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Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
The Lazy Man's Guide
to Enlightenment
by
Thaddeus Golas
Contents
Foreword
Who are we?
Look, Ma, I'm
Enlightened
How to feel good
Lifesavers
How we got here
Self-improvement
Time and
vibrations
Going through
changes
What is real?
How you get there
A Fable
Even Lazier
Addendum (1995)
Foreword
I am a lazy
man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort,
discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. That's
about the worst heresy I could propose, but I have to be honest before I can be
reverent. I am doing the work of writing this book to save myself the trouble
of talking about it.
There is an odd chance that
this is what someone needs to read in order to feel better about himself. If
you are a kind person and want to know what to expect when enlightenment
strikes and why it comes to you, with or without psychedelic help, this is for
you.
These are the
rules of the game as I see them. I realize that many of us are opening up very
fast these days, and one of the most common delusions we face is the belief
that our sense of revelation is unique. The feeling of knowing the truth is not
enough. My intention is not to pretend final truth, but to suggest certain
simple attitudes that will work for anybody and stay with you in the most
extreme freak-out or space-out, even when your mind is completely blown. These
attitudes are so simple that I'm surrounding them with a picture of the
universe to show why they work even when you don't believe they will.
The universe is so vast and
complex that if we needed books like this to become enlightened, we'd never
make it. But on the other hand the universe is so simple in design that there's
no reason for anyone to be puzzled or unhappy. It's easy to control your
existence, no matter how complicated it looks. I've abandoned the idea of
writing this a number of times, on the ground that people didn't know it
because they didn't want to. But in the end there is no more reason for not
writing it than there is for writing it.
I am writing what I will want
to read someday when I am stuck in a weird place. Several times on bummers I've
thought: What could I say to someone in this state of mind that would mean
anything? That's the kind of testing this information has had. There isn't a
line in this book that is there just because it sounds beautiful. The
information is practical and reliable. It has taken me and others safely
through some extreme states of mind, and can be reduced to a few phrases that
are simple enough to recall in any crisis.
The first chapter begins with
a briefly stated idea about how the universe is made, and the rest of the book
discusses our lives from that viewpoint. It is a far-reaching idea, extending
into every field of knowledge, and since it took me many years to get it
straight, I cannot expect that anyone else should casually accept it. All I can
do is ask that you play the idea game, see where it leads, and check it out
against what you know. What has to be true for the universe to look to us as it
does? Is there a credible bridge between matter and spirit? Like many people, I
wrestled with such concerns for years, and this book contains some of the conclusions. Perhaps these
conclusions will be meaningful to you only if you follow your own process of checking
and proving. If so, the first chapter contains all you will need to keep you
busy for a long time. On the other hand, if all you want is a handy trip guide,
you'll find that, too.
I'm really not expecting
anyone to take these sentences and expand them again into a feeling of
realization. But if one of you whom I never hear about gets a little higher and
happier, then I would write all this again a thousand times over. I hope you
find the vibrations pleasant.
CHAPTER ONE
Who are we?
We are equal beings and the
universe is our relations with each other. The universe is made of one kind of
entity: each one is alive, each determines the course of his own existence.
That is really all you need
to know to understand this book or write your own. Everything I say has its
roots in that first paragraph, and it is possible to resolve any question by
going back to it and thinking it through for yourself.
The universe is made of one
kind of whatever-it-is, which cannot be defined. For our purpose, it isn't
necessary to try to define it. All we need to do is assume that there is only one kind of whatever-it-is, and see if
it leads to a reasonable explanation for the world as we know it.
The basic function of each
being is expanding and contracting. Expanded beings are permeative; contracted
beings are dense and impermeative. Therefore each of us, alone or in
combination, may appear as space, energy, or mass, depending on the ratio of
expansion to contraction chosen, and what kind of vibrations each of us expresses
by alternating expansion and contraction. Each being controls his own
vibrations.
A completely expanded being
is space. Since expansion is permeative, we can be in the "same
space" with one or more other expanded beings. In fact, it is possible for
all the entities in the universe to be one space.
We experience expansion as
awareness, comprehension, understanding, or whatever we wish to call it. When
we are completely expanded, we have a feeling of total awareness, of being one
with all life. At that level we have no resistance to any vibrations or
interactions of other beings. It is timeless bliss, with unlimited choice of
consciousness, perception, and feeling.
Space is a level of
experience that any of us can reach, but it is difficult to talk about on our
present plane precisely because it is unlimited. It is that which chooses
limits and makes definitions. We might say: all experiences are available to
the One Mind, and the One Mind is all of us or any of us at the highest level
of expansion. Or we might theorize: God could not create anything more limited
than Himself that would persist, but if He duplicates Himself, He can enjoy a
persistent universe. Each entity, therefore, is a duplicate of God, "made
in His image."
It doesn't matter what words
we use: we exist and the universe exists, and it is possible to test this
expansion-contraction idea within the limited scope of what is real to us as
human beings, especially in atomic and sub-atomic studies.
When a being is
totally contracted, he is a mass particle, completely imploded. To the degree
that he is contracted, a being is unable to be in the same space with others,
so contraction is felt as fear, pain, unconsciousness, ignorance, hatred, evil,
and a whole host of strange feelings. At an extreme he has the feeling of being
completely insane, of resisting everyone and everything, of being unable to
choose the content of his consciousness. Of course, these are just the feelings
appropriate to mass vibration levels, and he can get out of them at any time by
expanding, by letting go of all resistance to what he thinks, sees, or feels.
When a being is alternating
expansion and contraction, he is energy. My guess is that at the middle point,
fifty percent expansion and fifty percent contraction, a being would be
logical, non-subjective, egoless, and predictable. This may be the
"zero" which is one side of energy equations in physics, as well as
the "ego-death" we go through in expanding to higher levels of
awareness.
It is important to note that
energy is not a quantity of anything "objective." Energy, like space
and matter, is what a lot of live beings are doing. Energy beings usually react
to their neighbors in a way that is often predictable and apparently automatic,
like falling dominoes. While relating to space beings, energy beings will
appear to be high, vibrating rapidly, with a sense of increasing subjective
freedom. Oriented to mass beings, they will be low energy, vibrating more
slowly with a growing feeling of subjective compulsion and disorder.
The universe is an infinite
harmony of vibrating beings in an elaborate range of expansion-contraction
ratios, frequency modulations, and so forth.
There is a particular set of
feelings and ideas that goes with every variation, every combination, every
vibration level. There is also a different perception of how other beings are
relating from every different view-point. The thought of these possibilities is
so staggering, trying to contain them in writing is so ridiculous, that it is
hard for me to move my pen any further. However, what we are after is to
isolate some basic attitudes that will recover awareness of our freedom to move
around in this maze—or go straight to the top.
What we need to remember is
that there is nobody here but us chickens. The entire universe is made of
beings just like ourselves. Every particle in every atom is a live being. Every
molecule or cell is a tribe of beings. Energy is a large number of us vibrating
together. Space is an infinite number of our brothers and sisters in perfect
bliss.
There is no important
difference between live and dead matter, since both are made up of live
entities. Not only is mass convertible into energy, but energy is convertible
into space, and vice versa. It is our own withdrawal from awareness, our own
mass condition that makes us see our brothers and sisters as objective matter,
energy, and space. We always have the experiences and perceptions appropriate
to our vibration level.
The same rules apply to all
of us. The rules do not come from anywhere outside ourselves. They come from
the truth that we are all equal, we all have the same range of possible
behavior and experience. We are free to do anything we want to do, within the
necessary laws of our relations as equal beings. And love must be the first
law. Love is the action of being in
the same space with other beings, which means that love is real, as real as we
are. Love is not a limited idea, it is something we do, ultimately with our
whole selves.
Perhaps many of us do not like
it where we are in the universe now, but we can all be certain that we got
where we are by our own decisions to expand in love or withdraw from it.
The kind of brain and body
you have, the family and society, the time in history you were born into, all
these and more were determined by you yourself, by your degree of expansion, by
your willingness to love. No one did anything to you. No one forced you. There
is absolute justice in the experience that each of us is having every second of
the day. In one sense we can all relax, because nothing is secret, nothing is
lost, nothing is forgotten, no one is abandoned.
Each of us is the same kind
of being, capable of outflowing attention and awareness, or withdrawing it. And
that is all we need to do: Give full, permissive, loving attention to
absolutely anything that we see in our minds, in our bodies, in our
environment, in other people.
Expansion in
love is an action that is available to every being in the universe all the
time. A willing awareness will take us to heaven, a loving attitude will make
us free. Nothing else controls our fate. Good or bad behavior is secondary.
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking,
love yourself for thinking it. Love is the only dimension that needs to be
changed. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not
being sure of how it feels. There is nothing on earth more important than the
love which conscious beings feel towards each other, whether or not it is ever
expressed.
There is no point in worry or
wonder about worse or better spiritual conditions, although that game is
available. You will not be able to rise above your present vibration level to
stay until you love the way you are now.
No matter what your spiritual
condition is, no matter where you find yourself in the universe, your choice is
always the same: to expand your awareness or contract it. And you have to start
where you are. There is nothing wrong with being where you are—it's one of the
infinite experiences available to us. What you are, I can be. What I am, you
can be.
Whatever we have done in
withdrawing from full consciousness of the One Mind, we are doing now. Whatever
we are doing will always be within us to do, even when we are not doing it, and
therefore is not to be resisted, but transcended. These are reminders I
frequently use: "That's always
within me." "This, too, can be known with a fully expanded
awareness."
We can trust the flow of the
universe. If these rules of love are true, then they are effective whether we
agree with them or not, whether we are conscious of them or not, whether or not
we use words to talk about them. The reality of love is something you do for
yourself, with or without words, and judge the results from your own experiences.
All information like this exists in space all the time, and doesn't need books
for its reality. It's always within you.
It follows that I am not
writing this book out of any sense of objection to what anyone believes now.
Beyond all reason is the mystery of love: you know we are all equal, no one in
truth needs any help from anyone else, no one needs to be told anything or
given anything—and then you do the most compassionate act anyway, do the best
for your brothers and sisters that you have in you. I'm relaying what was given
to me when I felt I needed it: if I felt that way, maybe someone else does,
too. This is a letter to my brothers and sisters, a love note to try to show
how, when we thought love wasn't working, it was working perfectly.
It's an interesting mental
exercise to turn the whole game upside down: the problem is not how to free
yourself from the mass level, how to get enlightened. The real question is: if
you are a completely free and self-determined being, how did you lock yourself
into a body to play games on the material plane? How did you get yourself and
others to agree to this game? How did you get it to be compulsive?
