TUESDAY
NIGHT TALKS
December 11, 2001
MAYA
L Hi everybody. So last time we were talking about leela, and this time we will talk about maya, which is the same thing as leela. The way of looking at it is different. Maya is the word the Eastern religions use; the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Joel Goldsmith talks about maya a lot. He calls it hypnotism. It’s exactly the same thing. We’ll spend a few minutes talking and see if we can’t get to where we can get a clear picture of what that means.
As usual, I’m not asking you to believe in the reality of maya. What I’m asking you to do is to see if you can understand what I’m saying and then you go out there and discover whether it is true for you. Usually, Robert starts talking about maya and his translation of the word maya is the “grand illusion”. He says like the classic Indian story, they always talk about the illusion of the snake and the rope. It’s dark in the evening and in India there are lots of Cobras; Cobras are very deadly. People have been known to go out at night to go back to the outdoor plumbing or whatever and step on a rope and they look down and see the shape and their mind tells them it’s a snake. People have died of a heart attack from stepping on a rope. Of course, if you ever get a chance to see that its really just a rope, then all the fear is gone, and having seen that it’s a rope that rope will never fool you again, but when you first glanced at it you saw a snake. The body reacted to that as if it were real.
Another example that they use a lot is mirages in the desert. You see water out there and that’s a really good one that I like to use because it gives you a good sense of the reality. You see water. In the case of the snake and the rope, once you know it’s a rope, you don’t see snake anymore, you only see rope. But when you’re in the desert you look out there, you see water and you know it’s a mirage if you’ve been around a bit, but you continue to see water. The most common one that we all encounter is on the road. You come over a hill in the desert and you look down and there’s this river where the road is. This is an example that Joel uses too, as far as hypnotism. If you come over the hill and you look down and you see the river, which is really just the sky reflecting off of the road, but since we know that roads don’t reflect, our mind says, well, that’s got to be water. But if we didn’t know it what that was and we came over the hill, we would say oh-oh, there’s a river. No way I’m going to get across the desert on this. You park your car, call AAA and try and find alternate routes and try and figure out what to do about the water down there, because there is no way you’re going to get through that water to get where you’re going. So if you bought the belief, you would be stranded. Alternatively, if you trust someone who says, well, it’s really just a road and it’s just the way the light is, and you start driving down there, as you approach, the water moves back and eventually you get through and there certainly was no water. Nonetheless, your mind will tell you the next time you come over that hill in the same conditions, that there is a river. So, we see things that aren’t true and we either let them determine our life or not. It’s an indication of the power we have and the choices we make where we clearly see the water and yet we know it’s just an illusion, just a mirage. Joel’s point is that specifically disease – he uses the example when he’s talking about diseases or lack or things like this – “error” he calls it. When you see disease, once again you’re dealing with the hypnotism. Your mind believes in disease and therefore you accept it and if you believe it then so it is unto you and it will stop you. The interesting thing about that water on the road is, that as you drive down the road, the road never was wet. If you get out of your car and feel it, it’s not like the water moved back as you approached, the road never was wet. It looks like it should have been, but it never was.
Similarly, even though your body has the appearance of being sick, that which you really are, the one whose been hypnotized into believing he or she has a body that is really sick, that one is untouched by the hypnosis, by the lie, by the false belief. It’s important to keep clear that all of these false beliefs and all of this hypnotism and all of these lies don’t have any effect on reality. The sand was never wet, the road was never wet, the rope was never a snake.
Joel’s other example is in fact the case of hypnotism. He explains why he uses hypnotism. People can be hypnotized. His classic case is always to see a white poodle. You can hypnotize somebody to see a white poodle. A good hypnotist can hypnotize you and tell you that you are going to be followed by a white poodle and you will wander around and you will look back and you will see that white poodle. No question about it. It will look exactly like what you think a white poodle should look. You get to construct the white poodle. He just said “white poodle” but you’ll construct a little white poodle and you’ll construct a large one or a toy or whatever your mind says for white poodle and that white poodle will follow you and you’ll wander around making room for the white poodle, holding the door for it and of course nobody else sees the white poodle, but this is the nature of hypnotism. You go to somebody and you’ll say “help me get rid of this white poodle”. That’s not the right question. The question is, “help me wake up so I don’t see this white poodle”. Nobody can help you not see the white poodle. Nobody can help you get rid of the white poodle. It’s not there. Similarly, help me get rid of this disease, is not the right point. The disease is not there, the right point is “help me wake up so that I don’t see this disease”.
