Trust the teaching, not the teacher, goes a familiar spiritual axiom. But, in the case of Stephen Gaskin, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other, as his own lifestyle is a powerful reflection of the truths he speaks.
That is perhaps why more than 1,000 people live with him on The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee — the largest, most successful working commune in America — and why his words are read so widely.
Stephen is 43 years old. A recent magazine article described him as “tall and unnervingly thin . . . he wears wire-rim glasses, a wispy Ho Chi Minh beard, stringy blond hair to his shoulders, and he stands like someone whose body is a bother to him, someone who’d be happier just wandering around in his bare soul.”
While an instructor in creative writing at San Francisco State College in the late 1960’s, he started experimenting with psychedelics and began holding Monday night discussion groups — on drugs, religion, honesty, responsibility: in short, how to live — in a lounge on campus. The group grew from a few friends to 2,000 in three years. Many of those talks may be read in Monday Night Class. Another book, Caravan, grew out of the cross-country odyssey of Stephen and his followers in a caravan of remodeled school buses. That journey led them to Tennessee, where they pooled their money to buy the 1,750 acres that is now The Farm. Very much like a small town, The Farm has its own schools and clinic. Members, who sign over all their worldly goods upon joining, are divided into work crews, for farming, carpentry, and so on. The foods crew alone has 14 subdivisions, from the soybean dairy to the bakery. It’s no hippie retirement home, but a living model of Stephen’s beliefs in self-reliance, hard work, and faith in God.
The Farm also has its own publishing company. Aside from making money, The Book Publishing Company spreads The Farm philosophy. Two of its books, Spiritual Midwifery and A Cooperative Method of Natural Birth Control, are reviewed in this issue. This Season’s People — A Book of Spiritual Teachings is Stephen’s newest book and we are grateful for permission to reprint excerpts from it.
— Ed.
There is a plane of experience, other than the three-dimensional material plane, which can be felt by a human being. Many religions tell of people experiencing that plane — the stories of miracles and visions and revelations. There is much religious teaching telling us how to get to that plane.
It is a plane of experience that many thousands of people in this generation were catapulted into through the psychedelic revolution. There are still people all over the country saying, “Wow, what was that?”
The only thing that can answer that question is an understanding of the spiritual plane — understanding the nature of the relationship of man to the Universe, understanding human beings are telepathic.
If people never get above the purely signal level of communication, and don’t become telepathic, they haven’t explored their full human birthright. Telepathy is a high and Holy thing.
When a bunch of people experience it together — when they really feel each other’s presence and the presence of the Holy Spirit, they call it Holy Communion.
You can’t understand God. You can’t define God, and you can’t contain God. But you can, if you don’t look at yourself, be God.
The way to keep from looking at yourself is to be so busy doing your best that you don’t have anything left over to look with.
You can’t know the totality of God with your finite mind, because God is infinite, and your material plane intelligence is finite — it cannot contain an infinite thing. But if you aren’t pressing about the totality, and just relax and observe what’s in front of you, you are knowing God, because that’s all there is to know.
There is nothing else to know; and the knowledge, the knower, the thing known, and the act of knowing are all one and are all God.
You are the eyes with which God looks, and the mind through which God understands itself.
God is intelligent. God communicates. But if you’ve thought of the Deity as something easy to understand, that isn’t true. The Deity is huge. It is larger than your mind can encompass, and it disappears in every direction infinitely. It’s very hard to put any personality on something that disappeared off into the distance the last time you were searching, so you couldn’t know whether you were looking at a tenth of it, or a hundredth of it, or a millionth of it. All you know is that it disappeared when you were last looking.
The Universe is a vibratory entity, and you can affect the vibrations one way or another by what you do. Everything has vibrations. Colors are vibrations, sounds are vibrations; so is concrete. So is thought. So is the Universe, God — all vibrations. (Since there is no space to vibrate in and no time to measure rate of vibrations in the spiritual plane, let it be known that “vibration” is a figure of speech.) And if that’s what it’s all made out of, then you have a technology for learning how to deal with vibrations.