Several times when I've
spaced out, I flashed: Well, if it's that easy to get out, I might as well go back
and play the game. Maybe that's the ultimate temptation. And maybe no one
really wants to know how easy it is, nobody wants to upset the game. We may all
be playing let's pretend, hide-and-seek.
Physical reality is one of
the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies. If
the universe as we see it from our vibration level is illusory, only partially
true, then that's all the more reason for enjoying it and loving it, instead of
getting freaked by it.
Everything that happens on
earth can be experienced on any of thousands of different vibration levels,
from the most euphoric to the gloomiest. We are entirely free to emphasize any
level we wish. We need change nothing but our own attention and love, our own
expansion and love.
Since the universe is nothing
but live beings, each controlling his own level and his own relationships,
there is absolutely nothing in the universe that needs to be corrected in any
way. We don't have to do anything about it, whatever it is. There is consciousness
everywhere in the universe, and we can trust all beings to handle their own
decisions. No matter how it looks to us, love never loses control: the laws of
our relations are as honest and exact as the laws of physics.
I can't say I know at this moment
what all these laws are. But on some level everybody knows that we are all
getting exactly what we deserve.
The harmony is infinite and
one and divine. Where do you figure you fit into it? Don't be too hard on
yourself. A little bit of love goes a long way.
What do you do to become
enlightened? What are the signs that you are succeeding? How does your life
change as you become more enlightened?
There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.
All potential experiences are
within you already. You can open up to them at any time, faster than
instantaneously, just by being there.
But there's no hurry. Total
expansion is always there, beyond time, within and around you. You need only
open your awareness at the pace you find safe and comfortable. If LSD is too
fast, go slower. This is home. We all belong in the universe.
Nothing gets in our way, but
most of us are likely to open up in stages, gradually. We tend to go up in
cycles of emotion: after each burst of euphoric realization, we may hit a new
and different kind of negativity, the next thing we need to learn to love. But
the higher you go, the easier it gets.
The experience of complete
awareness being space, does not mean being presently conscious of every detail
in the universe, every possible relationship between limited, withdrawn
entities. Being space is a readiness
to be aware fully of anything conceivable. It means we have no resistance, no
denial of any concept or relationship. Therefore, to achieve enlightenment, we
are not required to gather any particular set of ideas or experiences, virtues
or sufferings. Anything that exists can be experienced with a completely
expanded awareness.
Regardless of how you have
limited your awareness, you are a free and self-determined being. No other live
being, nor any group of beings, can control your vibration level so there is
nothing in the universe, especially the physical part of it, that can counter
your free will.
That means that the physical
world has no power over you whatsoever: it doesn't tempt you, it doesn't
corrupt you, it doesn't get in the way of enlightenment, "it" doesn't do anything to you.
You are the sole cause of your level of existence. Your internal condition
is never programmed. The experience of being forced or controlled against your
will can occur only when you make yourself dense, when you contract your
awareness.
Our reality at any level
consists of whatever unique conscious beings we perceive as alive, and the process
of enlightenment is expanding our comprehension of other beings, until we
experience everything as a live interaction.
The more we withdraw from
loving other beings, the more of a "physical" world we will contend
with, the more mass-obsessed we become. On the other hand, the more we open up
to our brothers and sisters, the less solid the world becomes.
Enlightenment is any
experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We could
also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all,
and that the entire universe is alive.
The difficulty in writing
about it, and in all efforts to tell how to achieve it, comes of trying to use
limited terms to talk about going beyond limits. To be enlightened is to be in
a state of flexible awareness, an open mind. Enlightenment is the very process
of expanding, not of arriving at a different set of limits.
There is no one correct way
of looking at life "after" enlightenment. We are not obliged to be or
not be anything, as long as in our hearts and minds we are whole.
What does it mean, to be
whole? It means that we must be willing to conceive of, to contain within
ourselves, whatever is "other than" any limited idea. It means
knowing that when we emphasize a positive, we are at the same time creating a
negative. When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the
ignorance that is other than the
knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the
sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it.
If we deny doing so, that is
a contraction of awareness; we become dense, we become mass-level entities, we
are incarnated in physical bodies. And we cannot control what we have denied
creating, it is forced into our attention whether we like it or not, and so we
live in a world of sin and ignorance.
However, if we remain
constantly open and unresisting to such negatives, we are not compelled to
dwell on them: If we allow that ugliness is always within us, then we are free
to create beauty. If we know that stupidity is always within us, then we are
free to emphasize this intelligence.
Love is the highest and
holiest action because it always contains that which is not love within itself,
it always and ever moves to include the unloving.
How often we try to figure
out a cause-and-effect sequence in our experiences, when what is happening is
merely a swing of alternating conditions. We may choose a negative task, like
monastic discipline, and then feel rewarded. Or conversely, we may pursue a
seductive pleasure, and then feel cheated. We never stand back to see that we
are just swinging like pendulums.
And many of us insist on
thinking of ourselves as only kind, good, and wise: we try to be pendulums that
swing only to one side.
The remedy for this confusion
is to be loving, to experience life without mental resistance, until we rise
above mass and energy to the space level. On that level, where love is constant
and our awareness is open, we will more easily comprehend the miracle of
containing contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes. We will be free to
experience what we choose, because we will not deny that we always contain
everything other than our choice.
Karma is not "paying for" exactly what you did in the past. It's just
that, as you raise your vibration level, you may encounter the kind of experiences you withdrew from in
the past, or you may run into anything other
than what you are insisting on now. If you try to close your mind, you will
drop back to a lower vibration. But if you look calmly at undesired events,
absorb them mentally, and love yourself
for disliking them, you will keep going higher. You might say that for a
while you must take your bum trip with your high.
As you deal with and love
each new disturbing phenomenon, you will begin to realize that none of the
threatening evil that bothered you has disappeared from the world. But your
compulsive feelings of dismay and helplessness will be gone, you will learn how
to steer your way around or through turbulent vibrations and in time they won't
happen to you any more. You will see how you can change your emotions and
experiences by understanding their relation to your awareness level.
For instance, if your
feelings fade after a deeply loving experience with someone (which is
especially likely if you were high on marijuana or LSD at the time), you can
understand it as a fading out of being in the same space now that you are both
vibrating on a lower level again. When you know that, and know that the low
mood can pass just as easily as it came on, then you are less likely to make
big decisions and get into arguments because of it. You just relax your mind
and watch it go by.
Currently many of us are
experiencing temporary highs and flashes of illumination, especially with
psychedelics available. If things get weird in new ways after such euphoric
times, you need not be disturbed. It may be a sign you're going higher still.
Meanwhile we should realize
that we tend to return to the vibration level where we feel stable, something
we can "live with." It's the level of stability, the level where we
feel ourselves to be comfortably on the same vibration with others, that needs
to be changed. And that can be done only through an unresisting state of mind,
a constantly expanding love.
It is quite natural, in
pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your
everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing
else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as
you become more loving, but not in ways that you can exactly predict. What
happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
There is a good attitude to
take towards any goal: It's nice if it happens, nice if it doesn't. Long before
you get to where you can confidently make choices for the future, you may find
that you are no longer interested in predicting much. You won't mind letting go
of one beautiful experience because love will make the next one just as
rewarding.
Similarly there
isn't much specific advice to be given about what enlightened existence should
be on Earth, and I am reluctant to make glowing predictions about what is
possible. As we have seen, as soon as we are completely willing to create a
condition, it changes into something else if our minds are blocked to
alternatives. On our mass level, that "something else" is often
likely to be unpleasant, and as soon as we try to withdraw from our feelings
about it, we are stuck with it. That's one way to explain why ideal and
beautiful events vanish from our lives, and bad and dull ones last, and the
same applies in predicting a rosy future.
But no matter how vague and
unwieldy that process seems, love will overcome it. It can be safely predicted
that, as you grow more loving of yourself and others, you will in this lifetime
begin seeing every person and object as a perfect form, just the way they are
now. You will feel a rich pleasure in every moment. And since beauty really is
in the eye of the beholder, your vibrations will be beautiful, too.
CHAPTER THREE
How to feel good
It's all right to have a good
time. That's one of the most important messages of enlightenment. We should try
to comprehend the highest pleasure level, the pleasure of God, so to speak, in
all that we perceive. No one in higher consciousness wants any of us to have a
miserable time on earth.
There is a paradise in and
around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move, not
even lifting your eyes from this page. You can open yourself to the diamondlike
perfection of everything you see and feel. If you don't think it can happen
that easily, just be loving, moment by moment, and trust that it will come to
you.
No one on the space level
ever puts barriers or tests in the way of someone who is trying to raise his
spiritual level. Hindsight may make it look as though you were being tested,
but in truth you are always being allowed to decide for yourself, to define the
universe that is real to you.
Higher beings are only too
happy when you show yourself loving enough to rise. You will be given every
help and chance when you ask for it, whether you ask by taking LSD or any other
way, be it simple prayer or writing a letter to Santa Claus. You are never
asked to torment or frustrate yourself. You don't have to prove anything. You can't prove anything: your vibrations
always speak true, you can't lie about them.
And it is easy to rise on the
wings of love. No matter how convincing any perception of any level of reality,
no matter how overwhelming, intricate and complex, you are still seeing only a
fragment within our true reality: being just us, unresisting, unattached,
loving all.
It is also all right to have
a good time in sexual relations. In truth, a satisfying orgasm is a spiritual
realization more than a technical accomplishment. The flesh is not apart from
the spirit. The body is an ecstatic creation of many beings vibrating on other
levels of consciousness. A deep orgasm is a realization of love on many levels,
including those which many of us now think of as "animal." Love,
getting into the same space or on the same vibration with others, is the ground
of our being, and takes an infinity of forms. As in all other experiences, we
always have the sexual experiences we deserve, depending on our loving kindness
towards ourselves and others.
The ecstasy of sex can be
considered a mirror to our psychic dissolution in the space of our divine
brothers and sisters in the higher levels of expansion. Making love is one
demonstration of how space relations ask us to surrender in love, and absorb
the differences and imperfections and beauties of other beings.
If this is so, why is
asceticism so often recommended as a spiritual path, and why does it sometimes
appear to work? As we saw in the preceding chapter, when you push hard in one
direction, you are likely to be swung into a state other than what you intend.
When you insist on having only sensual pleasure, you will, unless your mind is
open, be thrown into a state where asceticism seems like the right course. And
when you go far enough in asceticism, you may be thrown into bliss and ecstasy,
as many saints have told us.