Robert tells one more story. When he was 10, I guess it was, he went with his uncle to see a hypnotist in New York City somewhere. His uncle was invited to go up on the stage to be one of the potential people to be hypnotized. I guess they called up 25 people and then the hypnotist interviewed them and selected five of them and hypnotized them, and his uncle was one of the five. When the act was over the hypnotist said, okay, I’m going to wake you five up, and he said to his uncle, but when I clap my hands later, you’re going to get bit on the neck by a black widow spider. So, he clapped his hands and they woke up and they went back to their seats and Robert’s uncle was saying to Robert that he didn’t think he was hypnotized at all and about that time the guy up on the stage clapped his hands and his uncle jumped up and was brushing his neck and was trying to get this spider and saying “help me, Robert, there’s a spider on my neck” and Robert’s laughing his ass off, of course, it’s just very hilarious. Then the guy clapped his hands again and he woke up from that illusion too, but then Robert looked at his neck and on his neck was a red welt, a spider bite, where the spider bit him. The spider that wasn’t there. The mark was there. That’s just a demonstration of the power of your mind. It certainly can produce marks. It can produce superhuman strength under incredible stress. If you can hypnotize people to do things, they have much greater strength. Your body is certainly capable of manifesting what it believes. Robert’s point about the bite on the neck; he uses that story to answer the question, “where did all this stuff come from”? The answer is, it came from the same place that that bite on his uncle’s neck came from. Your mind; or nowhere.
So, that’s what we’re talking about. I like to find ways of looking at this stuff so that I can see it and remember the points about it. I try to understand what Robert’s seeing, because the difference between Robert and the rest of us is that Robert always knows that it’s maya. Whereas we’re almost always sucked in to believing that it’s real.
The next example is when you go to a movie. You’re in the movie theatre and you’re sitting in a seat with a Coke in your hand and you’re watching a movie and the big screen up there is probably 30 feet high and 50 feet wide or however big movie screens are, and there may be a horror movie going on, there may be a war going on, people getting their heads cut off, and your body gets all upset about that, or if it’s a scary movie where somebody is going to get their head cut off and your adrenaline starts going and your emotions start going and your stomach tightens up and you get all worried about it. The reality is that your sitting there very worried and concerned and your heart is pounding and your pulse is very high and your breaking out in a sweat and everything and what your doing, is you’re sitting in a chair in a movie theatre looking a colored lights on a screen. It’s a static screen and different colored lights flickering on a screen. That’s what you’re looking at. And yet your heart is racing and your scared for the people and your pulse is pounding and your breaking out in a sweat and there are tears running out of your eyes – you know, all this great concern. You bought the story. And it’s just colored lights on the screen. If somebody in the back of the theatre had a flashlight or some sort of a light that wasn’t real bright, just sort of bright, and shined it up there, you know, like a spotlight on the screen, then you would see the screen behind the colored lights. You would still see colored lights flickering on it, but if someone opened the door or something, or the light wasn’t dark enough in there, then you could see the screen as well as the colored lights. Then you would always be aware that it was a movie and you would not be nearly as upset or uptight or emotional about it, because you would be sitting there thinking, well, I see this horror story going on, but I see that it’s a movie. I always see that it’s a movie, because of the light shining on the screen that allows you to stay aware of the screen. But, usually what happens when we go to a movie is we forget that the screen exists and all we see is the lights and they sell us. If they add Dolby sound to suck in your second sense and, I’m sure if they could find a way to control it, they would waft perfumes and the smell of blood and things like that through the theatre to suck in your third sense and when they take you on the tours through Universal Studios and such like, they throw in the vibrations to throw in the fourth sense. If they could get all of your five senses involved, then you would have no way of knowing that it wasn’t real. You would be completely sucked in. Turns out that your eyes are your primary sense and your ears are secondary, so if they get your eyes and ears sold, you forget about the rest of the stuff. The fact that your butt is on a chair doesn’t have anything to do with it or your arm is on an armrest – you forget about those and you’re just pulled into the belief in the reality of the movie, and of course usually you associate with somebody you’re worried about and so you’re associated with a particular actor or actress or a particular role up there.