Non-space/time doesn’t have any personality. It doesn’t have any differentiated beings. It doesn’t have any separateness of entities. Those are all space/time functions. It does have a clear set of vibrations and rules of its own which are just as real and just as reliable as the fact that something falls 32 feet per second per second. If you behave in certain ways in the material plane, you will resonate with certain of those vibrations from the nonmaterial plane.
If you resonate a vibration that is very high — love everybody, willing-to-lay-your-life-on-the-line-for-mankind, we’re-all-in-it-together, nobody’s-going-to-live-off-of-anybody — you are going to resonate that pure vibration out of the non-space/time place that we call Christ Consciousness, or the intermediary between God and man.
We are all parts of God. Each one of us has an electrical body field that surrounds us, and a mind field that goes on to Infinity. Whenever you have two electrical fields together, there is another field that exists that is the vector-resultant group vibration that everyone partakes of. That vibration is more than the sum of its parts: the totality of all our vibrations go together to make that one pure vibration which is God.
Religion is something that lives in the hearts of the people. We honor the old religions like Buddhism and Christianity and Judaism and Islam, because they’re enshrinements of a heavy thing that happened in the hearts of a certain generation. There are spiritual levels of experience that man is heir to. In times when there’s a lot of material success in the world, folks sometimes forget to tune into these fine things and lose the knack maybe for generations at a time. And whenever it comes back, it’s always a big flash.
There is something happening now that doesn’t have a name on it because it isn’t old enough to have a name. But it’s living in the hearts of the people.
If you but know it, in your highest and your finest and your most honest places in your own heart, God is speaking to you. Even now. All the time, in your highest and finest places.
It is not complicated or unusual or weird to know what God wants: If God is God at all, He wants justice and freedom and health and happiness and equality for everyone. If you know that’s what God really wants, you’ll help out along those lines.
Here are the keys to heaven: LOVE GOD. LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF. And here are the keys to hell: “Well, I know I got to take care of everybody, but I just want to get a little for myself first.”
For a few years, I had been hearing interesting noise from people like Aldous Huxley and William James: There are other levels of experience, separated from ordinary consciousness by the filmiest of veils.
I could say, “Well, that’s subjective. There’s no way you can prove it.” It was the old philosophical problem: How do you know what you know? Then I ran across a weird phenomenon. Somebody, talking about it just as though it were ordinary, said: And another strange thing about psychedelics is the phenomenon of the contact high. The contact high is a phenomenon by which someone who has not ingested a psychedelic substance but who is in contact with someone who has, will also get high.
That ran past all my carefully ordered cosmology, and I said, “What!? You say what!? Does Dr. Rhine know this? What is this thing that passes between these people?” It implied that there is some kind of medium that exists between people, and that the very phenomenon of stonedness can be sent as a telepathic message.
I explored this thing for months and months with my friends. We checked it out for a couple of years. We would say, “Did you feel what I felt when I felt that, or was I just having a subjective experience that you weren’t in on?” If you were going to check out something like that, wouldn’t you want to be careful? Wouldn’t you want to be sure you weren’t only fooling yourself?
Then we got the idea that it was really there, and we began to feel like we were at the beginning of the discovery of a new territory — like the people who put the Constitution together for this country, saying, “Here’s a whole new territory. We have to find some ground rules.” We started thinking, What are the ground rules? What is the etiquette of a telepathic society? How does one order one’s mind when you live in a Universe where there is not a wall around your head, where your skull is not the limit of your consciousness, but that you actually share space with other people — that you interpenetrate? What is the etiquette? What is the political science when we can all be in the same place at the same time?
We started considering the assumptions behind that, and discovered that many of them had already been thought up. We found that many of the assumptions we were searching for were already in use in religion.
We found out that mankind has known that mankind is telepathic for thousands and thousands of years, and that it’s so pure and so delicate a thing to bring about that they call it Holy.
In Zen, they say you should learn to interact with the world, instead of leaving it. Incorporate the distraction, because the distraction is also Buddha.