Also, if you complain loud
enough, you will be given a flash of insight into higher consciousness. If you
deny yourself food, sex, communication, or sleep, you are in a way reporting to
headquarters that your life form isn't working, and you may be allowed a brief
return to space to check it out. But such flashes, though they presently make
up most of what humanity knows of space, are not the entire light, no matter
how convincing they feel. And these flashes are unstable, they are not the most
comfortable way to get home. You will not be able to stay on higher levels when
you get there through such negative emphasis.
No matter what high-minded
rationalizations you comfort yourself with for coming back to earth, asceticism
will keep bringing you back to the physical plane until you love enough to rise
above it on a positive path. Indeed, it is love itself that is the positive
path to space. There is no wisdom or holiness that is ever an excuse for the
failure to love, in ourselves or others.
And in sexual relations,
again, love overcomes the pendulum effect, the yin-yang of concepts, and at
last we have a rational way to explain why love must be the first motive in
sex. But love in this intention is much broader than romantic passion, and it
must begin with loving yourself. If you love everything you feel and do,
including your emotionally dry and empty moods, your pleasure will keep coming
back. If you find sex unrewarding, it just means that in this lifetime or
another you insisted too much on the other side of the balance. It is the
action of contracting your awareness that makes any condition compulsory.
Also it is important not to
judge others for their pleasures of the flesh. What you deny to others will be
denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for
yourself, all your words and actions define the world you want to live in. One
of the necessary laws for our relations as equal beings is this: What you say,
goes—but only for you and those who agree with you. If you say a man should not
receive help undeservedly, it may not affect his life much, but it will hold
for you: you will not get undeserved help. If you say other people's sexual
pleasures are vulgar, it won't change their experiences, but your pleasures
will become vulgar. It is precisely your unlimited power to control your
experience that hangs you up. How much compassion and forgiveness do you want
for yourself? Give it to others. Go to the extreme: forgive all beings for
their karmic debts to you. Grant to others the freedom, the love, the
consciousness that you want for yourself.
Music shows us how to
maintain pleasure and ecstasy. Normally we tend to think of a moment of
euphoric realization as unbearable and impossible to continue. It slips away
and then we pursue it again. It does so because we are unwilling to let it go,
we are unwilling to conceive of being away from it. But if we take the example
of music, letting go of one note to hear the next, then our pleasure can be
constant though the vibrations change.
If we "listen" to
the world, and let it act on us without either-or judgments and ideas, then we
can learn to comprehend each flash of pleasure as a tone in the infinite
harmony. The orchestra of the world plays the familiar melodies again and
again, and the old folks stand around and tap their feet while the young ones
dance.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lifesavers
Before going further, let's
expand on some of the basic attitudes salted away in what has gone before. It
is not my intention to have anyone remember all the transistorized thinking in
this book, but I highly recommend memorizing the italic lines below. They are simple
enough to stay with you and will work in any mental crisis. Keep them handy in
your mind.
One of my psychedelic
excursions had gotten off to a bad start, and I was sinking into a really
satanic bummer. As I looked about me at people turning evil, shrunken,
colorless, old, and weird, I suddenly thought, "Well, What did you think it was that needed to be loved?"
And just like that, the doors opened and I was in paradise.
No resistance. This does not mean that you must be physically passive or meekly put up
with bad vibrations or rip-offs. This means no resistance in your mind. Be free
in your head, act out of love, and do what feels good. There is no action that
is always right or wrong: the only true variable is the love with which you
act. As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even
have to try. It's a beautiful paradox: the more you open your consciousness,
the fewer unpleasant events intrude themselves into your awareness.
Love as much as you can from wherever you are. This line is especially good
to recall when you feel frightened, crazy, or have taken some bad dope. Write
it on the wall of your room. You may not want to love what you feel or see, you
may not be able to convince yourself that you could love it at all. But just
decide to love it. Say out loud that you love it, even if you don't believe it.
And say, ''I love myself for hating this."
Love it the way it is. The way you see the world depends entirely on your own vibration level.
When your vibration changes, the whole world will look different. It's like
those days when everyone seems to be smiling at you because you feel happy. The
way to raise your vibration level is to feel more love. Start by loving your
negative feelings, your own boredom, dullness and despair. It's hard to
believe, but changing the content of
your mind does nothing to change your vibration level.
For the purpose of raising
your awareness, it is useless to change your ideas, your faith, your behavior,
your place of residence, or your companions.
It is not arbitrary nor an
accident that you are where you are, so you might as well get your attitude
straight before you make a change. Otherwise you might find yourself chasing
all over creation looking for the right place, and not even the
You take yourself with you
wherever you go. As they say in Zen: if you can't find it where you're
standing, where do you expect to wander in search of it? There is never
anyplace in the universe to be except among your equals. The direction of
change to seek is not in our four dimensions: it is getting deeper into what
you are, where you are, like turning up the volume on the amplifier.
Love yourself. But isn't the definition of love being in the same space with others? Actually much of what we now
think of as our selves— our bodies, our minds, our emotions—involves billions
of other beings. Being the ego consciousness of a human body is a little like
being Mayor of
We are free, as individual,
unique entities, to leave any group, such as the group that forms the body, but
we will find other beings to harmonize with on any level we go to.
When you love your self you are in truth expanding in love
into many other beings.
And the more loving you are,
the more loving the beings within and around you. On all levels we are mutually
dependent vibrations. Play a happy tune and happy dancers will join your trip.
In another sense, loving
yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How
contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas?
Loving yourself is not a
matter of building your ego. Egotism is proving you are worthwhile after you
have sunk into hating yourself. Loving yourself will dissolve your ego: you
will feel no need to prove you are superior.
CHAPTER FIVE
How we got here
We have a flood of ideas and
names for many different kinds of human behavior, but much of what we do obeys
certain common rules of expansion and contraction. As I said, the rules do not
come from anywhere outside ourselves. If we conceive that we are equal beings,
then certain truths must follow about our relationships with each other. We may
call these truths the source of fairness and justice, but such names do not
matter. It's just the way it has to be if this universe of life is to exist at
all. It seems pointless to try to be convincing about this in words, compared
to what you will comprehend when you flash on this divine order and justice for
yourself when you are meditating or high on psychedelics. I can offer only
limited speculation on how these rules show up in our human experience.
The idea of
equality has often been taken to mean dropping to the lowest common
denominator, or settling for the characterless common middle. Equality as I am
suggesting it is our coming together at the level of highest awareness, pure
space, without attachment or resistance, with complete freedom of experience
and consciousness, merging with others in whatever ecstasy or calm we choose.
In all the vibration levels less than the highest, there are illusions of
quantity and value, of greater and lesser love, intelligence, and powers. We
appear to each other according to the vibrations we choose to emphasize, but we
are equal in potential.
If that's true, how did we
get so deep into mass that physical reality looks like the only reality? And
that these comments on space sound like a peculiar and unverifiable fantasy? As
concerns verification, I believe that the concept of equal entities can lead to
a reintegration of currently available data in physics, and that we may then
extrapolate from that information to describe the laws of our relations on a universal
scale. Meanwhile I must indulge in some rough guesswork about how we got to the
mass level in the first place.
We can start with a paradox
at the highest level: expanded beings, completely unresisting, are also
completely irresistible. Space beings are entirely permissive to other beings,
but when one of us contracts, he becomes dense to the extent of his
contraction, and is then in appearance propelled
by the space beings. The experience of being propelled and later compelled is
due entirely to the density of the contracted beings. Space beings have no
intention to propel or compel anyone to do anything.
All conceivable universes in
all conceivable dimensions exist in the One Mind as pure idea or archetype.
When any of us withdraws from a willingness
to create any aspect of that, we drop to a lower vibration level. For this
illustration, imagine we are a great number of energy beings who are
indifferent to the idea of Pluto the Dog. Since we are denser than space
beings, they would propel us, and we would appear in space as a flowing,
flashing image of Pluto the Dog, looking like a fireworks display, perhaps.
Imagine, then, some of us,
more than indifferent, who deny the
concept of Pluto the Dog, withdrawing to the mass level. Our mass, being even denser
than the energy, is compelled to take the form denied, and behold the physical
manifestation of Pluto the Dog. In this manner, what is denied on the
conceptual level, the space level, becomes manifest on the physical plane.
Of course, the truth is not
quite that cut-and-dried, but it will give you the idea. Space appears to
propel energy, and energy appears to compel matter. But these reactions cannot
occur without the density of the more withdrawn beings. By denying your
capacity to create a concept, or by denying someone else's freedom to do so,
you drop to a vibration where not only Pluto the Dog is evident, but a lot of
other material forms also. Denying the truth is what opens Pandora's box.
You don't have to assume that
you personally denied every miserable thing that happens on earth: when you
deny coffee you also become compulsively involved with the reality of tea and
cocoa. There was something that
freaked you, or more likely a whole series of ideas that you were unwilling to
conceive of or love, so that gradually your vibrations dropped to a mass level,
and you found yourself being a body. But there's nothing holding you down to a
mass level, regardless of all your experiences of being pushed and pulled by
other masses, by energy, and by space. It's your own ignorance, your density,
that makes it possible for you to be pushed. You can't feel pain until you're
stupid. Pain is the experience of not being able to get into the same space
with others.
But all you need do to get
free of pain, to get un-stupid, is to be willing
to be aware of anything that enters your consciousness.
There are many events closer
to earth in which we can see the compulsion-by-denial process working. Of all
the paradoxes with which we struggle on the material level, the failure of good
intentions is perhaps one of the most baffling. Good people try to do good
things and get bad results. Peaceful youths are jailed, spiritual communes are
attacked, and flower children become bombers. Often in history spiritual
revivals have been followed by bloodshed and persecution. Perhaps we can now
understand why these things happen.
What you cannot think about,
you cannot control. What you cannot conceive of in your awareness, you will
stumble over in your path. Violent human beings are precisely those who refuse
at some time to conceive that they could be violent. It also happens that if
you are unwilling to conceive of people being the victims of violence, you may
become a victim yourself, for you will not be sufficiently aware of how it
happens to avoid it. Everything that is manifest begins in the spirit: every
evil that is manifest to us is there because we refused to conceive of causing
it, or denied someone else the freedom to conceive of it. The way out, as hard
as it may be to believe, is not by resisting further, by moving the furniture
around, but by being willing to conceive of it—by loving it, in short. As we
should have done in the first place.
Unfortunately, most people
with good intentions are trying to deny or eliminate what is already manifest.
And many spiritual revivals are a deeper denial of the facts of our vibration
level.
What can we do about evil? A
great deal, if our heads are clear. My catch-all phrase is: "I wouldn't
deny that experience to the One
Mind."