S Maybe you just really want to get your eight bucks worth. Must have something to do with the fact that we want to participate.
L No. No, you want to because you get sucked in. You don’t get sucked in because you want to get your eight dollars worth, it’s worth eight dollars to you because you get sucked in and you get to forget you.
S You don’t think it’s a form of escapism?
L Of course it’s a form of escapism.
Now, in the screen in the movie, one thing to notice is that up comes a love scene and then up comes a horror scene, heads getting chopped off and up comes this kind of scene and that kind of scene, and of course the screen, which is the reality of all of this, what is really happening is the screen. The screen is unchanged by all of this. The screen is not touched by it at all. Okay? That’s an important point to note about the screen and the movie that no matter what kind of movie you show up on the screen and no matter what kind of sound you play through the speakers, the screen doesn’t change and the speakers don’t change. All that changes is what’s in your head.
Now, in this comparison of this to maya, we have to change the picture just slightly, because now we have a screen and movie is on it and you are sitting out here watching the movie. In the comparison of maya, the screen corresponds to consciousness and the movie corresponds to this human experience. So, there is not somebody watching the maya the fact is you need to imagine the movie as if you were the screen, so you’re the screen and all this stuff is going on on you. Okay? Think of it that way. You are the screen, the screen is the consciousness, and all this horror or love or cartoons or whatever are being shown are being shown on you and also, you’re the projector. So, the analogy doesn’t match across, but think about that. If you are the screen and you are the projector and then the problem is if you get sucked into the movie, you would be forgetting that you are the screen and that you are projecting it. You would start believing in your own images, in other words. Do you see what I’m saying? I want to get rid of this person that is sitting out in the audience, because there are only two players; there is only the screen and the movie that is happening here. The screen is consciousness, the consciousness is the projector and the thing upon which the movie is being projected, and what we call maya is the movie that is going on. If the screen is saying “wow, look at all these colored lights flickering across me”, then the screen is an enlightened screen and if the screen says “oh, my God, it’s Frankenstein, I hope he doesn’t tear me, I hope that guy swinging the ax doesn’t cut me” or something like that, then he is in the illusion, he is in the hypnotism, he is in the maya.
So, the claim about maya is something you’ve heard here a hundred times, if you’ve been here a hundred times, all there is consciousness, all there is is the one consciousness, and that would be the screen. Let’s think of it in terms of a three dimensional screen, or actually, a four dimensional screen – three dimensions in space and one dimension in time – so, it’s really a four dimensional screen, but consciousness is the four dimensional screen and all the things that we think of as “this world”, as the 3-D world, as the material world, as our physical things, are really just images in consciousness. Sort of like a holograph in consciousness.
The thing that sucks us in so completely, is that we go to movies and we get sucked in on two senses – in the maya all five senses work, the thing that is so convincing is that we see what we see, and we pretty much trust it, and we hear what we hear and we pretty much trust it, but when we can put our hand on it, that’s our yardstick for knowing the reality of it. Yep, this is real. So the fact that the illusion involves all five senses is what is very convincing. Of course, you should keep in mind that the five senses that you have that are compelling you are a part of the maya. The reality is just the consciousness. So the fact that you’re believing so convincingly your five senses is part of the story on the screen. Oh, this story is about a body with five senses, you know, and these five senses are seeing this, but it’s all part of the maya. The body that has the five senses is part of the maya, the perception of the five senses is part of the maya, it’s all part of the maya.