You have to clean your heart. If you want to communicate with people at that level, you can’t have an impure thought about them. It muddies it up and makes it so unclear that you can’t communicate. We found that you have to really try to be pure in your heart to experience Holiness.
The practice of real love and impeccable correctness and politeness and care among each other is only the beginning stage of the kind of peaceful society in which you may talk seriously about spiritual enlightenment.
What we expect is to be truthful; to be kind; to try to share; to try to love one another. Some folks don’t recognize that as a discipline: They say, “Oh, that old stuff . . .” And it may not sound too difficult, unless you’ve ever tried it. But if you ever try it, you’ll know it’s an exacting discipline.
In the light of planetary communication and the current state of the world, we have to recognize that other cultures have had their planetary spiritual teachers. We can’t be in an exclusive position in regard to the rest of mankind, because it is vitally important that we evolve some common philosophical religious assumptions — in order that mankind may survive. Without them, there’s a good chance we won’t.
It is of paramount importance to recognize that God is One. There are a lot of differences among the religions at lower levels. At the highest level, they become One.
The mystical sect of Christianity is called the Gnostics. Buddhism has Zen. Hinduism has the yogis. Judaism has the Hassidim. The Moslems have the Sufis. If you study their writings, you will discover that they talk again and again about exactly the same phenomena, the same experiences, the same realizations. They’ve obviously been to the same territory. There are certain realms of the mind that, if man ventures into them, it changes him, and he comes back different.
Religion only seems different if you’re dealing with a retailer. If you deal with a wholesaler, they all get it from the same distributor. I think that there is only one church, and your membership button in it is your belly button.
In the religious revival that’s happening in the country now, we’re beginning to see that real live human values, nonconceptual, compassionate, and real, are more important than social standing, money, or any of that. If you’re not straight with your fellow monkeys, then being chairman of the board doesn’t help you out.
Religion is a generic term for how we relate to our Universe and how God and our Universe relate to us, and what is our proper relationship and perspective in the Universe.
There shouldn’t be anything deeper than your religion. Your religion is how you really get along with folks — not what you may claim your religion is.
Your religion ought to make a difference to you in your daily life; it ought to make it easier for you, not in the sense that you don’t have to try, but that it makes sense for you. If you’re not getting along with your kid, it ought to help you out with your kid. It ought to help you out during childbirth; it ought to help you during the death of somebody who’s close to you. It ought to help you through the heavy passages in life.
Attention is energy. What you put your attention on, you get more of. Each one of us is a fountain of energy, a valve through which universal life energy is metered into the world, and we can each point our self at whatever we want to. We add life force to our surroundings — to everything we pay attention to. If you put your attention on the best, highest, finest, most beautiful thing that you can, that will be amplified.
Keep your attention in the here-and-now. Don’t past-trip. Putting your attention in the past means that here-and-now is continuing on without you. The more time you spend in the past, the farther and farther out of register you are.
Don’t put your attention into the future, other than a reasonable amount of plans which you intend to carry out. Putting your attention out into the future is like when a squirrel runs out on a tree limb — when he gets way out into the small limbs, it gets very shaky. When you get out into the thin possibilities, it gets very unlikely and it tends to get you paranoid.
So tripping in the past gets you schizophrenic, and tripping in the future tends to get you paranoid. Hang out in the here-and-now. It is healing. When you’re in the here-and-now, accept it as reality. Don’t think about it or run it through your mind-filter when it’s coming in. Accept it.
A meditative state is pure perception: not being conceptual about the here-and-now. That’s what most Zen discipline is about: not past-tripping, not future-tripping, and not being conceptual in the here-and-now.
One of the things that teachers of meditation are trying to teach you is to be able to put your attention where you want it, and to follow out a difficult idea. I don’t think that some people are smarter than others; I think that some people are willing to put more effort into following an idea.
Within each one of us is a spark of God. Some people call it inborn intelligence: a capacity to look out and see something. That capacity is so strong that if you look at someone and you see something in them that you like, you don’t have to say anything, or give them a bouquet or write them a poem or send them a card. If you just see something in them that you like, that thing will become stronger and it will come out at you; and they will do it more for you.