Once you have cleared your
head on the matter, then do whatever feels right to you. Evil occurs as a
secondary reality, after you have withdrawn to a low vibration level. The
seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it.
When your consciousness is
open, any action you take in reference to evil has no more significance than
digging a ditch to channel floodwaters away from a house. By all means, go to
the doctor when you are sick; disable someone trying to hurt you; ask unpleasant
people to leave your house; start a revolution: just keep your awareness open
all the while, and know that your evil has manifested itself in your life
because of your lack of love. The true enemy, if there is one, is in yourself,
in your failure to love enough. But there is no moral judgment in our
involvement with evil. If you refuse to admit that auto-mobiles exist, you're
going to get hit by cars, not because you are sinful or neurotic, but just
because you are not looking at automobiles. You won't see them coming.
Some people think that
"thoughts are things" and that you must avoid negative thoughts or
they will happen. As we have seen earlier, thoughts are certainly powerful when
conceived by expanded beings. But trying to withdraw from thoughts is what got
us incarnated on a mass level in the first place. If you avoid negative
thoughts, they will sooner or later manifest themselves physically. It is your
resistance to the negative thought, whether you bring it to consciousness or
not, that makes it manifest in your life.
What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real? That is the first question
to ask yourself when you become aware of something ugly or evil or stupid. We
are always in a context of our equals, and the justice of love is always
perfect. The universe is an infinite tapestry of perfectly ordered love
relationships, and when you are loving enough, you rise. It's not even a matter
of waiting until your lifetime is over. Your movement as a being is not
horizontal through time, so to speak. All states of consciousness are available
right now. Every possibility in the past and future exists timelessly, it's
always there, and you activate your level of reality by your own vibrations.
There is a jewel of perfect
ecstasy of being who you are. You are at the level of consciousness that has
the greatest pleasure and ecstasy you are capable of accepting. Regardless of
what I tell myself, or what I have at times experienced, my greatest pleasure
right now is to be penniless in a room in
Try these sayings during
meditation: I surrender to this reality.
I have no resistance to this reality. I am one with this reality. I surrender
to the justice of our equality. I have no resistance to the justice of our
equality. I am one with the justice of our equality.
CHAPTER SIX
Self-improvement
I hope you will find it
encouraging to learn how these general ideas apply to eliminating evils in
yourself, to spiritual self-improvement. The more bad thoughts and feelings you
try to weed out of yourself, the more there will be.
Since I myself have certain
preferences for what I want to do, I must be wary of passing these on as having
the dignity of law. Therefore I must necessarily become even more personal in
this chapter, and make my bias clear. I am
lazy, and it bothers me to see people strenuously pursuing self-improvement
goals by methods that will not work, and urging me to do the same. They are
often the loveliest of people, and I would love to join them if I thought they
would succeed. On the other hand, perhaps they know the goal will never be reached by their means, and I am the
fool for exposing what everyone secretly knows. If we didn't have these games,
that would leave a Void, wouldn't it? I am playing the game of refusing
pointless games, which may be the most pointless of all.
Obviously there is a danger
here of wandering in circles, but if someone else knew what was in this
chapter, I would want him to tell me, so I must take a small risk.
A structure is any relation
between entities that avoids dissolving. The self that you know as a human
being is a structure, an organization of billions of entities.
An odd thing about structures
is that they will dissolve both from success and failure, so the problem, if
you want a structure, is to maintain a tension somewhere between the two.
The idea that structures will
disintegrate when completely successful struck me as peculiar, and I made a
list of hasty examples: a victorious empire inevitably breaks up into parts or
collapses when it reaches its peak and is unopposed. A man inherits wealth and
"ruins" himself with dissipation. The genius goes insane. "Power
corrupts." "The good die young." Religions break into schisms
and heresies. A dominant species mysteriously becomes extinct A cell divides in
two. The magician goes mad.
Hence people are cautious
about success or power too easily gained on some level. On some level, the
structure invokes a self-imposed limit on success, including success in pursuing
spiritual awareness. Spiritual leaders keep telling us the ego must die to be
reborn, but we hold back. The structure preserves itself.
The ego, the mental
structure, "feels better" when it has to contend with the tension of
threats to itself. We feel "high" and energetic when tested by
negative possibilities: hard work, discipline, sky-diving, racing, wars (until
Vietnam—the North Vietnamese got high off that one—the U.S. didn't because it
wasn't threatened), illness, fasting, asceticism, gambling, drugs, careless
driving, arguing, paranoia (invented threats), contending with the devil and
black magic, and so on.
Of course, if the negative
definition goes too far, the structure will collapse, but somehow that doesn't
bother us. We love to worry about dangers to human survival. (Unless it is a
real one, like the atomic bomb or germ war-fare. Then the risk is
"unreal," we are reluctant to think about it.)
As a normal process, we
define ourselves, we find out who we are, by what we disagree with. And we
identify others by what is wrong with them: we keep looking until we find some
difference between "us" and "them." Virtues in others are
invisible, not really interesting .
We human beings, almost alone
among species, have solved the problem of maintaining negative tension by being
our own worst enemies. We can never completely overcome "human
nature" in ourselves or others, so the game goes on. It is plain that we
are getting a reward from all the ghastly facts of life we complain of: that's what
sells newspapers.
Negative emphasis results in
an intensified structure and a stronger ego. Even though some of these
activities, like self-denial, are carried on under the banner of spiritual
search, the result is the same. On a subtle level we know that most spiritual
endeavors will not succeed, but we go on maintaining the fantasy that they are
admirable. Many of us have no intention of really
succeeding in dissolving our attachment to structure and going to another plane
of existence.
But what of those, wise and
serious, who zealously pursue enlightenment by traditional methods? Since we
know that negative methods of getting high will not lead to a stable experience
of space, what is it that makes yoga rewarding?
The reason yoga works when it
does is in the love expressed between teacher and student, and in the student's
willing placement of attention. If you limit your experience to phenomena you
are completely willing to conceive of, such as the contents of a cave in
But as soon as you walk out
of the cave, you will find people behaving just as they did before. And if you
are not willing to be the cause of their behavior, and love them as they are,
your vibration level will drop. And then you may preach about how evil the
world is, how corrupt cities are, how sinful people are.
Insofar as we are seriously
concerned about evil, not just as a negative-tension game, we should see that
we need not be concerned with evil as a physical
manifestation: it is that such manifestations have their source in space-level
concepts that exist in timeless possibility. It is as a concept that evil is real and is always within us. If we cannot
learn how to deal with it on earth, we will be plagued with it even in heaven.
Even if you are not just
testing your structure, the motive
for purifying yourself —that you feel spiritually impure—will prevent any
genuine gain until you learn to love the impurity you started with. Can any
being seriously think that he is going to pass through the infinity of time
without ever making another mistake?
Quite often a flash of
enlightenment will give you this message: Go back to where you started and
learn to love it more.
There is another handicap to
conventional methods of self-elevation: if you identify with a status system of
spiritual values, it can produce unloving snobbery towards your brothers. The
justice of our relations is exact, and if you are unloving the results will
manifest explicitly. You may then complain, "If I'm working so hard to be
pure, why do these things happen, why do people hate me?" But there is no
purity greater than love, even when it is corrupt and unwashed.
The positive way to define
your ego is to be one with the cause of it: love it the way it is, then freely
choose whatever behavior feels good to you. You won't blow away; you can
experience your present structure as a space-level interaction, and then go
higher only if you want to.
Changing your vibration
level, raising your love level, is the only action that results in a real
change for the better. Group encounters, sexual freedom, revolution, yoga,
diets, asceticism, rock music, dope, all means are dependent on your interest
and creative power to be effective. These are all good games, but don't try to
force yourself past the time when you are really interested. They work only
while your attention to them is aroused. And when they work too well, too
successfully, you are likely to "lose interest." When you feel your
structure turning into energy and then space, you are likely to pull back,
unless you accept what is happening and stabilize at a new level.
There really are more loving
games than improving yourself or reforming other people, or otherwise using
negative tension to harden your structure.
Keep in mind that your
survival does not depend on any structure. You are a unity, an entity just like
all the others in the universe. When you ain't got nothing you got nothin' to
lose.
There isn't anything
"wrong" with using negative events to define your ego, as long as you
do it consciously, because you want to. The only wrongness in any activity is
being withdrawn from awareness of what you are doing. We can play these same
silly games with a lot more pleasure when we are aware of what we are really
doing.
When you offer people
spiritual solutions —or solutions of any kind for anything, for that matter—you
are asking them to give up what makes them feel active, alive, defined— their
ego structure. Be careful—it's dangerous!
Well, just for starters, take
it that every human being is a perfect whatever-it-is right now. Every state of
consciousness is perfect and complete, and does not need to be changed. And
every change of consciousness is perfect and complete, and does not need to be
static.
I have tried to cover all the
possibilities at once with a couple of maxims:
Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with the cause of all that
exists.
Whether I feel it or not, I am one with all the love in the universe.
We can vary our experience of
time by changing our vibrations, just as we alter our perception of the rest of
the physical universe. Our concepts, feelings, and limited relations have
beginnings and endings in time, but we do not. On the space level, when we are
completely expanded, the time is always now.
When you look at a lake,
there is no water in your mind. Put another way, the awareness of a hard object
has no hardness in it. The awareness of confusion is not confused. The
awareness of insanity is not insane. The awareness of the passage of time takes
no time, there is no time in it.
We "measure" time
by the compulsive repetition of interactions on the mass level. And the more
expanded our consciousness, the less compulsion we are involved in. Our subjective
awareness of time is often at variance with the clock.
Many of us by now are
familiar with distortions of time when high on marijuana, and of course the
stronger psychedelics go to greater extremes. How does this happen? A brief
guess at the sources of the time experience is highly worth while, because it
suggests how practical it is to look to your own vibration level before
reacting to what you think is an external reality.
Think of perception as a kind
of radar: your wave goes out and bounces back from an object. Needless to say,
the facts are more complex than this illustration, but it's close enough to
serve.
Let's say someone is shaking
a table and a cup is starting to slide off. If your perceptual vibrations are
very slow, your waves will give you one message about where the cup is when it
starts falling, another flash when it is halfway to the floor, and another when
it hits. But if you are vibrating quickly, you will get many messages as the
cup starts to fall, telling you the direction it is going, and you will feel as
though you have plenty of time to reach over and catch it if you want to.
Note carefully that when your
vibrations are slow, events seem to happen fast, and you will feel that events
are happening too fast for you to control them. And you may therefore feel
impelled to try that much harder to exercise control. You may try to establish
habits of orderly behavior, and you may resent disorderly people. This is one
origin of the power trip. You may try to get away from disturbing events by
moving to the country, or turn off your consciousness with hard drugs or
liquor.
