and there’s nothing in between. It’s itself looking at itself looking at itself looking at itself. There is only one of it in all these different forms. And though you and I are in these separate things it is only as if one of us decided to make two in order to make believe we’re separate. But here I am and in this case all of us are in drag. You’re all making believe you’re audience and I’m making believe I’m lecturer so that we can play this one out. This is all called the divine lila of the One, the Ancient One. And you are the One and I am the One. This is it. And this is all play, all of this stuff.

One more. One more flick. And now . . . you’re in an interesting place. Because now you’ve gone beyond the One, you’ve gone beyond the concept of God. You’ve gone into God where God is not. Because God is a concept and obviously where it really is there are no concepts. That’s called nirvana in Buddhism. So now when you flick it what you see is a totally empty screen. It is the formless out of which all form comes. It is the Aum, the unmanifest universe. It is where you have merged into God and that is where God is not, meaning the concept of God is not. Now every single one of those flips is another reality and there are people living in every one of them and from where they’re sitting, that’s real.

If you took a construction job and worked with somebody who just watches the girls go by all day, but you know what’s real reality and you say to him, “But we’re all One.” (“What are you some kind of a nut?!!”) But by the same token you find a being who is looking with eyes that see, the eye that sees and sees the Oneness in all things and you say, “Hey, dig that chick.” It’s the same one. “Is he putting me on?” How did you get that separate from the universe in order to experience lust? That’s what God meant when God said, “Thou shalt not lust,” that’s what that was about. You won’t get so separate from the universe that you will experience another person as an object. And then love making can only be done in love and to reproduce.

The predicament is that if you are in any one of those realities, if you’re just in that reality alone, you still are not free. For as the Third Chinese Patriarch says, “It is neither this nor that, there is no clinging anywhere, not even to enlightenment.” For ultimately you must be able to have a vision that clearly sees all of it and clings to none of it so that you are both God and man and woman. See, that’s an interesting one. That entity that got born into your body is neither man nor woman. That’s why so many of you in this generation that are awakening are having so many weird sexual trips, of not quite finding the role thing and the physical-psychological aspects of your identity quite meaningful enough because you’re half tuned with this being within you and that has nothing to do with any of that.

That’s the example I use about the eating of the pizza. See on the physical plane you love pizza, but the soul couldn’t care less. The soul lives on nectar, it doesn’t need pizza. So your personality and your body says I need pizza so you go and you order a really good pizza with extra cheese and peppers and the whole business and you go to take a bite and your body, your psychology, the person in Lawrence, Kansas, is going, “Yum, yum, yum, oh, I wish there was more, oh, isn’t this wonderful.” And your other being is saying, “Eating another pizza.” It’s not judging, it’s not putting you down, it’s not doing anything, it’s just noticing. For a long time what you try to do is shut that off . . . “Will you shut up, I’m just trying . . . Just let me eat my pizza in peace, for God sakes . . . all right, I’ll go to God later . . . Let me eat the pizza.” That’s what I mean by finally all of your actions relate to only getting on with the journey to God.

The top part of the scale is you are in fact God. You are a statement of the Will of God at that point, that’s how the game works. Very simple. Idiot simple. It’s a question of how long it takes you to do it. Ha. Ha. But along the way it gets pretty hairy because you go up the scale a little bit and you get all kinds of powers but you haven’t gone up the scale enough to understand the full design of the game, so you can start to use the powers too soon to do what you think is good, but your good isn’t in the harmony with the total scene and you end up creating all kinds of stuff for everybody. Now does that mean you don’t do anything? No. It’s very simple how it works. You say — Look, from where I’m at I don’t really know what it’s all about at all. I know a little bit. And I’m still living in life, I can’t go off to a cave ’cause that’s out of harmony. I can feel that I am a Westerner living in America at this time with these responsibilities and I’m part of this collective community and I must live my responsibilities out. So what you say is — What in truth I can offer to other human beings is my being, and since I am not enlightened, I will use every act of my life to become enlightened and every act will be whatever it is I do. So if you’re a mother, you use your mothering as a vehicle to go to God, you don’t say, “Shut up, kid, I’m meditating.” You don’t create this kind of thing — If my life only wasn’t this life, I could go to God. That’s phony.