Everybody needs attention — it’s a human requirement, just like oxygen and water. The need for it begins as soon as we’re born, and if we don’t get it in a fair way, we’ll learn outlaw habits of getting it. People will do outrageous things to get attention, because it is life force and energy. The reason to be discriminating about what you give your attention to, is to give real help to a person. That’s how we all be each other’s teachers: what we dig in each other, we reinforce.
Paying attention to what we choose to pay it to is probably the greatest freedom we have.
We all control what happens in the future by what we pay attention to in the present. If you perceive it to be improving and a groove, it improves and is a groove.
If you see that something should be a way, assume it’s going to be that way.
In Zen, they say you should learn to interact with the world, instead of leaving it. Incorporate the distraction because the distraction is also Buddha.
The more agreement there is about putting your attention into reality, the stronger and healthier everybody will be. It’s better to pay attention to what is, because that’s better mind food. A little attention to what is not is like spice for your mind food, to keep you from getting dull and not thinking anything new. But if you put all your attention into what is not, then your mind is going to get jaded and dull, and lose sensitivity to reality.
On the other hand, while you’re soliding up your reality, you can’t be so square as to make it so miracles don’t work. You can’t get so rigid you can’t do miracles, can’t do healings. You want your reality just loose enough that you can do a little miracle now and then. But not so loose that it starts getting chancy and problematical for the kids and the folks out on the fringes. It has to be good and solid for everybody.
Your brain thinks in Gestalt flashes — the question is how quickly can you forget all that and go on to the next flash.
If you’re not steering your mind, it’s running on automatic pilot and goes a million times faster than you can steer it.
Rather than figuring it out, and saying, “Is this right?” or “Where would this be in the light of contemporary philosophy?” — that first flash is your best bet. I try to trust myself and trust myself until I can just move on that first flash. If we all moved together in our interaction on that first flash, we would be incredibly fast and smart. If every time you asked a question, the next thing that came back was the answer instead of “Huh?” or if they just said, “I don’t know,” and let you clear the circuit to do the next thing — if we just all answered honestly and correctly the first time, it would be so easy, so incredibly fast and smart — we would just be fabulous.
You have to learn to trust your mind — don’t try to force it and push it in various ways. The more you trust it and the more you let it run on its automatic pilot, the faster and smarter and heavier it gets. It lets you out when you trust it. It’s a good one — trust it.
Any time something is hard for you to do, bring yourself to bear; pay attention to it. Concentrate yourself. Come on to it with all your energy focused. That’s all karate and breaking bricks is — is having all your attention focused when you hit. You can break bricks if your attention is focused. If your attention is not focused and the swing is the same, you might break your hand.
One of the highest and Holiest religious experiences that is available to mankind is to get outside your head for a couple of seconds and realize that the sun doesn’t rise and set in your armpit.
God is the center of the Universe, and we are all like rays extending out from God. When we act, it is God acting through us. When we have a new idea, it’s God coming through us with that new idea.
I used to be very attached to thinking that I was having good ideas. Then, just for a second, I seriously thought about God coming through me — even in something like a good idea I thought I’d had, and Bang! I had this beautiful rush of spiritual energy that came on to me so strong and so sweet that I had to let go of everything I was doing and just lay back in my chair and relax and let these beautiful rays of spiritual energy come over me.
I found that I never really understood the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes until I had experienced for myself what Jesus had seen. After I had seen the other level of experience for myself, it all made as absolutely perfect sense as, “If you’re going to put this television set together, hook up wire A to terminal A, and if you don’t wire it that way, it’s going to blow up.” It’s just that clean.
I saw that Spirit was real, and I saw that karma mattered, and I saw that telepathy was real, and I saw that folks really did have communication from heart to heart and from soul to soul, and I saw that, contrary to modern psychology, you can know your brother.
Psychology teaches that communication is like taking a rock and wrapping a note around it and throwing it, and the other person catches the rock and unwraps it and reads the note. They say that’s all you can know about somebody — and that’s not true. One person can know another person. You can go to that place where you share souls and you can know somebody, and you are not alienated and you do not live in a box.