All of this that we’re seeing, is happening in mind. It’s happening in your mind and it’s happening in my mind, but it’s really happening in “the” mind. Mind is an aspect of consciousness, of “the” consciousness. “The” mind is an aspect of “the” consciousness, and the entire universe is within mind. I would make the case that everything that you’re conscious of must be within consciousness. If it’s not within consciousness, you’re not conscious of it. So, clearly, everything within the entire universe is within consciousness. Now that for years sounded to me like a slight of hand - like a quick story. I’ll take two or three approaches. First of all, the fact that it feels so real physically is what convinces me that it’s real, and we can pretty clearly make a case using no mystical concepts at all, using nothing but physics that that’s nonsense.
If you consider the nature of matter, all matter is made up of atoms, and the atoms are really far apart. There is really a lot of space between the atoms. Like space between solar systems in the big space. So it’s 99.99 percent or something, vacuum – matter is. So you look at the 1/10th of a percent that is the atom and the atom is really a nucleus with electrons flying around it. Again, the distances here, the proportionate distances are like planets flying around the sun. The electrons are really far from the nucleus of the atom compared to their relative size, so even that fraction of one percent that we say is matter, it’s 99.999 percent vacuum. Then, when you get down to these little electrons that really are particles that are real, if you look at any kind of physics today, they will tell you that they’re not particles, they’re waves. Or if you really get into studying some of the new age physics, wave mechanics, they are probabilities. Not that this electron is here, there is this probability that whatever we are calling electron is here or somewhere. If you really look at the wave mechanic equations, you say how do you know where an electron is. When you look at it, when you actually measure it – it’s almost impossible, the uncertainty principle. To measure it, moves it. If you want to know where it is, you can’t know how fast it’s going, and if you want to know how fast it’s going, you can’t know where it is. To measure it is the only way the probability equation gets a solution. You want to know, where is this thing. It’s probably within this ball. If somebody will actually measure it, see where it is, then you will know where it is, but now it’s no longer the electron, it no longer has the properties that it had before because you’ve measured it. Doesn’t matter about that, what is interesting is that in order to give the electron anything close to what we might call reality, a human being had to look at it. It had to be seen in your mind. So this tiny little fraction of the total reality, the rest we agree is just space and vacuum, this tiny little reality isn’t even there until we look at it. I again claim, it is all in your mind. Mostly, it’s vacuum. Mostly, it’s nothing. Vacuum is not even a word because vacuum sounds like something. Mostly, it’s nothing. The little part that isn’t nothing isn’t really anything unless you look at it, which is to say, it’s in your mind. The human being has to be involved or nothing has any location and position. So, physics certainly agrees that there is nothing going on except that which is in consciousness.
Also, we demonstrate it every night. Consciousness is perfectly capable of creating a universe, because we dream. In our dreams we are in a situation. Like, we could be dreaming that we are in a room, and there are people in the room, and they’re talking. Maybe you’re sitting at a table with somebody having coffee and you’re talking. You can knock on the table and it’s hard, it’s real. You can pick it up and feel the weight. Maybe it’s too heavy for you to lift, so there’s proof that it’s real. So, in our dreams, we create a world that is just a real to us in the dream at this world is to us here tonight. The dream is in a space. Let’s say you’re sitting at a coffee table having coffee and it’s in a room, so this room was created in the dream. You may sit there and talk with the person for an hour, have coffee with the person for an hour, and yet if somebody had an encephalograph on your brain and measured your brain waves you would discover that the whole dream took a second or two. So that hour of time - lapsed time in your dream – happened in a second or two. That space in which the dream took place happened inside your brain, I guess is what you have to think if you’re in a 3-D interpretation of this. So, what I’m saying is, you created time and space and the person you’re talking to, you created them, and you wrote their lines – it’s your dream – you wrote their lines. You wrote your lines. You wrote the lines of the waitress that brought you the coffee. You wrote the part where you decided what kind of croissants they had or sweet rolls that they had that you could have with your coffee. You wrote all of that. Then you wake up. What happened to that hour? Well, was only a second. What happened to that room? Well, it never was.
S Why do we dream?