For a while, on the spiritual trip you looked around and everybody looked like these weird distorted beings, everybody was busy trying to be the Buddha or trying to be the Christ or you know. It’s called phony holy. I mean, it’s not just in holy work, in universities everybody gets like . . . I’m full of ideas about the future. See and what happens is you know that there is some plan of things and you don’t know it, so you look around for somebody who must know it and you imitate them. But that isn’t going to do it. You just end up being a phony holy. Finally you get to a point where you say, “The hell with that.” I mean, as I’ve said in lectures, I used to have to sneak around the corner to dark areas to get pizza because Ram Dass, with his white thing and beads, I mean, he couldn’t eat pizza. And for some of us what happened was, we went from being very, very, very good, the pendulum swung, and then it was, “Well, I’m just going to be honest.” And then there was wild everything and then in that was the yearning from a new level now to honor that soul that was crying to get out. So people who meditated to be good from outside in and then said — Screw that — and went out and lived life, suddenly found themselves wanting to sit quietly, a whole new level.

You will find in this journey that many of the things that you threw over because they were phony at one level, you will go back and find them from a new space of your own consciousness. Like I go to church and the hymns blow my mind, they are so absolutely beautiful . . . and everybody in church is singing them like a shopping list for the grocery store. You will find that as you evolve many of the forms of your life that you rejected because of the level of your own development, you’ll run back through. You’ll suddenly find joy in like relationships in your family. Where the family was a drag before because it was a conflicting of values and motives and so on, suddenly there will be a joy in the dance, the lila, the dance of life. I hang out with my father, with my stepmother, and with my brother, a lawyer. Everybody is different from me, the values are completely different. For years we were like this, putting each other down, judging, but then I started to be kind of secure in what I am and I started to see it all as the dance of life and my compassion developed to the point where I didn’t have to go around converting everybody. When you have no compassion and you’re not sure what you’re doing is right, you try to get everybody else to do it, even if you have to kill them. As you get more certain that what you’re doing is what you need to be doing, you recognize that what other people are doing is what they need to be doing.

See, the predicament is that if you say that there are ten thousand incarnations you might be on incarnation 8,800 and your parents or your brother or your child might be in incarnation 4,000. Does that make them better or worse? No. A twenty year old is not better or worse than a fifty year old. They are just different in age. So you end up looking at beings as older or younger, not necessarily higher and lower. They’re just older and younger. And you start to develop your individual differences. Because you realize that your work is your work. Now in the course of your work, who you hang out with starts to change. See, you’ve had old friends and family, then as you start to recognize what your journey is about you look around for other people that are sharing that perception and you start to move towards them and some of your old friends fall away. And at that stage you might try to push away your family or your husband or your wife or your children because they’re not sharing the journey. Later you recognize that there are different kinds of relationships and some of them like parents and husband and wife and child are what are called the given karma of a lifetime. They are not things you can drop like old friends. Friends you can grow away from as your journey spreads out. That’s reasonable. But you honor your parents right from the beginning to the end because they are the parents that gave birth to you in this incarnation even though their values are different. And your being forced to confront the difference in values is the grist for the mill of your work on yourself. That’s the fire you need to burn out. Because the only reason they get to you, the only reason somebody else’s different values get to you is because you are not clear in where you’re at. Sometimes you get furious with your parents because they represent some values in you that you’ve repressed, you wish you didn’t have, so you hate them for it. That’s not good enough. If there’s anybody that get to you at all, if there’s anybody that gets you angry, if there’s anybody that frustrates you, that is grist for the mill. There is no way you can walk away from that stuff and end up free. It is impossible. If you truly want to become a liberated being in this lifetime, everything in your life has got to become grist for your mill of awakening. Every time you are irritated, angry, frustrated, lustful, doubting, desirous, that’s the stuff you work with.