We are all really one thing, and we are all in this together, and no matter how we make it look, we are really and truly going to share fortunes. The sun is going to shine or not according to God’s whim, as usual, and we’ll share those fortunes.
There is an order of real experience that is, to some people, as real and common and everyday as whether the sun shines or whether it rains, or whether there’s enough to eat. It can be as easily and plainly discernible as whether the lights are on or not; and the majority of the culture doesn’t even believe in it — it has heard rumors out at the edges somewhere, that there is something else besides the meat part. It is a real religious experience.
In San Francisco, when heavy psychedelics were at their peak, people were seeing things three or four times a week that one sight of it should have gone wham and just straightened them. They should have said, “Wow, look at that,” and just got cool right then, but they were so jaded from having done it a hundred times or two hundred times that it didn’t have any juice. It was an example of, “If the salt of the earth loses its savor, werewith shall you salt it?”
As familiar as religious experience may become to us, we don’t dare let it get ordinary. This is called keeping things sacred.
Your intelligence varies according to your condition, your sanity, and how much energy and Holy Spirit you’re able to get together — you can change your intelligence and you can get smarter.
Some Hindus refer to the kind of energy that you keep on as shakti. They say you should guard your accumulation of shakti, and be careful with your energy, because whatever you let your energy out on is going to be furthered, whether it’s a good cause or a bad cause: if you put your energy to it, it will make it prosper.
I try to be faithful to that energy, trying to conserve it so I’ll have some if I need it. I don’t need to have such a head of steam on that I’m just crackling and hallucinating every second.
It’s nice to do that once in a while, just to remind yourself that it does that. But I want to have enough energy on that if I run into somebody who’s scared in the dark, I can say, “It’s okay. It’s not scary. I’m here, too, and I’m not scared.”
Magicians studying will are learning to contain an immense amount of energy with their ego. The most energy that you can possibly contain with your ego is less than not having ego and being open to everybody else, because then you have access to everybody’s energy — the Universe’s energy — and it is so much more than anybody can possibly contain.
Anybody who keeps their energy to themselves for a certain length of time gets stagnant, and they really need a little fresh water to come through. They may get a little irritable and a little numb from getting stagnant. It’s a helping and a healing if you can get them to open up and let a little clean stuff flow through their system. The real secret is: The most energy you can have is uncontained.
Sometimes you push very hard and you expend a lot of energy, and you get to where you don’t have too much energy. You have to stop and relax and let yourself fill up. Maybe you’re in a hurry, but it’s more important to relax. You’ll get so much smarter and more efficient. It’ll be worth the time you put into it — just stop and let everything out.
Your stoned is just a little surplus life force in your aura. If you aren’t using it, give it to a kid, or give it to a plant or something. But don’t just let it dissipate away. If you’ve got any juice, give it to somebody while you’ve got it. It’s all you can do with it.
The way you learn how to have juice on is to get some juice on. “To those that have, shall be given.”
You must be in a state of grace to receive grace.
If somebody isn’t respectful of the energy, it makes it go down. Be sacred. Recognize that the Holy Spirit is there, and be respectful of it, and don’t drive it away.
The way you can stay high is by speaking truth: not only by doing good, but by speaking truth.
Everybody has been somewhere that’s their benchmark for high; and if they’re lucky, they’ll never get down past the place where they’ll forget that — even if they say they’re not high right now, they can remember there was a place where they were high. When people get down so low that they forget they were high, that’s like being in hell. You can make spiritual agreements with people to help each other stay high.
You can see right into people’s souls. And if you can be compassionate and not revolted by anything you see, you can give people exact, unemotional information on the nature of their subconscious, and you can help them become more sane. Sometimes, when I’m talking to someone and telling them what I see in their head, I see them get prettier and better looking word by word as I tell them about it. If you can help somebody’s subconscious be conscious, it’s like bring their soul out of hell. It’s a heavy responsibility.
You have to use all your good judgement, and all your compassion, and courage, and tact, and taste, to say heavy things to people in ways that will be valuable to them, rather than just knocking them off their own center.