But the faster you are
vibrating and the more messages you get back from your environment, the slower
events will appear to be happening, and the more you will feel you are in
control. The more you love, the faster you vibrate, then the less need you feel
to control anything, and you are not fearful of change and variety. You
experience everything deeper and slower and more lovingly.
The higher the ratio of expansion
to contraction in yourself, the more expanded and loving you are, the faster
you vibrate.
The secondary reality is
useful in the sense that it will always give you a clear picture of your
vibration level. If the world looks beautiful and safe, you are vibrating fast;
if it looks gloomy, dull, or frightening, then you are vibrating slow, and you
need to love yourself for vibrating too slow.
Inside yourself or outside,
you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it. It is useless
to try to escape any difficulty by contracting your consciousness. You will
have to climb back up any hill you roll down, you will have to do it sooner or
later, in this lifetime or another, because our true nature is beyond time.
Never pull your attention away
from a scene impulsively because it looks ugly, unpleasant, or painful.
Make a conscious decision,
the words are enough, to love yourself for seeing it as revolting. If possible,
keep your attention on it until it turns beautiful, or at least until you are
indifferent to it.
You don't have to go looking
for bad scenes to test yourself, or remind yourself of all that is wrong in the
world, but once a scene manifests itself in your presence, become as fully
aware of it as you can.
Staying with it is important.
You may hide in your room or leave the city, but you as an entity will still be stuck on a low vibration level of
denial if you pull away suddenly. It will seem like the strangest of
coincidences when, having withdrawn your attention sharply from one unpleasant
scene, you keep running into others like it. That will baffle you, and keep
happening until you come to an unpleasantness you can tolerate or love, and
your vibrations go up.
Look at it, love it, and then get away! It's all right to channel
your attention to what is pleasant for you. What else is freedom for? And as
long as there is free will, there are always going to be some beings creating
vibrations you do not like, no matter what level you are on. The point is to
take your leave in a way that doesn't hang you up.
After a few experiences with
loving weird events, you will be tuned in enough to get early warning when
someone is likely to rip you off or otherwise stir up bad vibrations, (when the
cup is starting to fall, so to speak,) and you will be able to make the right
moves before it gets too involved.
Don't feel that it is
"unspiritual" to perceive unwholesome possibilities in other people:
it isn't paranoia if the object of your fear is real.
It's just carelessness karma
if you ignore early warnings. Keep your mind open and unresisting to any
possibility: that's what gives you the information to keep evil from
manifesting in your life. Pay attention, here and now. It's all right to say
No.
No matter what others are
doing, you are the only one who is responsible for what happens to you. There
is nothing in the external event that in the least way determines your feelings
and experiences: your life is entirely governed by your vibrations, what they
tell you and how you respond.
The slower your vibrations,
the more unpleasant your life: you will contend with more conflict, mass, and
pain. Events will happen too fast for control, yet time will seem interminable
because you can see no way out.
But when you raise your
vibration level, you can neatly sidestep collisions, both psychic and physical,
and quite literally change the world for the better. Love is the strongest
magic of all.
When you learn to love hell,
you will be in heaven.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Going through changes
If nothing is holding us down
to the physical plane, then what's holding us? Why are we attached to
structures? Why do we stick to our vibration level? Why do we fear change?
To answer these questions,
let's start at the top once again. There are a lot of words for how it feels to
be completely expanded: total awareness, completeness, freedom, love, ecstasy,
certainty, stability, supreme intelligence, compassion. I think it will be
least vague in this instance to discuss our interactions in terms of stability.
Absolute stability exists
naturally at the space level, because all
relationships are persistent to the degree that the beings involved have the
same expansion.
But on the more contracted
levels, where there is by definition some withdrawal of awareness, we accordingly
have less control over how long the stable condition lasts. And when we are
relating to beings whose vibrations are higher or lower than ours, we feel
unstable and uncertain.
In an unstable relationship,
we have basically two ways to go, regardless of the subtleties of the changes:
one way is towards stability, reaching a common level of vibration, the other
way is towards disintegration, getting so far apart in vibrations that we are
no longer aware of each other at all. Since we are uncomfortable in the
presence of vibrations higher or lower than our own, we tend to make certain
"natural" responses. If the other person is lower, we will generally
try to get him up to our level, to help him and cheer him up. But if the other
person is higher, we will often, at first, try to bring him down and get him to
lower his vibrations. Note that when you try to help someone you are working
against his natural, perhaps unconscious effort to bring you down. The lower
vibrating person (and this could be any of us depending on the circumstance)
will appear to be draining the energy of the higher person, often with the best
moral and social motives. This effort can take the form of exaggerated praise,
sly pokes disguised in polite words, pleading for help with problems, showing
fear and depression, freaking out, starting an argument, quoting better
authorities, and a thousand other forms, all the way down to putting the higher
person in prison or killing him.
On the other end, if you are
faced with such behavior, the remedy is to keep on out-flowing love, to have no
resistance in your mind. The lower vibrating person may reach farther and
farther to bring you down, but when he finds you will not come down, when he
senses that you have no internal resistance to him, he will have to rise to
your vibration level to feel stable and comfortable, it is too painful to stay
where he is. And he will rise unless of course he goes the other way, and
disintegrates from the relationship. You are not, however, obliged to wait him out:
if you sense that he is not going to do anything but try to bring you down, you
are free to effect the disintegration when you choose. In current language,
just split. Don't dwell on it, and don't feel guilty about it. It's in the
natural order of things.
If you are going to take
psychedelics or meditate and open yourself to communication with beings on
higher levels, you should be aware of the implications of these automatic
interactions between vibration levels. You are likely to feel overwhelmed, driven,
compelled, degraded, full of psychic terror (the bummer) until you drop your
resistance, expand in love, and move up to the vibration of the higher beings.
They have no intention to scare you or test you, it's your own density that is
making you have those feelings.
Anything that really
frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how
deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social.
Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist
by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction
is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment.
That is why we often fear to
open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to
withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.
Here are some lines that have
made me feel good, both in times of emotional turmoil and in meditation:
I am nothing, I am empty, I am silent.
I have no resistance to the vibrations of other beings.
I have no resistance to the expansions and contractions of other beings.
When we are afraid to see
what is higher, we may then try to buy a feeling of safety or power by keeping
our attention on what is lower. This process takes many forms in human life.
Charity conceived as an
impulse towards those lower than ourselves often has unhappy results. Many of
our impulsive feelings have their source in erroneous assumptions about the
status of other people. There is nothing wrong with feelings—the feelings on
the space level are incredibly rich. But it is wise to pay attention to where
our feelings are coming from, and where they are leading us. We may be seduced
by a feeling of freedom, power, or amusement by relating to those we think are
weaker; or we may recoil from the fear and depression we feel in the presence
of those we consider stronger.
The principle of equality is
a safe guide, both in saving us from foolish condescension to disturbed people,
and from self-limiting awe towards superior people.
The solution to all our
push-pull tensions is to treat everyone, every being you recognize to be alive,
as equal to yourself. Always look deeper than any evidence that you are
unequal. If another person displays great wisdom or genius, produces great
paintings, or even inflates himself to writing books of advice like this one,
just DON'T BELIEVE it is any evidence that his potential is higher than yours.
Know that anything he has done, you can do—not in the sense of debasing him but
of elevating yourself. Don't "admire" him excessively—that separates
you. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, enjoy what he produces,
treat him as an equal. And whatever you see on a psychedelic trip, just say, "I'm equal to that; we are all equal to
that."
On the other side, if a
person displays sickness and insanity, degradation and emotional distress,
helplessness and despair, just don't believe it is any evidence that his
potential is lower than yours. Know that anything you are doing, he can do.
Don't blindly agree with his game; don't react as though what he is doing is
real. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, have compassion for him,
treat him as your equal. Begin with the knowledge that he can bring himself out
of it. Don't ignore him necessarily, unless you know that he has been running
the same movie over and over and are bored with it. Your attention is always
life-giving; it will make him feel stable and loved, and he can go up from
there if he wants to. You can even
tell him in words that you don't believe his game: do it while you are
bandaging his wounds or feeding him or giving him money. Don't act superior to
him: you aren't, you're his equal. Ignore the sin and love the sinner.
It is not a personal affront
to you when someone is being discordant, it is a measure of his pain. He's
showing you how much he hurts, and how much compassion he needs. But keep in
mind, too, that not all victims are innocent. In a certain karmic sense, no
victims are innocent, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't help them, for it is
our fate to exist in a relation to them, and how we behave determines our own
karma. But we should give help in a way that does not extend our attachment to
low vibrations. That means we should give what we would expect to get, good or
bad, in the same circumstance, and begin with the knowledge that all beings are
equals.
While we still believe there
are people greater or lesser than ourselves, we will tend to hang on all the
more tightly to our current vibration level, we will be fastened to the people
who make us feel at home. We will be stuck with our ideas, our emotional
habits, our jobs, our bodies. We will be afraid to change because we will fear
the unstable experiences we have when we try to reach a "higher"
level. We will be afraid of falling to a "lower" level if we let go
of our current stability.
Once you begin to behave in
the knowledge that no being is greater or lesser than you, then you are free to
change, because you will feel stable no matter what level you are on. You will
feel calm and sure of yourself with or without a body, with or without a job, a
brain, a book to read, or a book to write.
Withdrawing awareness from
the expansions of others, and keeping attention on the contractions of others,
fastens us to the world of matter. It is reassuring to know that this process,
which got us incarnated in bodies in the first place, is also happening in our
daily lives, and can be reversed very easily, starting now.
It is a nice truth that the
way that will relieve your woes on the physical plane will also take you to the
highest spiritual realizations. And the way is simple: No resistance.
CHAPTER NINE
What is real?
The concept that we live in a
universe of equal beings can make sense of all religions, and can contain all
metaphysical attitudes. It is the easiest raft to discard when we reach the
other shore that is no shore. It can tell us how to live on this plane, it can
integrate our scientific knowledge, it can show how our physical existence is
the expression of spiritual laws. It gives us an absolutely confident
understanding of what is true and what is real.
Equal and unique live beings
are all that is fully true and real in the universe. We are the universe.
We experience the deepest
sense of reality only at the highest expansion in perfect love. On lower
vibration levels, we see other beings relating to each other in a way that is
not entirely true or real.
For a down-to-earth example,
let us consider that the people in an audience are real, but
"audience" is a name for something that will disappear when the
people go home. In this sense, the audience is an illusion: a temporary,
partial and limited reality—it has no independent, causative existence.