It’s really nice when you go to an ashram or a cave, there’s no frustration. Everybody around you is holy, nobody is pushing you very hard, that’s easy. How about living right in the middle of Lawrence, Kansas and every day having to deal with all kinds of different people. Imagine if you could make it in that scene, how clean you’d be, how squeaking clean you would be. The purification is not good and evil. Purification is letting go of the stuff in you that keeps turning you off from the process of the universe. It turns you off from God, it turns you off from the flow. Attachment to your thoughts turns you off from the flow. That doesn’t mean you don’t desire those things, it means you don’t cling to the desire, you don’t get attached to the desire, you don’t identify with the desire. I can want a chocolate milkshake, but I don’t sit around being someone who wants a chocolate milkshake. There is the desire for a chocolate milkshake. And it may be satisfied and it may not. And that’s the way it all is. I’m not busy being somebody who wants a chocolate milkshake. I am, and that includes chocolate milkshake desireness. Can you hear that distinction?

I’ll tell you what my reality looks like at this moment just to share with you. There are two things in the reality in which I function in that are the dominant themes. One of them is the Mother and the other is God. The entire universe, all of its forms is the Mother. You are all part of the Mother. My body is part of the Mother. I feed on the Mother. I absorb the Mother. I drink the Mother. I feed at the breast of the Mother continuously. The Mother is the shakti, is the juice, is the vibration, is the energy of the universe. I keep growing inside as I feed more and more and more. I have to consume the Mother. I consume all of it. I consume the violence and the beauty. I have to consume Kali, that aspect of the Mother that goes with dagger to destroy those things which keep people from God. The fierceness of Kali. I have to consume Kali. I have to consume the beauty of the universe. I have to take it in, not digest it so it doesn’t exist anymore, but hold it all in my heart so that I am acknowledging it all. So I am consuming the Mother and I am taking all that energy and using it in order to stay with God.

Father, Son, and the Mother is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit made manifest. The Son returns to the Father through the Holy Spirit. I work with Mother just as Ramakrishna did. I worship the Mother. I consume the Mother. I make love to the Mother. I make love to the universe. In truth, I am the bride of God. For in truth, this game is the game of returning to God. And put another way, in Tantric terms, in true Tantra, not in phony, man-made Tantra, it is intercourse with God, in which you become both the lingam and the yoni, in which you become both that which thrusts forth into God and that which opens to receive God. You are both. Any worldly ecstasy you know is as nothing compared to the ecstasy and bliss as your body enters in samadhi, as your breath stops, as your pulse stops, and as you sit on the edge of being in God. For then you are beginning to know that part of yourself which is the energy of the universe. And all of the sadhana ultimately becomes the preparation of your body, of your heart, of your mind to receive your lover. That’s what it is about. Because when the shakti enters your body, if your body is not strong enough, it will rip you to shreds. If your heart is not open and you try to go to God, it will become dry and brittle and you will go insane. Until you have a discipline, a discipline that ultimately you crave, not — He needs discipline, not that kind. But let me be disciplined so that I can sit with spine straight so that the shakti moves in an appropriate way. You can sit and you can ask God — “Let me know you God, I love you God, I feel you God.” And breathe in the Mother through your heart and take that and go with it up through the seventh chakra, the thousand-petalled lotus, go above it and go back to the Father. Which is what Christ asked you to do in the first place, “I come to you to bring you to the Father.”

And all of that, the intercourse with God, the consuming and being impregnated and impregnating and drawing to you of the Mother, all of this is in the absolute purity that comes only when you have transcended, not denied, but transcended by acknowledging all of your sexual panic, all of your power panic, all of your survival panic. Because if you try to grab God prematurely it will destroy you. It’s as simple as that.

The game becomes very interesting — whether you are so eager to have it that you will take it at whatever cost, even at your own destruction, which merely means new karma, which means you go around again and again. Or do you want it in perfection? In which case you balance, move slowly, develop strength, clean up your game, get yourself purified, meaning tuning, listening, hearing, cleaning up, strengthening, straightening, lightening, orienting your life more towards the awakening than staying asleep.

The path of going into God in truth is not an easy path. How difficult it is for you is a function of how much you are attached to your physical plane identity. But at the same moment that I tell you that it’s not an easy path, I repeat, you’re hooked. So it doesn’t matter if it’s an easy one or a difficult one, you can’t get away anyway. And you will keep orienting and looking and listening, just as you came here tonight.