Sometimes a person can say the truth, but be doctrinaire about it, so it’s a lie anyway. The truth, if said ignorantly, is not the truth. You have to know it’s the truth when you say it, for it to be the truth.
You need to be truthful, and you need to be kind. You also need to be helpful, and your information has to be relevant.
If you’re doing what’s right, you’ll know it. If not, don’t fool yourself.
If you want to communicate with people, you have to work at it all the time, every waking minute. You have to work at it really hard, because many people are a little bit afraid.
If you think you’ve done enough when you do fifty percent of the work, that won’t make it, because to touch some people you may have to do a hundred percent of the work. You can’t ever say, “Well, I’ve tried hard enough.” You have to keep on trying and keep on trying, remembering that folks really do want to be touched. They really do want to be communicated with.
Being spiritual does not mean to become as esoteric and as different as you possibly can, but to become like a solvent that can melt away the differences between people until only the essential thing is left. If we really understand what we’re doing, we ought to get it on and find essential agreement with anybody.
Sometimes I have to watch stuff happen several times before I see the dynamics of the situation. But if I ever get a good grasp on what’s really going on and who did what to whom and how they did it, I will not call off the meeting until I get that expressed and understood.
Sometimes I can’t express it to the person involved, because he is too involved. I might just end up having to tell all the witnesses. Well, that’s free will. If a person doesn’t want to understand, he isn’t going to. He will later, probably.
And you have to allow for folks to do that. You don’t want to get so arbitrary with folks that it’s an either/or situation where they have to split.
You can have the presence of mind, right in the middle of a hassle, to realize the other person probably doesn’t want to be in it either.
If you can make a graceful place for him to get out, he’ll want to get out of it. Give him a little room; don’t put anybody in a corner — frequently, they’ll figure it out and come back and say, “Hey, man. I was on a trip. I don’t want to do that.” Recognize any little spark of good will, and fan it — don’t run over it. If you do, folks will just think you’re dumb for not noticing.
If you be fair and don’t cheat and don’t be angry and don’t try to take any position on someone while you’re trying to get them to open up, when they do open up they’ll see you standing there being fair and they’ll have to love you, and they’ll say, “Oh wow, man, were you trying to help me out all along? Far out!”
If it isn’t cool, if you aren’t able to get stoned, that’s the time to say something.
If everything’s cool, you ought to just keep your mouth shut.
Some of the heaviest stuff that’s been passed down for hundreds of thousands of years is that it seems to work better in the long run if we be good to each other. One of the forms of being good to each other that’s been passed down is forgiveness.
Christ forgave them while they were doing it to him, even while it still hurt. It was a noble thing.
To forgive somebody, you’ve got to come and place your value in the real world, where the action is. You can’t have all your value in your head, or your memory, or what you think you are, or how you think someone treated you. You can say, “Look, let’s just write all that off. We know we really love one another,” and just go on ahead.
Jesus said that if you come to pray and you have something against your brother, don’t bother to pray right then — your mind won’t be clear and can’t do any good. Go back and find your brother and get straight with him. If you try and can’t get straight, get two or three witnesses so that what was said may be established, and with those witnesses present, try to get straight. If that doesn’t work call on your brother in church, in front of all the congregation, and ask him to get straight with you in front of everyone. If he won’t get straight with you then, you’ve done all you can and you don’t have to worry about it any more. You can go on about your business.
The time you may notice compassion the most is by its sudden lack, like when someone says something tactless or thoughtless, and there’s that sudden sick feeling when somebody has had something stepped on. What gets lost there is the ability to sustain compassion.
Compassion is the very bread of life. It’s the assurance when we’re with everybody that everything is cool. If somebody needs something, then there is the instrumenting of compassion, which is helping somebody to be comfortable so that they can become compassionate, too.
We each have to decide for ourselves what to do; how to do right and stay in balance. You don’t want to be a hassle in the atmosphere all the time and you don’t want to let things pass that shouldn’t pass. About the most someone else can do for you is to tell you that you have to do it for yourself.