L Why does who dream? If there were a you, I would tell you that you probably dream in order that you can see that there doesn’t need to be a you for all of this to happen. It’s a hell of a good demonstration that everything I’m saying is possible. You demonstrate on a nightly basis that you can create these huge fantasies and you can populate it with people. Your friends, your really close friends may be in your dream. But no, they were in their beds, they weren’t in your dream, but you were relating to your really close friends in your dream. You had experiences with them. You can learn from your experiences. You can wake up the next morning and have gained something from the dream. You may have gotten some insight from your dream. Who knows? All this happens in your dream. Your mind is capable of creating the whole thing.
There is one more point. Also be aware - so you’re in that dream. The dream starts and you’re sitting at the coffee table in mid-conversation and your friend says, “well, what did you do last night”? And you tell him what you did last night. The dream just started now – there was no last night. The dream just started now, but in the dream there was a last night, in fact, there was apparently an entire history. I mean, your dream didn’t start with Adam and Eve, your dream starts right in the middle, and yet to you sitting in your dream, you don’t feel like it started right now, you feel like you’ve been sitting there and if you were asked to tell how you got there and all that – so, even the idea of previous time is seamlessly created in your dream so that it makes sense to you. See what I’m saying? So, right now as we sit here, we don’t know whether this dream started with Adam and Eve or two seconds ago, and the Adam and Eve story and all the other stuff that led up to this point was created as a part of the dream – there is no way of telling.
S Is that why as you do this work and start to distance yourself from that personal “I” you don’t relate so much to your own past. Like I’ve started having experiences of seeing pictures of myself as a little kid and not . . .
L and it’s not you, had nothing to do with you. I don’t know if that’s the reason or just as you believe in yourself less and less it has less reality to you. Remember always that the one who’s believing less and less is that one. It’s the same one, of course. The one that doesn’t believe in the past so much is the same one. So, there is no reason to believe the lie of solidity. Clearly demonstrated by modern science that it’s not solid. It’s all vacuum. For all practical purposes, there is no reason to believe in the reality of this meeting tonight. We all have demonstrated thousands of times our ability to create such a scenario. We’re able to create scenarios where people that talk to us say things we don’t know. That happens in our dreams. We’re able to get married and raise children in our dreams.
Robert tells the story of the man who lost his children through a calamity and went to their funeral and was not torn up with all sorts of tears and did not show a great deal of uncontrollable grief or anything like that and everybody really thought he was being a hard-ass. They said, “why is that” and he said, “well, last night, I dreamed I was in some country and I married this wonderful woman, and she turned out to be my queen and I turned out to be the king and we had five children, three princes and two princesses and we raised them and we were out hunting tigers when my kids were 14, 15 and 16, and this tiger jumped out of the tree and came down and killed my sons and by the time I got home, some calamity had come and hit my wife and kids, and then I woke up. So, now I don’t know whether to mourn for my children in the kingdom or my children here.” He was a wise enough man to know that both are dreams, and if he woke up, he would discover that he was the consciousness in which this dream was happening and part of this dream was that he was the consciousness within the dream in which that other dream happened. No way to prove it’s not so.