Your minds will constantly try to explain it all away. I know, I have one of those minds. Once you understand that all of the gurus that have ever existed who have tasted of God want only to be in God, and that they choose to stay in form on these planes, this plane or the astral plane, in order to liberate other beings, then you understand what a sacrifice is about. Christ’s sacrifice is not getting crucified, Christ’s sacrifice is in taking form in the first place and leaving the Father. That’s the sacrifice. And for you with your unworthiness to realize that any being is sacrificing his existence, is making the total sacrifice of his being just for you, you can’t handle it. And you’ll get hysterical and your mind will grab and do all kinds of weird stuff. ’Cause it’s too heavy. ’Cause you can’t play in the major leagues until you have a major league mentality. And that means a hell of a lot of purification for all of us.

I’m sure you’ve been in the situation where you’ve gotten into a relationship with somebody that is so pure and so delicate and so vibrationally exquisite at any moment and then they’ll say something or you’ll say something or your mind will flick in and there will be something jarring and it will be like a ripping sensation. And it will hurt you very deeply or it will hurt them. You didn’t mean to do it or they didn’t mean to do it but it just happened that way. Well, that’s why some of this can’t be shared because there’d be too much of a ripping sensation. Because the rational mind is but a little system in this huge cosmology, but the rational mind wants to be the master. And it can’t be and it will fight to its death. That’s what the Bhagavad Gita is about. Even a little of this gets in and you start to look at your life just through these little different perspectives of reality and realize they are all relatively real. Honor them. And how do you get on with it?

The things that don’t get you to God you give up. What do you give up? Unworthiness. You don’t analyze it, you just give it up. You give up guilt. Guilt isn’t going to get you to God. You give up anger. It’s not going to get you there. Do you want to get there, or do you want to screw around? That’s it. Preoccupation with your own melodrama. Do you want to hold on to it or do you want to get on with it? God doesn’t care. You’re the one that’s in a rush, you’re the one that came here tonight. You want to get on with it. Give it up. It’s very simple. That’s what the guru says. Maharaji said to me, “Ram Dass, you’re angry?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I was very righteous and he said, “Give it up.” I said, “But . . .” “Just give it up.” And he looked at me like, “I’m your guru and I just told you to give it up.” I’m telling you, if you feel unworthy to be in the presence of God, give it up, don’t analyze it, don’t say, “I’ll plan to give it up,” do it now. Here Ram Dass, you take it. Here Kali, you eat it, Kali eats it. Here Ma, you eat it. She eats anger, she eats everything in you which keeps you from God. She loves it, she feeds on it, she fills, she gorges herself on all your impurities, she loves it, she’ll come after you to get them. But she’ll only come after you if you ask her to, she won’t come if you don’t ask her, she won’t bother you at all. See. But the worst thing is if you ask her and then don’t give them to her, then you’re in for it. That’s phony holy. You must in truth want to give them up, “Here Kali Ma, you take it.”

Every time you fall on your face you get up, you brush yourself off, and you get on with it. Cut out the melodrama, “Oh, I’ve lost this, I’m bluuu . . .” That’s not going to take you to God either. See, you get very ruthless with yourself. Do I want to get there? Let me do it. Stop screwing around, I’ll do it. Unworthiness, lust, self-pity, greed, anger, doubt, sloth and torpor, and tension and anxiety. But aren’t those real, don’t all psychologists say they’re real? Sure it’s real to psychologists, if you don’t like the stuff, give it up. I’ll take it, give it to me. I won’t hold on to it. I’ll send it to God, I won’t get stuck with your karma, I won’t take anything from you unless you give it, because if I take it from you without your wanting to give it, that’s my problem then. And I got enough, sorry, without you. You can at any time in your meditations, at any time, say to any being that is here in order to help liberate other beings, take my shit, take my stuff, take it from me Ma, take it Ram Dass, take it Maharaji, take it Christ, take it, take it, take it, take it Kali, and let it go. Then breathe in to your heart and then talk to God. It’s very simple.