Touch on the telepathic plane is compassion. On the telepathic plane, we’re all supposed to touch all the time. That’s how we know everything is cool, and everybody can relax.
True compassion is born of knowing your brother, knowing he’s just the same as you are. If there is not compassion, there is not enlightenment.
Love is an active verb. It’s not an abstraction or a conceptual idea. You have to perform an action to show that it’s really real. Love is broadcast energy that actually physically helps sustain everyone exposed to it. Love interpenetrates. If I point a flashlight at you, and you point one at me, the lights don’t stop each other. My light illuminates you; your light illuminates me, at the same time.
If you go out and just love everybody, then you’re bound to get enough back. It happens to you as you get older — you meet more and more people that you fall in love with. You find yourself becoming naturally in love with lots of people, who you don’t necessarily have to do a big Romeo and Juliet scene about. You can just relax and be warmed on the beauty of love.
Love is an active verb. It’s not an abstraction or a conceptual idea. You have to perform an action to show that it’s really real.
The more love you put out, the more capable of loving you are. Love is infinite — and you have to love everybody. Even if someone does dumb and evil things, you have to understand where they’re coming from, and love them anyway, even if you don’t agree with their actions. Even if you have to resist their actions, you still have to love them. If you don’t love them, there’s no way you’re ever going to help them. If you love them, it will help.
You shouldn’t act on the basis of emotions other than love. You can be conditioned into other emotions too easily. So we prefer reason over emotions.
P.S. Love might tell you to do something unreasonable once in a while and that’s cool. You can’t be reasonable all the time.
If you were going to name and contain and count everything in the Universe, the first thing you would notice is that you need some kind of a counting tool, because obviously you would overamp your mind in trying to do a thing like that.
So you start counting off the things in the Universe. You start on your fingers. And then your toes. Use your elbows — until pretty soon, you use that up.
So you get an adding machine. Pretty soon, you have every hole where a number could be, filled up with a nine. And you’ve used up the adding machine. You’re still nowhere near all the stuff in the universe.
So you keep on counting, and you say, “Okay. I’ll start using other stuff to store information on. I’ll start using grains of sand.” And you say, “All the grains of sand on the Pacific Ocean beach from Canada to Mexico.” Then, “All the grains of sand of the river banks of the Ganges.” And all the beaches of all the continents. You can use up the grains of sand and pieces of gravel and all the dirt, and you’re still counting and you ain’t even getting there yet. Because all the stuff you’ve used up so far hasn’t even gotten you into counting all the stuff on Earth.
And there’s more stars than there are grains of sand on the Pacific Ocean beach from San Diego to Vancouver.
Every one of these stars has a possibility of planets and solar systems with river banks and beaches with grains of sand.
So you have to go from that level to the molecular level. You find that each grain of sand has so many molecules — and you still aren’t getting there.
You want to contain this information about the Universe in something; but as you’re using up the Universe to contain it, you reach a point where there is only one computer capable of containing the information, and that is the thing itself. It is the totality of everything in the entire Universe.
The Universe exists as held in the mind of God. The universe is the mind of God: more stars and galaxies than the grains of sand on the Pacific Ocean beach. And within this mind there exist all the connections and possibilities in the Universe.
Now the reason for this trip which we just went on is the idea, “What is God?” Some people insist that God is a person. They want to be able to relate to God, and they don’t feel like they can relate to a rock, or half a cup of seawater. They want to have a person to relate to. But when you were using up all the grains of sand and all the molecules, you also used up all your brain cells and all the possibilities of interconnections among your brain cells.
In a way, your mind is a reflection of the mind of God. Because all these grains of sand and galaxies and stars, and this limitless space was only understandable to you at all because inside each of our skulls is a model of the Universe.
A hologram is a new form of laser photography. You can set up an object and illuminate with a laser, and capture the image on a special kind of film, and then you can project that image with laser light through the piece of film, like showing a movie. But it does a slightly different thing. In a hologram, you can look at, say a coffee can, with writing on it. And around the bottom of the coffee can is a little line of print that tells you what it weighs and where it was made. You can read that across the front of the coffee can, and when you get done there you can walk over a little ways and you can continue reading the sentence. It’s a three hundred and sixty degree picture.