We can construct a statistical
probability about how the audience will behave, but each member is free to come
and go at will, just as the atoms forming our bodies come and go. It is in this
meaning that we can say that the physical universe, including our bodies, is an
illusion.
We are real: the beings
participating in the universe—us, the particles in the atoms, the energy and
space beings, all are real, all are equal, all are of one kind.
But the relationships,
groupings and massings are illusory as we see them from any given vibration
level. Thus, as the audience is formed of people, illusions are formed out of
real beings. Indeed, there is no other way to form an illusion except by using
what is real, there is no other material around.
However, rather than speak of
the world as illusory, which can be interpreted as a license to steal and be
otherwise unloving, and can only be annoying when you feel stuck where you are,
it is better to call it a secondary reality. The world is real enough when we
are vibrating within a particular range, but only while we are doing so.
Facts are limited truths: the
way relationships between others look to us when we have limited our own
awareness and love, or when they have limited theirs. But facts have roots in
the truth: we may have only a limited view of the beings involved in what we
see as matter, but those beings are real, they are self-determined and are
acting in harmony.
However, we don't need facts
to be wise and loving. Different sets of facts are real at different vibration
levels. The truth is the same for everyone, the facts are always a little
different for everyone.
Facts are certainly
fascinating, like gossip: who's doing what to whom, what's doing what to what.
Of the gathering of facts there is no end. Sometimes we feel that if we had
enough of them, we could get at the truth. Sometimes we madly try to deny them
even though we are attached to a vibration level from which they will not
disappear.
Illusions, facts, are
reliable to the extent that they have truth in them, but they are also somewhat
delusory.
Delusions are denials of the
truth. If we use the physical plane to deny higher reality, we are deluded. But
if we deny the reality that is in the material world, we are deluded also. We
cannot rise above the physical plane by denying its reality: we must love it
and affirm the reality of the live beings who form it.
Some of us grow discouraged
with spiritual efforts because enlightening experiences don't always help us
handle the facts of physical existence any better. We may even mess up more: an
LSD trip may show us how vaporous the world is, and then we get annoyed because
hard, mass-level reality is still there when we come down.
Enlightening experiences can
help in dealing with facts by showing you that you are a completely flexible
whatever-it-is, capable of existing on many different vibration levels, both
within and above the physical plane.
Once you know that the facts
will be different on every level, you are less likely to fight the facts of any
particular plane. As your awareness opens up, you will be able to choose the
level you want, and you will have more enjoyable facts to deal with.
There is no being in the
universe more powerful than you, but there are also none less powerful than
you. This should be the starting point of all your behavior towards other
people. I often say to myself: Let my
intentions not attempt to contradict the necessary laws of our relations as
equal beings. (A long sentence, but I do say it.)
Since every being is
self-determined, you cannot change anyone else's vibration level against his
will, nor are you obliged to. You cannot in reality hurt or help others without
their agreement to play the game, nor can anyone hurt or help you without your
agreement.
Indeed, your perception of
others is colored by your own limited vibrations until you reach the higher
levels, so you have no way of knowing exactly what it is you are trying to
change. On the other hand, you do control your own vibration level absolutely,
and that's all the freedom you need to govern your own relationships and
experiences.
You are free to be anywhere
you want to be in the world that is real to you now. And beyond that, you are
capable of being in any time, on any vibration level, in any system, with
whomever you like.
Regardless of how trapped you
feel, how weighed down by one day after another, your fundamental freedom is
not affected.
If you look at your
environment now, you may see a great deal of "reality" that makes you
feel secure even when it hurts or tires you out. It's all right to hold onto
that while you think this over. Nothing is going to happen unexpectedly just as
a result of reading about how free you are.
In any case, you're never
alone—there are many beings aware of you at all times, loving you, ready to
make you feel it whenever you are ready to open up to it, taking care to see
that you don't get in too deep, encouraging you to love yourself.
The world you see is in truth
a reality of convenience—in a sense, the universe will compassionately arrange
itself into anything you need it to be to work out your preferences. You have
an infinite choice of worlds to live in.
You are also free to live
according to many different cosmic plans. The fact that you can choose doesn't
make any one of them less valid. You may live in a universe in which there is a
God at the top, with a hierarchy down to souls in outer darkness. Or a
materialistic world in which you experience no life after death, just a
complete wipe-out of the past. You may have a heaven and hell.
Whatever your choice,
whatever vibrations feel right to you, you will tune in and stabilize with
others believing the same thing. On the space level, like usually attracts
like.
You can tune your vibrations
to Christ consciousness or Buddha consciousness and experience supernal
compassion. You can tune yourself to black magic and live in a world of weird
shapes and violent forces. You can tune in on Mickey Mouse or Mr. Natural in
the cosmic comic book. You can become one with the Divine Mother and dwell in
incredible sensuous luxury.
You may have all these
experiences and more when you meditate or take psychedelics. You may not
remember this book then, but you will be able to remember two words: No resistance. These two words apply
even more importantly on those levels than on this one, if anything. Remember
them especially when you are dying.
Since we aren't going
anywhere, with stability, any faster than our love will take us, and we have to
love it where we are first, there is something to be said for not getting too
ambitious about the infinite possibilities.
But it's nice to know that
there is more to it than what you see in front of you now, and that you can
experience your present reality on much deeper levels of pleasure and ease.
CHAPTER TEN
How you get there
There are many paths to
enlightenment. Some of us who have expanded to a degree of illumination have
thereafter preached the dogmatic certainty of one particular path.
But enlightenment doesn't
care how you get there. And if you aren't going to be thinking about it in
paradise, then don't worry about it now.
My suggestions intend only to
show why you must actually do it yourself. Act from what you know to be true.
My own attitude, arrived at with an excess of labor and doubt, is that I will
not settle for any path that makes it difficult for most people as I know them
to be, or perhaps excludes them entirely for lifetimes to come.
For myself, I must take the
path that is available to everyone. When I get there by LSD or other paths, I
find myself coming back to help those who are not spiritual athletes. By taking
the path open to all, I will know that those who have stayed behind are doing
so of their own free will, and I won't have to come back again.
As there is perfect enlightenment,
so there is a perfect means to enlightenment: a simple path that is available
to every being in the universe all the
time. Love is the perfect means to enlightenment. It is available at all
times to every being: nothing, no one has the power to stand in the way.
And as soon as you choose to
take the path that is available to everyone, that's it: you are on the path that is available to
everyone.
This book revolves around the
hypothesis in the first paragraph of Chapter One, but let it be clear that I
have many times actually been in all the states of consciousness discussed, as
have many other human beings. I'm not just guessing. These states are no
farther from us than a breath of air. And often I have had to let go of this
concept itself, and can therefore say with confidence: Go beyond reason to
love—it is safe. It is the only safety. Love all you can, and when you are
ready all will be shown to you.
The state of mind that most
needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened.
The sin that most needs to be
loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners.
Those of us who arrive at a
flash of space through a negative emphasis may try to comfort ourselves that we
are on a Bodhisattva trip, coming down to help others. But we should be then
even more discriminating of our motives.
Every person who allows
others to treat him as a spiritual leader has the responsibility to ask
himself: Out of all the perceptions available to me in the universe, why am I
emphasizing the ignorance of my brothers? What am I doing in a role where this
is real? What kind of standards am I conceiving, in which so many people are
seen to be in suffering, while I am the enlightened one?
These questions came to me
with a great shock, and this is one way I might answer for myself: Everything
that is happening in your body is happening on an infinite range of vibration
levels. If you love your lack of information better than I love this knowledge,
then you are on a higher level than I. There is absolutely no external evidence
that will tell me how much you love yourself, because I am seeing you with the
limited vision of my own vibrations. In that sense, what I see is myself.
No matter how confused or
stupid or unloving other persons may appear to us, we have no right ever to
assume that their consciousness is on a lower level than ours. They may be
realizing far deeper dimensions of love. The way we see them is an explicit
measure of our own vibration level.
The very people we now see as
vulgar, unenlightened, stupid, rip-offs, insane—these people, when we learn to
love them and all our feelings about
them, are our tickets to paradise. And that is all we need to do—love them.
We may express that love or not as we wish, in any way we wish. It doesn't even
matter how we treat them. But we must see them and love them as they are now,
for we cannot deny them the freedom to be what they are, just as we must love
ourselves as we are now.
Let us remember that each person
is some kind of opposite of what he insisted on in the past or could be in the
future. As long as we conceive of ourselves as limited beings, we are all the
same distance from the center, whether we are good or bad, sane or mad.
If a man has some awareness
of higher levels and knows that he is free to be anywhere in the universe, he
may then seek to justify taking part in a physical game. The most
self-flattering way to disguise his appetite is to see himself as a bringer of
enlightenment, of purity, of virtue. No one, not even he, will question his
motives and results: isn't he doing what he says he is doing? If others fail to
reach his height, it's not his fault—and thus he keeps the game going forever.
It's self-renewing as long as he is unwilling to see that his own vibrations
emphasize the evil and ignorance he sees. The more he hates evil, the more evil
there is to hate. The more he advises people to resist the material world the
more he binds them to it.
And even these comments are
the consequence of my own resistance to the "error" of resisting
evil. This is a perfect example of how we are always guilty of what we condemn
in others. What we see is always ourselves. It is useless to correct anyone's
behavior. If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't be doing it, true enough,
but he is just as capable of knowing it as we are. If he doesn't see it of his
own free will, is he any more likely to do so when we tell him? By denying him
his freedom to be wrong, we are equally wrong. Giving others the freedom to be
stupid is one of the most important and hardest steps to take in spiritual
progress. Conveniently the opportunity to take that step is all around us every
day.
Those of us who pretend to
greater knowledge than our brothers, who report more enlightened experiences,
have more to explain precisely because we know more.
This book is the description
and education of my own ignorance. And beyond the information herein, I am
trying to show how a human being can handle the kind of experiences I have had
without laying strange trips on his brothers and sisters. Whenever we hand on
what we are shown, we must do so with the same divine love with which it was
shown to us. We are but channels of spiritual joy, and to continue to have it
we need only be open channels.
If we always stand facing the
higher light, like looking into the sun, our vision of the people around us
will be distorted. But if we have the light coming over our shoulders, shining
through us, we will see the beauty of others, we will be open to the light
coming through all forms, and know the glory of the creation.
And I say it often: Thank you, brothers and sisters, for letting
my consciousness be in this place.
While we have humility and
pride enough to act on the knowledge that we exist in an infinite harmony, that
we are neither greater nor lesser than any others, we can enjoy exquisite
spiritual wealth and pleasures.