Every choice you make you can take you closer or further away. Day by day, minute by minute, choice by choice. And God, Guru, true Self, just sits back and watches. But if you in truth reach up and say, “Help me,” in truth, if you reach for God in truth, that is what elicits what is called Grace. And then all of the beings that are here only to serve, come forward to reach forth, just as in that picture in the Sistine Chapel of man and God touching. And then God reaches forth and helps you. But that only happens when you reach — that’s man’s will.

Sit straight and experience right in the middle of your chest a tiny being. Imagine it, use your imagination, sitting on a lotus flower, a tiny being the size of your thumb. As you look upon this being, light is pouring forth from it, radiant, luminous, just from looking upon this being you get a sense of incredible peace. You look at its face and you sense infinite compassion within this being. Just being near this entity fills you with a feeling of love. It sits quietly, perfect equanimity, great wisdom. Now let that being grow in size until it fills your body; its head, your head; it’s torso, your torso; its legs, your legs; its arms, your arms. Feel its peace; feel its equanimity; let yourself be filled with its love. Now with your eyes closed, you and the being expand in size until your head reaches to the ceiling of this hall and you’re sitting down beneath it, and all of us are within you and this voice is within you. Feel your hugeness, feel silent, peaceful, compassionate. Now you break out of the building; your head goes up into the sky; your head is among the planets; you have grown in size till you are sitting in the middle of this galaxy; the earth is within your belly. Feel your hugeness at this moment; you’re in the heavens; silent. Expand yet again until all of the planets, all of the galaxies, everything of which you can think is within you. You are the One. You are the Ancient One. I am within you. Everything that ever was, is, or will be is part of the dance of your being. You are all of the universe so you have Infinite Wisdom. You appreciate all of the feelings of the universe so you have Infinite Compassion. Feel your immensity, your aloneness. Let the boundaries of your being disintegrate now and merge yourself into that which is beyond form and sit for a moment in the formless. Now gently, reestablish the form of your being, you are still that immense One. Very slowly reduce in size, back through the universe, smaller and smaller until your head is at the roof of this building and you’re sitting below the earth and all of the beings in this hall are within you. From this vast height look down and find who it was that walked into this hall, find who you thought you were. Look at that being. Look at her or his life. Look at that being as a soul living out another life. Look upon that being with compassion. See how it gets lost into its drama. At this moment reach down from your vast height and gently touch that being in blessing on the top of its head. At this moment you are that which blesses and that which is being blessed. Experience both simultaneously. Now come down in size until you are back into your body still with this radiant being filling you. Feel the love, compassion, wisdom. This being in its huge form fills the universe and now fills your body; and as this being, hold up your right hand palm forward, and allow yourself to become a vehicle for bringing those qualities out into the physical plane to all beings that suffer in the universe. Become a pure vehicle of that huge One, filling your body, let it pour through your hands, feel it coming out the palm of your right hand and send blessings and love to all beings who suffer, whether their suffering is physical, psychological, spiritual — it makes no difference, they are suffering. If there are beings you know who are suffering, bring them to mind and surround them with light, with love and peace at this moment. If there are beings towards whom you feel anger, bring them into your consciousness, see the soul that lies within that incarnation and bless that soul with love and peace. For as you go on this spiritual journey you must accept the responsibility to share what you receive, for that is part of the harmony of God, that you become an instrument for the manifestation of the Will of God. Now put your hand down and finally let that being become smaller and smaller until it is the size of a thumb sitting in the middle of your heart. That is your inner being, that is the inner voice that speaks truth because it is truth, that is the being who will guide you home, that is the being who is none other than your True Self when you’ve finished being who you think you are. And at any time you can go inside and start to talk to and listen to that being, whether you call it Christ or Buddha or God or my True Self.

Questions And Answers

Q: Do you need a guru on the physical plane?