Well, if you have a negative for a hologram and you tear off a little corner of it and project through that little corner, you don’t see a little corner of the picture: you see the whole picture.
That’s the way your mind relates to the mind of God. You can just fall through that little picture, out into limitless galaxies of space and stars. It’s all in there.
All you have to do to meet God is to understand that you are a corner of it. God is intelligent. And the person, person-ness and personality of the godhead is you. God exists mentally perceptible to us as the sense of eye/I-ness — the sense of identity wherever it occurs in the Universe.
It’s like a light inside you. If you put too many filters on it, not much light gets out. You just have to let go of assuming that you’re the whole picture, and realize that there is a whole picture.
One of the most difficult things to do is to recognize the existence of God as the totality of the Universe.
Some people think I’m trying to do away with God when I’m not into the curly-bearded man in the white suit. But I feel like that’s a very limiting idea of God. If there is anything that God is, it is not limited.
I was talking with someone and he said, “Why is a cow a cow? What’s the right name of anything? We call stuff by names. How do we know what God’s name for it is? Maybe he’s got numbers.” And I told him he had just stumbled onto the edge of Zen. Part of Zen is that when you look at someone or anything, you see what it is. Not the name of it, or what you previously knew about it, or your preconceptions. But you see what is. And it has no name. It is it’s own name. A name is only a signal. The only reality a name has is a piece of noise.
You are born. The first question you ask and the next question and the next one for about the next seventy-five to a hundred and ten years is “What is it?”
And people say, “It’s the sky.” “It’s your diaper.” “It’s your Aunt Sally.” “It’s your nose.” “Don’t touch that — it’s hot.” “Leave it alone, it’s not yours.” All that stuff is what it’s for. What it is, is God.
What’s this thing with the rubber end on it sticking in my mouth?” “It’s God.” “What are these things I’m putting on my feet?” “It’s God.” That’s a little inconvenient. You need a little differentiation to tell your nursing bottle from your galoshes. But don’t get caught up in the differentiation and think that it means anything at all, other than a little matter of convenience.
Everything you do is right here in front of God and everybody. There isn’t anywhere you can go. God is also out behind the barn, and in your deepest heart of hearts. God is not only every grain of sand and every massive star, but every plane and level of existence, material and immaterial, thought of or as yet unthought of; every level of vibration; every realm of imagination, every possibility — is all God.
Even in the back of your mind, where you sometimes think uncharitable things about people because you don’t think anybody is listening — is God, sitting there listening.
What is that thing that observes that?
You want to find God? Spend just a couple of seconds. Look around inside your head for God. Can you find him? You having trouble finding him? Who is looking? That’s who is looking.
There is a necessity for revolution. A revolution is not about hurting people; a revolution is about making changes. The best way to do that is to live your life right — massively — and do it clean and good and obviously out in front for people to look at. And if you don’t violate the people’s trust, the people will back you up.
What’s truly revolutionary is growing your own food instead of supporting the profit system. It’s revolutionary to deliver your own babies instead of paying a thousand dollars a head to profit-oriented hospitals and doctors. It’s revolutionary to get the knowledge out of college and make it so you don’t have to sell your soul to learn something. It’s revolutionary to learn how to fix stuff, rather than junk it or take it in to be replaced.
You can learn how to take care of yourself. And that’s revolutionary, because if you want any independence, it comes with taking care of yourself.
You have to realize that you are responsible for where you are at and for what your life is at. How you are is the result of your past decisions; and if you don’t like the way you are, you can, with a little effort of will, change your decisions for awhile and you will change into being another way.
You have to do it inside yourself; a good moral structure imposed from the outside is totalitarianism. If you do it, you’ll hook in with other folks doing it. You have to make interior decisions when nobody’s looking: all by yourself, in your head, take full responsibility for what you are about to do: and do the best you can.
After you do it awhile you’ll begin to expect it of yourself.
Copyright © 1976 The Book Publishing Company, The Farm, Summertown, Tennessee 38483
Reprinted with permission