That’s what I used to do years ago when I got messed up when I was a young kid. It occurred to me that I couldn’t prove that there was anything out there. That was my first real brain teaser. It became obvious to me that there was no way that I was ever going to be able to prove that there was anything out there. My reasoning was that the only way I know something is out there is that it comes to me through my senses. So like I see this cup. The story is, that the light bounces off this cup and it strikes my eye and it gets focused on the retina and photons hit some little pot on the retina and it gets converted to some sort of an electrical impulse that can travel along a neural corridor. So, now I don’t have light off of a cup anymore, what I’ve got is a neural impulse. Presumably, different frequencies of light is what produces the color, but presumably that results in, I guess, different frequencies of neural impulses or something, but the fact is that there are neural impulses that go up my optic nerve and they go to my brain. Now, here is this meatball with little channels in it and it’s got electrical impulses running around in it. Okay? And that is its only source of input. It never sees anything, all it gets is electrical impulses, so it’s got electrical impulses running around in it and it’s got another set of electrical impulses running around from the stuff that comes in through the ears and another set of electrical impulses running around from the stuff that comes in through the fingers, and another set from the stuff that comes in through the nose and another set from the stuff that comes in through the tongue and another set for the stuff that’s running around in there because I’m thinking. But, all it is is a bunch of electrical impulses running around inside a meatball. Okay? And yet, the meatball, out of these electrical impulses creates this picture of people and cups and all this stuff, you know? It creates this stuff out of electrical impulses. Is that the story you’re telling me? That the meatball is creating all of this imagery out of electrical impulses running around inside of it? Well, if it can do this, it certainly didn’t need the electrical impulses, did it? I mean, it made it up out of nothing. Why does it decide that the electrical impulses at this frequency are orange and see orange? It’s just such nonsense that it could create this imagery and these sounds and everything out of little electrical impulses running around inside of it. The fact is, it’s all happening inside of consciousness, and the meatball is inside of consciousness and the electrical impulses and all of that is just nonsense. The fact is that my consciousness is not inside of that meatball, that meatball is inside my consciousness. I claim that if the brain can recreate this picture out of those electrical impulses, it didn’t need the electrical impulses, it must have had a previous idea of what this stuff looked like and where did that come from?
S What does that mean when you say it’s all happening inside of consciousness? What do those two . . . what was the alternate part?
L There is no alternative. All there is is consciousness. Everything is happening inside of consciousness. The human 3-D story is that your consciousness is inside your brain – that the seat of consciousness is inside the brain and that all this stuff is a matter of electrons running around inside the meatball. I'm saying, nonsense, the meatball is inside the consciousness. One of the things my brain is aware of is my brain – whoops – now I've got something inside and something outside, and it's the same thing. My brain is in my consciousness and my consciousness is in my brain. Whoops!
S: Sounds like a no-win situation to me.
L: Yeah. So lets see, that's probably plenty of confusion. So I can tell you now that Robert's experience is that he always knows that he's the Consciousness and he said to me several times that he sees exactly what everybody else sees, but he sees it as Consciousness, rather than seeing it as separate realities. Okay?
S: What do you mean?
L: Well, it's like if I look at you and I think you're a 3-D object, that's one thing. If I think I'm Lee, a 3-D object and I look at you, then I think you're a 3-D object and we're in the 3-D human world. If I'm aware of the fact that I'm Consciousness and that this body here that we call Lee is an appearance in Consciousness, then if I'm always aware of that, then I'm also always aware that that body I see over there is an appearance in Consciousness. Okay? So now, instead of seeing you, I see Consciousness "as" you, and instead of seeing me, I see Consciousness "as" me, or as Joel would say, I see God "as" you and I see God "as" me – I see God "as" everything.
The mystical experience that people talk about, not just the people that use the word maya, but that Joel talks about and all the Christian mystics – the mystical experience is recognizing that you are everything. Realizing that you're the trees and you're the rocks and you're the stream and you're the butterflies and you're the people and everything. The mystical experience is realizing that you are everything. That's in all the Christian literature; especially they talk about that so ecstatically. That's exactly saying that the mystical experience is recognizing that you are Consciousness and that everything is Consciousness. You are the Consciousness "as" everything. That's what the mystical experience is.
The maya is the same experience without the recognition that you are the Consciousness. Maya is that you're watching a movie and you bought it. The mystical experience is watching the movie but knowing you're the screen. Robert always knows that he is Consciousness and he is never confused that that body was him. He knew that that body more or less was his, in some sense, in some strange sense, but it was no more him than any other body that was around him, that was near him.
So now we know where we're going. It is true for all of us. All of us are sitting here sucked into thinking that we're this body and all of us are the one Consciousness expressed as all of us. There aren't any of us here. What's here is the one Consciousness expressing as all of us and the chairs we're sitting in or the cushions we're sitting on or the water we're listening to.
S: So then to be able to stay in that state where you're aware that everything is Consciousness – the only way to get there is meditation? Is that how you get there?