A: It is possible to become enlightened without a guru on the physical plane. Everybody who has looked up at all has a guru. You may not know who your guru is, you many not know in this lifetime who your guru is; it doesn’t necessarily matter. Your guru is still guiding you to the extent that you have looked up. Your guru will lead you to many teachings, some of these teachings will be in the form of teachers. Take the teachings, trust your own intuition as to whether or not that teaching is for you and then go on. You may have met your guru and passed the guru by because you weren’t ready to know that person and then you come back at another time. Your guru might be Ramakrishna or Christ, Padmasambhava or any number of beings. Your guru may not be on the physical plane at all but your guru will lead you to many teachers. It is very useful to have teachers on the physical plane when the opportunity presents itself. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself don’t feel that you are blowing the scene, that isn’t true at all. You can still use every experience in your life to come closer to God. But when you find a teacher whom you can trust then it is useful because that teacher will help you clean up your ego in ways that you would be inclined to slide over. And what you’re trying to do is meet Kali, that form of the teaching which rips away the impurities. And that requires surrender.

Surrender is very difficult because we tend to have a very hard time surrendering to other beings that are in physical bodies, because we sit around judging them rather than surrendering to them. If you surrender to another being in purity, even though they are impure, your purity will free you, even though their impurity will entrap them. You don’t have to spend too much time worrying about the purity of your teachers, they can only lead you astray if you have the impurities. Take what teachings are around, take them with a pure heart, with a true desire for God and you’ll get what you need from whatever is around. It is best until it feels right to think of all teachers as teachings. Then you don’t have to sit around judging them. Is this one good enough to be my guru? You don’t have to worry about gurus, it’s a drag to think about it. It’ll just get you into a cop out of saying, “I can’t go ahead ’cause I don’t have a guru.” You can spend your life looking for gurus and that will get you there too. Making pilgrimages to holy places . . . it’s not the getting there, it’s the going that gets you there.

Q: Would you comment about LSD?

A: Psychedelics have shown many of us a great deal. And I honor them for that. The predicament is that once you’ve seen the possibility that psychedelics are not a full sadhana, they will not get you there. They will just show it to you again and again and again. And in the process of seeing it again, you will clean up some things but it will also reinforce a feeling that you are attached to your method. All methods are traps sooner or later. The predicament is that once you know where it is, you might as well get on with becoming it and then in this game no longer are you that eager to get high and see it again; you are more eager to become it. And at that point to become it you’re more interested in dealing with your lows than your highs. You actually go looking for lows. That’s really far out. You go looking for lows because those lows show you where your stuff is that you’re clinging to that is keeping you from being it. Do you understand what I’m saying? You go looking for the lows to eat them alive, that’s eating Kali. You eat the stuff that brings you down. You consume it and go higher on it. Not because you’re greedy for the highs but because as you let go of all that stuff pretty soon everything is the world, is the Mother, and everything is taking you to God. That’s the way it finally works. All of it. So after a while you’re not pushing this away and grabbing that, which is what you do when you turn on. You take everything just as it comes down the pike, just every day. It’s all grist for the mill. Nothing’s any different than anything else; it’s all stuff.

Now the other thing is that at a certain point, like what I found in my most recent work, is that my very extensive usage of psychedelics ultimately has become something that has made some of my higher inner work more difficult. Because it has a very strange psychic effect, not physiological, but psychic effect on the medulla — the thing in the back of the head. And the effect is as I say, it’s not neurophysiological, it’s psychic, but it creates a kind of a blockage that later makes some of your work more difficult and some of my advanced Tantric teachers have had to do a lot of operations, psychic surgery, to clean away some of the stuff I created.

Q: How do you open your heart?

A: Well, a good exercise is to do the breathing in and out of the heart, the deep breathing. And then there are a number of things. One is you can use the breath to ferret out, to find those places in you where there is a deep sadness and then let them come forth and then let them go, give them up to Kali. Keep bringing them out, the sadnesses deep within your heart that have closed you off, keep bringing them forward and bringing them forward, just keep going in and in until you’re all the way back to your spine. Keep digging and digging through breath, breathing in.