Let every jewel remind you of
the diamond light of love. Know that the smallest kindness is a facet in the
infinite jewel of enlightenment.
A Fable
Once upon a time there dwelt an old King in a
palace. In the center of a golden table in the main hall, there shone a large
and magnificent jewel. Each day of the King's life the stone sparkled more
resplendently.
One day a thief stole the
jewel and ran from the palace, hiding in a forest. As he stared with deep joy
at the stone, to his amazement the image of the King appeared in it.
"I have come to thank
you," said the King. "You have released me from my attachment to
Earth. I thought I was freed when I acquired the jewel, but then I learned that
I would be released only when I passed it on, with a pure heart, to another.
"Each day of my life I
polished that stone, until finally this day arrived, when the jewel became so
beautiful that you stole it, and I have passed it on, and am released.
"The jewel you hold is
Understanding. You cannot add to its beauty by hiding it and hinting that you
have it, nor yet by wearing it with vanity. Its beauty comes of the consciousness
that others have of it. Honor that which gives it beauty."
Even Lazier
A selection of
reminders from the text:
We are equal beings and the universe is our relations
with each other.
What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this
is real?
No resistance.
Love as much as you can from wherever you are.
Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with the
cause of all that exists.
Whether I feel it or not, I am one with all the love in
the universe.
Love is the only dimension that needs to be changed
Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only
safety.
All states of consciousness are available right now.
It's always within us to relate this way.
Enlightenment doesn't care how you get there.
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it.
There is nothing you need to do first in order to be
enlightened.
This, too, can be experienced with a completely expanded
awareness.
I wouldn't deny this experience to the One Mind.
What did you think it was that needed to be loved?
When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.
Thank you, brothers and sisters, for letting my
consciousness be in this place.
HOW THIS BOOK
CAME TO BE…
Thaddeus
Golas’s final essay on “The Lazy
Man’s Guide To Enlightenment”
Dear Readers, thank you for all the lovely
messages you have sent me over the years. What can I say that will not fall short of your imagination about me? I am mortal, your equal, and that's the message I was trying to deliver we can all do it. Recently I was asked, "What
led to your opening up to cosmic consciousness?"
Was it at age fourteen during dental work, under
gas, when I was aware of the pain as
spirals of light? Was it when I slammed my head
against a wall in Holland during World War II, was knocked out, and
realized I was out in space seeing stars as I was coming to (just like the
comic strips!)? Was it in 1950, when I casually
wrote in my journal, "Space is to energy as energy is to
mass"—an idea that kept me busy for
twenty years, especially after I equated space with consciousness? Was it the satori in a
I did not at all anticipate the kind of experiences I had on LSD. I had
never taken refuge in castles in the air. In college days at
I never varied from my determination to evolve hard information, a way
of being that could be relied on even in chaos. It was chaos that taught me. I
was so ruthless in testing, suspecting every sentiment, that I came to feel I was a destroyer of ideas, and indeed my books are based on what I could not demolish. Anyone who wants to tear those books down will have to work harder and longer than I did.
At times on my psychedelic trips I was distinctly aware of myself as
an unmoved watcher, a still core of awareness immune to changes. However, there were
often wild storms of emotion, and I made a deliberate effort to be completely
passive, open to anything. There were beautiful states of being where I would have loved to
linger, but they vanished the instant I embraced them willingly. I took reassurance just
knowing they were there and that I might return. There were states I recalled from
previous trips but which flashed by as I went somewhere else. There was a constancy in these
realms where I was unpredictably bouncing around.
I might have constructed a
whole life of behavior on the basis of only my first trip, as some have done after a single
illumination, but I was greedy for more. I wanted to live there.
The full story of the 1960s can never be told because so much of it
consisted of subjective experiences. Readers who have no echo in their own experience can give no
credibility to what might be written or said. Only the music transcended such limits.
Otherwise, those images most publicized were usually the silliest.
Many people who
had transcendent experiences made the mistake of believing their euphoria would effect changes in our social reality, that mystical exaltation would have a physical consequence. One day when
sitting on a hill in
I bought a thick-covered bookkeeper's journal with "Day" on the
cover.
As soon as I began to write, my right arm began to hurt with a constant
fierce pain, the same sharp pain I had felt when I cracked my humerus at the age of
eight. It made me sweat, and I tried all kinds of mental tricks to make it go
away, but nothing worked. I did not stop writing. For several days I got little sleep, though I took aspirins, which
should have knocked me out. I wrote a few pages every day in longhand. At last I
decided to go to Everyman's Free Clinic.
The doctor proposed to give me a shot of cortisone. First, to
alleviate the pain of that, he gave me a shot of Novocain. I had stopped taking LSD because I knew I
would not finish writing the book unless I stayed earthbound, but when the needle went in,
it was like an LSD trip of pure pain—I was out in space in a universe of pain. My body broke
into a cold sweat. After a moment or two, which was a true eternity—no past or future—the pain subsided. He then gave me the
cortisone.
In the days after, an enormous bulbous growth
arose in my right armpit, as big as a small teacup,
and I was ready to believe the demons were
after me. When I went back to the clinic, the doctor gave me a shot of
penicillin, and over the next days
the growth disappeared.
For six weeks, I wrote every day. Six weeks may seem like a short time, but in the twenty years preceding, I had
written and discarded thousands of pages.
One day when I did not write, I awoke in the middle of
the night and wrote a few pages. I still have that journal, and the handwriting is terrible, the writing
confused. But some of the passages made it all the way to the published book, including the first
sentence, "I am a lazy man." I never considered any other title but The Lazy Man's Guide
to Enlightenment.
I borrowed an old office typewriter and wrote the first coherent
manuscript. At least it was now passable. Half was commentary on the contemporary scene,
correspondences between historical nomadic tribes and the hippies, and so on.
I wanted to make Xerox copies to give away, but that would have been expensive in double-spacing. I decided
to type it single-spaced, in two columns per page because long lines would be hard to
read. In those pre-computer days, this felt like hard work! When I was about halfway through, I
realized the book was complete at
that point, and the rest was journalism. I
added some of the last chapter to the short version, and that was it.
This version came to twenty
densely typed pages and was inexpensive to reproduce. Over the next year I gave away
hundreds of copies, with occasional small revisions. I suppose it was a sort of market testing.
Previously I had often wandered around town, talking to people at
random, sometimes as many as five or six in an afternoon. When I started to write, I found that
many of the things I had been saying were stored in my mind as if taped. Also, a number of
lines in the book were words that came to me on psychedelic trips. The book was more talked than
written.
I really intended it for other "acidheads," so that those of us in the
psychedelic culture would have a language to use in describing our experiences. I was quite
astonished later when the book found wide acceptance by the general public.
For some time I had been mailing copies to various people, and now
significant feedback began coming in.
In July of 1971, I sent a copy to Alan Watts, whom I had met briefly,
and told him he was free to do anything he wished with it. (Over the years I had tried to give
the idea away, to get someone else to do the work of developing it.)
However, I never did become a popular "New Age" figure, and people in the movement seemed to find me shocking and
disturbing. Well, love may sometimes be blind, but it does not require us to be
blind. To "love it the way it is," in the phrase from the Guide, it
is necessary to see it the way it is. Or, in a thought that came to me once, God
must love us even though we are stupid, but God does not love us because we are stupid.
At the beginning of 1972, I myself was about to enter a maelstrom, not from belief in portents and wonders, but from
misreading social cues. I survived, and the book survived, but it took enormous strength
of will to accomplish it. (This story of Joe C, the "publisher" of the first printing, is
recounted fully in my autobiography.)
When the date for delivery of the manuscript to the typesetter was
less than two weeks away. I quit my job so I could concentrate on the rewriting.
My studio had a refrigerator but no kitchen. For my one hot meal a
day, I used a hot- pot to heat up boil-in-the-bag frozen entrees and vegetables, and then used the
same pot to heat water for coffee. But now I had no money even for that and was half-starved
during the last revision of the book, living on occasional sandwiches of Velveeta cheese and
wheatberry bread. I could have gone to the home of friends for dinner, but that would have taken too many
hours out of the day. I was in a frenzy of concentrated effort.
I revised the book completely. I cut up the Xeroxed version and spread the pieces on the floor, moving sections
around. Then I pasted the pieces on regular stationery, leaving room for typed corrections and
additions. I did a chapter a day until the book was done. Then I stopped revising, because I
knew it would lose its spontaneous quality if I made the book any more literary.
I was using all I learned from working on hundreds of books as
Production Editor for Ballantine Books and Fawcett Publications. In fact, I began to feel that everything
I had ever done was contributing in some way to this one small book.
While waiting for the published books to arrive, I went to the library
and made a list of two hundred bookstores, including all the stores that knew me as a salesman for
Harper's in the mid sixties. I typed labels and prepared envelopes, ready to send out sample copies as soon as the book was delivered,
with a note that it could be
ordered from Book People, a distributor in
(A year afterwards I learned that the sales manager of B. Dalton gave the sample copy to his secretary, who convinced him he should order it. Their computer automatically reordered books selling well, and B. Dalton for years accounted for about a third of the book's sales. I owe a lot to that secretary.)
I went to various bookstores in
For the first time in my life, I felt like a man who had done his work.
I got wonderful fan letters, some from people who said that while reading they suddenly found themselves out of their
bodies. I don't know how I managed to achieve this, so I am reluctant to change a word of
the book, even though I know now it was an error to speak of "rapid vibrating"
as a high state of consciousness. The book communicates the reality of the spirit, beyond the literal meaning of
its sentences.
The book was selling so fast it was obvious by the first week of
August 1972 that a second printing would be necessary at once. (One store in
When he returned, he was still disorganized. I gave him another
week to get started on the second printing, and then sent him a registered letter dissolving our agreement on the
grounds that he was not performing his responsibilities
as a publisher. For the time being, the future of the book was in limbo.
I left the house where I had been staying in
One evening someone knocked on my door and said I had a call on
the hall phone. It was Deray Norton calling. He had just been told by Book People that the
book was out of print. (Deray had added a room onto
the back of the Plowshare Bookstore in Palo Alto, stocking it with metaphysical books and
naming it title Seed Center. It was he who sold six hundred copies of my book in July.) I
told him briefly what had happened, and he said he would take up the publishing.
Deray, along with his lady Sura, came to
visit, and I explained the Joe C. situation in more detail. Deray was satisfied there was no legal impediment to taking over the book. Deray and Sura were both drop-out Mormons, whom I have found the most reliable people to do business with. Deray had taught economics and had done well in the stock market but left that career to work in the bookstore.