L: That's a way that reliably brings you closer to it. Some people have a one-time experience like Robert had. Robert did not meditate. Robert was 14 when he had his experience and before he was 14 he did not meditate and after he was 14 he did not meditate. Before he was 14 he was not even consciously on a mystical path and then he had the experience in which, as he said, he dissolved into the universe and became Consciousness. That experience never stopped for him. From that moment on he was always there, in which case there was no Robert to meditate. But for those of us who think we're mortal, who think we're mere mortals, the purpose of meditation and classes like this is to give a sense of direction. Meditation is a way of trying to quiet our mind enough to have the experience. The goal is to have the experience and to have it completely enough that the ego center completely dissolves.
If your mind is quiet, then you are having the experience. But our minds are never quiet. Our minds just chatter on thought after thought after thought after thought and it's that endless – actually, it's not the 5 senses that convinces us that we're real, it's that 6th sense, the mind, that endless stream of thought after thought after thought after thought all about "I" and "my" and "my this" and "my that", "I need this" and "I need that" and "I hope you never do that to me" and, you know, all this other stuff, that constant . . .
[break while tape changed to side 2]
. . . is the result of thinking continuously about "I". When you're asleep, there's no "I". There's no "you".
S: How do you get out of something like that, because, you know, I look at my 5-year old, everything is about him, and my 2-year old, everything is about him, I mean my 2-year old hasn't really been conditioned yet to think that everything is about him, I mean, it's just like you're born that way.
L: Well, in this lifetime he hasn't been conditioned about that, perhaps, but in fact, when he was born he was a lot closer to being realized than he is now or than you are now after being conditioned. I mean, so you have a new little baby, okay? The baby is in your arms and the first thing you start doing is showing him, "this is your nose, and these are your toes and this is your hand" – you are teaching him that this is you and this isn't – this is your nose, this is my nose – already you're conditioning him into the human belief that his own body is distinct from somebody else's body.
S: So, if Robert had this little baby, what would Robert be saying to him?
L: He has two very unenlightened daughters.
[Laughter]
S: Some of us are meant to be on a spiritual path and some of us aren't.
L: You can't not do that. The reason the kid took on a body is because its not enlightened yet. I mean, you can tell it whatever it can hear.
S: That's not your nose.
[Laughter]
S: Robert also says that conditioning has been happening for lifetimes. Not just in this lifetime as its perceived right now, that its been conditioning as long as we know.
S: So we're all conditioned to be unconditioned.
L: And there is only one Consciousness and there are 8,000,000,000 people thinking in it. So, even if you keep your mouth shut, the other 7,999,999,999 people are going to condition him for you. But, you can tell him the truth. The flip side of it is that right now I'm talking about the truth to people who are stupid enough to come here and hear it . . .
[Laughter]
S: Desperate enough.
S: Well, you just lost my business.
L: . . . to people who are ready to hear it. To those who are drawn here to hear it, this is a step on the path. People are drawn to Robert, people are drawn here, and it's all deconditioning, dehypnosis. Rajneesh used to talk about "dehypnotization" as what it was all about. He is using hypnosis there in the same sense that Joel uses getting rid of the hypnotism. Dehypnotizing is what it is all about. We do that by hearing the truth and by immersing ourselves in the consciousness of people who know the truth rather than in the consciousness of people who reinforce the conditioning.
S: When Robert talks about the Silence – he talks a lot about being in the Silence, he would always be in the Silence, right? There's no "I".
L: Right.
S: Okay. So, if we got enlightened along those lines, our thinking would stop all that.
L: There would be no you. Lee and enlightenment are mutually exclusive. Okay? As long as there's a Lee there's not enlightenment. Now, sometimes there are moments of "not self". You know, sometimes we have moments in which we don't have our self, but then we come back because it wasn't a complete enlightenment. Lots of us have that kind of an experience. Robert just had the one experience. He went out and never came back. But, usually, it appears to be increment by increment. The fact is, the whole thing is really ludicrous because it's already done; all of us are just the one Consciousness. There is nobody here. The fact that we are even talking about it is just part of a maya. The class is part of the maya. The idea that we need to go to a class to gain understanding so we can get out of the maya is part of the maya.