And then the other is to go out into the woods or something and start to open your heart. I physically have done it at times, just like this, like Hanuman does it. Physically you open your heart and then you ask whoever you’re in close contact with, like Christ, you might say, “Christ, let me feel your love.” You call upon Christ and ask Christ to let you feel his love. You’re not asking to love him, you’re asking that he allow you to feel his love, and if you really open yourself and ask that in truth, you will start to feel this warmth starting to touch you and permeate you and fill you and then that will start the process of your opening. To sit with a picture of some being like Christ and just experience, let that love flow back and forth between you and the picture in deep breathing. The predicament for most of you is — see, there’s a very delicate relationship between all the chakras in the body, and a lot of yogas start with the bottom of the spine, but the problem is that many people never get beyond the second chakra, the sexual place, without locking out and that closed off process ultimately keeps you from the full flow of the universe. Now the kind of work that I do, I start in the heart, just with these upper chakras, breathing in the heart, throat, the third eye, the top of the head, until you get connected up in there strongly, then you go back down, once you have this connection. You come back and clean out some of the tightnesses you have about your sexuality, and power and anxiety, about security and survival. Because when you open the heart there is a feeling that you may be violated or you may be vulnerable to others or even to your own impulses because when your heart opens all the rest of you opens too. You can’t just open the heart and keep all the rest of it closed, because actually the flow with the universe is all very much the openness of your whole being.

But the problem is that it’s in total purity, in harmony with the Will of God so even though you might desire another person you couldn’t act on that desire if it wasn’t in harmony with the Will of God. What is that about in terms of “Thou shalt not lust”? There is no guilt. You honor the desire, you honor the openness and the flow. The problem is that most people can’t take love because they can’t handle all the rest of their stuff yet and for the heart to be fully open you have to acknowledge your own sexuality, you have to acknowledge your own fears, it all has to be “Yeah, and that too.” Then the heart can open. A lot of people start to open their heart and then they feel a flood of love towards somebody and then the energy that comes into their heart, because of the habits of their body, immediately goes down and goes right into their genitals. And they just feel immediately that they’ve got to go to bed with that person or they’ve got to do something about it or there’s got to be some sort of sexual urge and then they have to push it away with guilt and shame and all that stuff. In a mature yogi there is an open heart and the juices of the universe flow in and they flow through your whole body and your whole body becomes like tingling, it’s like a total orgasm. There’s just bliss pouring through your body but at no time do you lose that connection at the top of your head to God. That’s the balance, so that what you do at first is work with the heart.

There’s a good process of breathing in through the heart and out the top of the head. In through the heart and up through the top of the head. So that breathing out takes you up closer to the transcendent stage and breathing in the heart keeps pulling in and opening the heart and bringing the Mother into the heart. If you want to open your heart, just breathe in and out of the heart. Keep cleaning out stuff, keep breathing it out, drawing in that mist that I talked about. Keep asking Christ, Hanuman, whoever — Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Krishna . . . fill my heart with love. Start a dialogue of love with a being who is love. Some of you have known Meher Baba who is so much love; Christ who is a statement of love. Christ is love. You just open yourself; you sit. That’s what concentration is about, you sit at your little puja or in your little space, and you take a picture of a being whose love is pure, one whose love is in the light of God. It’s not the love of personality; it’s not the love of romance; it’s not that love. The love of romance is needful love — I need you. Romantic love is — You are my connection to the place in me where I am love and I can only get there through you. I’m using you so I’m jealous, I’m possessive, I almost hate you because you’re my connection and you might split. Fear is in that kind of love. The kind of love that Christ gives is conscious love. He just is love. There’s nothing needful about it; he just is that. And that’s what ultimately you become, you become that kind of love. There’s no need about it. You are your own connection; you’re living in the connection, in the space, and then you don’t need anybody to turn you on to love because you are it and everybody that comes near you drinks of it. Then you sit in peace. It’s very simple about love — you sit in peace because you already are the statement of the thing you fell in love to get. The predicament is that as you become this thing more and more, the statement of love, you are falling in love with everyone.

Q: Is the amount of energy you have a function of the sex glands?

A: Again that isn’t true. The sex glands are much more symptomatic than causal in this sense. You are in fact all of the energy of the universe, it is merely that your models and your structure doesn’t allow you to express it so you may have pathology in one system or another of your being. If you can have that energy coming out in power and never in sex, it’s the same energy, it’s just in a different chakra or a different system. But if you have weak sexual activity you may also have weak energy, but it isn’t causal. It’s a correlative, it’s a symptomatic correlative.