Fortunately, he was able to get the page negatives from the printer and
made an arrangement with another printer in
Considering all the euphoric expectations of the psychedelic era that
turned to mush, it was amazing to me that I had managed to distill this little book. It was
popular as a gift: people often wrote to me that they bought twenty, thirty, or fifty copies to give away. A hippie from Santa Cruz came to Deray's house and bought five
hundred copies to pass along, paying cash.
A girl told me she was sitting in the park reading it when
a man came up and said, "When you've read that book, you don't need to read any of the
others." I heard that a woman slept with the book under her pillow. A class in Los Angeles discussed
whether the book had been written by "someone famous" under a pseudonym,
but decided it wasn't because of the dedication to my father. There were hippie rumors that I was
so "far out" that I had gone crazy or had returned to another plane of existence.
I took it as evidence the
readers had gotten the message that no one showed up to regard me as a guru. I had
written the book as a letter to friends, and I was hoping to make new and interesting friends.
But suddenly all the LSD-takers seemed to have disappeared from my
life. Just as I had been one of the twelve million people in the armed forces during World War II and then rarely met a veteran afterwards, now the acidheads had vanished.
The rescue of my book did not mean I entered
a time of calm and that I could now savor the culmination of two decades of
devoted effort. I was heart-torn over the break-up of a romance and
still missed the family feeling of the
psychedelic world. Joe C. was endlessly declaiming about my evil character, until people grew tired of
hearing about it. I knew such gossip deliberately
to drown or otherwise to die scandalously:
it happened at Weaver's Ranch, at Oompali,
at The Farm, at Tim Leary's ranch in southern
California, and elsewhere.
Even worse, when devotees submitted their will to a leader, they
set the trap of instant gratification for the unwary teacher—sooner or later he would be accused
of moral turpitude, or go mad with one delusion or another.
I decided that teachers who claimed to have the complete answer had damned
well better understand the mechanisms they were dealing with. Many gurus spoke of avoiding desire, but never noticed the seduction of becoming the object of desire.
My book was apparently a feature of the New Age movement, but I felt
embarrassed at being identified with much of the nonsense being promulgated. To those
who are offended, I can say only that The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment is an authentic expression of space consciousness, and I am
the kind of person it took to write it.
Consciousness will not give you power to control the world; it is not a
sentimental reassurance; it won't make you healthy or rich or successful; it is not a benign
form of therapy. Most of all, it is not energy and has nothing to do with energy of any kind. Consciousness
is the way OUT of this material reality, and that's all it is.
Expanding consciousness is not a process of expanding like a
balloon, it is a process of PROLONGING your conscious state. You must be either conscious
or unconscious in any given instant. Energy is the rapid alternation of these states:
when you are being energetic you are only half-conscious, and even that in millions of tiny bits
per second, running together like a filmstrip.
The significant variable is the length of time you are either conscious
or unconscious. Therefore (the sum of all my knowledge): "No matter what happens, I
am conscious all the time."
Space—consciousness—pushes energy
and mass in a uniform, nonspecific way (we call it "gravity").
Therefore, if you stay conscious continuously, you will push away the material world, all of it. Other than
prolonging your consciousness, there is no idea or action on earth that makes the slightest
bit of difference to your spiritual future.
I repeat the line often: "No matter what happens, I
am conscious all the time."
But what if we are not ready to leave this sphere? Wisdom and
poetry seek for final answers, but our human world is made of energy that never rests, never stops changing. Our world
is an endless rearrangement of the same variables.
Love is the pleasure of the universe.
All feelings are variations of love or the absence of it.
Love is any agreement of action between entities or systems. Love is available anywhere in the universe, high
or low, wherever entities agree in their behavior.
Pain, both physical and emotional, occurs wherever there is a
difference of behavior.
Love is not a property of either consciousness or unconsciousness alone, but of perfect identity in behavior.
That perfect identity is difficult to maintain in relations involving energy
because of its never-ceasing vibrations.
Following the star of love will not necessarily lead us upward to full
consciousness and freedom from pain. If we make the pleasure of love our
priority, it can fix us where we are, or even lead us into more confusion.
Love is a measure of our relations with others. The love
we feel is formed by our own behavior and the actions of others, not by our ideas or intentions. To love
another perfectly is to experience a oneness so complete that there is no sense of another. A
perfect agreement of action can be sustained only by entities who are continuously conscious or
continuously unconscious; in energy realities, love is always temporary and mixed with
pain. Since we human beings live in a material/energy reality, the occurrence of pain is
frequent and common, and enduring it is necessary for our survival.
Therefore, love is not the universal answer to all our problems,
since material systems must maintain their differences from other systems.
All agreements of action are equally pleasurable. In this respect,
there is no standard of value by which to judge realities or states of consciousness. We can be happy
anywhere in the universe or unhappy anywhere, depending on whether or not we agree
readily with the behavior of those around us.
We must always choose which others we wish to relate to. A choice to move to a different state of consciousness will place us in disagreement with those we now love. Transitions
are exciting but painful. On the other hand,
if we automatically choose to avoid pain and to take whatever love is easiest
and nearest, we will not move out of our present reality.
Perfect functional agreement is not possible between human
beings, and we should not expect perfect love from each other. No one person alone is
responsible for the pain of a relation. The pain is in the difference in the behavior of two
people, not in the actions of either one
alone.
Feelings never lie. Emotions always tell us exactly the degree of our agreement or disagreement
with others. If we suppress our feelings because we prefer our ideas about what is happening or what we
think should be happening, to that extent we will probably encounter more pain.
Perception is the experience of differences in function. The more we perceive, the less pleasure we feel. The
more intense the perception, the more painful it is.
Agreements can be felt and known but cannot be perceived, which is why we sometimes doubt our good feelings. A
perfect functional agreement is invisible. Love and good feelings grow with agreement: the
better we feel and the more we know, the less we perceive. "Love is blind."
To love consciousness, we must be space. To love energy, we must not only be energy, we must be synchronized energy.
To love mass, we must be unconscious. Love is an absolute identity of action with our
neighbors.
Our energy reality is pervaded by the frequent probability of non-love, or pain. There is no higher or lower value of
energy. All rapidly alternating entities are energy, and suffer the same liability of potentially
unsynchronized vibrations, of persistent pain.
The oneness of space is not a mystically difficult state to achieve.
All an entity needs to do is to cease vibrating: to will to be continuously conscious. Energy
imagines a mysterious power that knows all and controls all. But space has no interest in the
information that energy wants,
and has no desire to engage in energy's
passion for gaining agreement by manipulating
others. Is love the power? No. Consciousness is the power. But it is not the power to do anything specific. It is the power to push away from itself all unconsciousness, to remove itself from all energy and mass entities.
Consciousness is not the power to control
the material world: it is the absolute power to be free of it.
When we are continuously conscious, we will feel a profound love, so rich that it is
incredible to human mentality. But we cannot reach it by setting love as the
only goal. If we wish to move back to space consciousness, we must disagree with our
current material reality: we must be "unloving" or indifferent.
When we do choose to be continuously conscious, we awaken where we have been sleeping. That is, in the
proportion of time when we are
unconscious, we are propelled to the
vicinity of others equally unconscious; and when we open to continuous consciousness again, we then awaken to the
perhaps dismal thoughts around us, as well as the pain of being newly different from our neighbors. If we cannot endure this unpleasantness, and retreat from consciousness to feel the pleasure of human
agreement, to feel love now, then we will
remain in this Earthly reality.
In human life, love must always encounter pain, because the
differences between nations, races, cultures and individuals are real. Highly
conscious people have told us to love others as we love ourselves. We all recognize this as wonderful advice,
and we all know it is impossible to follow while living a normal life. As self-conscious systems, we
must maintain a degree of difference from others in order to survive. It is neither
possible nor desirable to eliminate all our differences. Laws based on pious wishes will fail.
Understanding the roots of pain, perhaps we may control the urge to kill, the instant gratification of
violence. Good manners may be our best hope. To love whatever we encounter will give us relief
and frequent pleasure, but we will have no reliable character or consistent
relationships with anyone.
We become what we agree with and love. Therefore, we must
choose to love what we wish to become. We must behave now as that which we wish to be. To reach the
existence we want, we must behave the same as those entities who now enjoy that existence.
Each of us has the responsibility of choosing the kind of love we wish to know, the reality in
which we wish to live, the other beings with whom we wish to relate.
Love is truly a blessing, and can happen in any reality, but we should
not expect love to do what it cannot do, and certainly should not expect love
to happen where it cannot happen. A perfect love is not possible in our
imperfect human reality.
Love is universal because it can happen anywhere, but
love is not a means to take us to higher consciousness and the life of the
spirit. Love is always profoundly wonderful, but it is not the answer, the power, or
the means for our deliverance.
And now that I have delivered to you all my common sense, I have to ask
you: Why are these statements less convincing, less inspiring than the text of The Lazy
Man's Guide to Enlightenment?
Thaddeus Golas
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
Devachan
Cycles
Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
Differentiation Of Species Missing Links
Psychic Laws, Forces, and Phenomena
Psychic Phenomena and Spiritualism
Quick Explanations
with Links to More Detailed Info
What is Theosophy ? Theosophy Defined (More Detail)
Three Fundamental Propositions Key Concepts of Theosophy
Cosmogenesis Anthropogenesis Root Races
Ascended Masters After Death States
The Seven Principles of Man Karma
Reincarnation Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
The Start of the Theosophical
Society
History of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society Presidents
History of the Theosophical
Society in Wales
The Three Objectives of the
Theosophical Society
Explanation of the Theosophical
Society Emblem
The Theosophical Order of
Service (TOS)
Glossaries of Theosophical Terms
Index of
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Full Text
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Definitive
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H P Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine
Isis Unveiled by H P Blavatsky
H P Blavatsky’s Esoteric Glossary
Mahatma Letters to A P Sinnett 1 - 25
A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom
(Selection of Articles by H P Blavatsky)
The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3
A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s
writings published after her death
Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
The Early Teachings of The Masters
A Collection of Fugitive Fragments
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy
Mystical,
Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical
and Scientific
Essays Selected from "The Theosophist"
Edited by George Robert Stow Mead
From Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II
In the Twilight”
Series of Articles
The In the
Twilight” series appeared during
1898 in The
Theosophical Review and
from 1909-1913
in The Theosophist.
compiled from
information supplied by
her relatives
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Letters and
Talks on Theosophy and the Theosophical Life
Obras
Teosoficas En Espanol
Theosophische
Schriften Auf Deutsch
An Outstanding
Introduction to Theosophy
By a student of
Katherine Tingley
Elementary Theosophy Who is the Man? Body and Soul
Body, Soul and Spirit Reincarnation Karma
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