Q: I get hung up in the paradox of desiring to be desireless, or trying to get beyond trying.

A: It is indeed a paradox but in terms of a temporal strategy you use the desire to end the desires to rid yourself of all other desires except for the desire to get rid of desires. Then you throw that one away too. But only when that’s the only thread that’s keeping you here as a desiring entity — the desire to end desires. As Ramana Maharshi said, “You burn the funeral fire and then the final stick that you used to stir it with, you throw that into the fire at the end.” It’s just a timing device. It’s just a timing process. That’s the one desire you can hold on to because when it goes it’s obvious that it has to go, you’ve just gone beyond it. You don’t have to give that one up, that one dies in itself. That’s a self-destruct desire because you get what it is that you’re desiring in the process.

Q: Why did it all begin? What are we doing here? Why did we leave in the first place?

A: That is the question which is the ultimate question and Buddha’s answer to that question was “It’s none of your business,” which is not a facetious answer. He’s saying that your mind as a subject-object mind can’t know the answer to that question. It’s an answer which you can be, but you can’t know, because in order to know that you would have to be that which is all of it from which it started, but you aren’t, as long as you’re asking the question. It’s one of those kind of absurdities that you get caught in. There are a dozen different answers all of which are phony. It’s like you said, God took form in order to know Himself. He had to become separate in order to see Himself. And that you go all the way around and as you’re coming back you know and then you merge. There is that moment of knowing.

Since there is no time in reality, nothing happened anyway. That’s a real answer too. These are all valid answers within one game or another. Every level has its own answer to that question; but in truth, the answer is not knowable until you have transcended those levels because every answer you give is just feeding your mind from one level or another, and they’re only all relatively true; they are not true in the real sense. Now that all sounds like words, which means it’s not an appropriate question. You keep asking it but you won’t get an answer. Not only from me, you just won’t get an answer. I guarantee it, it’s not a curse.

Q: What is the function of dreams?

A: All you’re seeing is what your astral body is doing working out its karma. See, most of the time your astral body is working quite independently of your psycho-physical body. Like my astral body does a lot of work with a lot of people. People write to me and say they have dreams of me and visions of me; I come to them and I do this and that. Actually my astral body is doing all that. They’re calling that body there whether I’m conscious of that body or not. It doesn’t matter, the body is still doing it. Understand? And that body is working out stuff in dreams and now and then you bring that stuff back into the physical plane. It’s nice to know. It may be a little useful or it may not. I mean any stuff is just stuff, whether it’s this plane or that plane, it’s just stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.

You can enter into your dream consciously. It depends on your choice. You have a choice. Once you are a free being, you are free. You are free to choose not to incarnate or to incarnate, that’s what freedom is, when you can stay or go. I mean, any realized being can go into Mahasamadhi, they just open the bottom of their spine and the life fluid starts to drip out and it takes seventy two hours and they just sit down and go into samadhi and in seventy two hours they leave the body, and it just decays. And they can do that by choice, any time they want, it’s a very simple method. Or you can work it out and live this life and take on cancer or something and take on a lot of karma when you’re doing it and work out a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Then you can get it all done and immediately take another birth right away. Because you’re into serving, you just want to stay in form and keep doing it. That’s up to you, there are no brownie points, you’re totally free to do whatever you want to do in the game, because you understand the game, you created the game, you can play any way you want.

Q: What is shakti?

A: In answer to that fellow’s question about sex before I talked about prana, which is that fine energy within the body, the more subtle energy than the genital sexual energy, and shakti is the universal stuff from which that is. It’s like everything here is shakti, it’s all just shakti in patterns of shakti, really. It’s like the stuff of the universe, it’s tinier than quantas of energy in the physical, scientific realm. It’s much finer stuff than that. And it’s just force, it’s just actually force. You can draw it in, mobilize it, direct it and use it just like you would use any other . . . just like you would use electricity. You can use it in the same way. You can collect it in the same way. It feels the same way except it is much finer.