When we're unconscious, there is no self and there is no maya. Like deep sleep. They always talk about the three states of consciousness. When we're in deep sleep, then there is no consciousness at all that we're aware of, and Robert would say that in that sense you're enlightened, but you're not aware of it – which is absolutely useless, of course. Time passes during those periods like nothing is happening. There are dreams, and during that we are in a different reality than this one, but it's as real as this one. We think we are someone in our dream, and there is chatter going through that one – just a different chatter perhaps, or it might be the same chatter. You might think that I'm in this dream as this person, or whatever. Then there is waking when we're listening to this endless stream of chatter. The "monkeys chattering in the trees" is how they refer to it in the East. I just love that. They talk about this thing between your temples as the "monkeys chattering in the trees". That's sort of a poetic way of talking about it.
When you first wake up in the morning, before your first thought, you're enlightened. In that gap, that's it. That's the experience. In that pause where you're conscious before your first thought. Now, of course if you wake up to an alarm clock, you're going to wake up with a thought as you go to turn it off. But, if you just wake up naturally and if you pay attention (you have to have gone to sleep planning to pay attention), if when you first wake up, if you wake up paying attention, if you wake up being aware of what is happening in the moment, then there is an experience there that you can have before the first thought. Of course, you wake up and you have that experience and you say, "is this it?" and in that second . . . oh, well!
Now, the game is to lengthen the periods between thoughts. And they do stop. Thoughts do separate. The analogy they always give is like a sky that is covered with clouds, and then as the day goes on, the clouds thin, and then periodically there are little patches of blue showing through and then the clouds get smaller and the patches of blue get bigger and that's more the way minds seem to work. As a result of meditation, your mind will start having gaps and you start seeing those gaps. The reason I tell you that I know about that space in the morning is because when I sit in the Silence now, it's exactly the same as that space in the morning before the first thought. You can develop that ability to be in the Silence. Silence doesn't mean no sound; Silence means no Lee. When I'm sitting in the Silence, I'm sitting in the no Lee. You can learn to be there. That's where you have the experience that what I am talking about is true, is when you're in the Silence. That's when you have the experience that will allow you to see that this is true; will allow you to have your own experience of it. Otherwise, it's just hearsay and conjecture.
The purpose of all valid forms of meditation and all other spiritual practices is to help you develop the goal to be in the Silence. There are hundreds of different ways of doing that, but that's the whole purpose of spiritual practice is to develop the ability to be in the Silence.
S: Do people refer to the Silence and meditation as the same thing?
L: Meditation gets confusing because we use the word meditation for the practice and we use the word meditation for the result. I used to use the word meditation to refer to sitting in the Silence, but I don't do that anymore because it confuses people, so I now talk about meditation as the practice and sitting in the Silence, or being in the Silence, as what I used to call meditation. It's what Joel calls "communion". Joel uses the word meditation for essentially what we call praying, or doing something – doing those things which we think will increase the chances of our being in the Silence. He calls the Silence, prayer. There are lots of practices that we can do to become silent.
Good old AA, you know. No spiritual practice is going to work before you clean house. If you've got a bunch of crap going on in your life, you're not going to be in the Silence because you're worrying about the crap. Jesus says a great thing, he says, if you're going to the alter to make your supplication or your prayer and on your way there you remember that you have ought against somebody, he says, put down your gift and go clean up the thing with the somebody else and then come back and make your supplication. What he is saying is, if you've got anything else going on in your life there is no sense going to the alter, because you aren't going to find God. So, the reason that the 11th Step is 11th is because you've got to have done the other 9 and be regularly doing the 10th in order to have any prayer of being quiet enough to do the 11th. You can pray any time, but to meditate you need to have your house clean. AA is just so sound spiritually, and Alanon and all the other 12-step programs that are based on that. The 11th Step should be 11th and the 12th Step should be 12th, by the way. After you achieve the Silence, then you have something to share.
S: About nothing.
[Laughter]
S: And no one.
L: If you've got nothing, that's worth sharing.
S: When you say Silence, I think some people think of an audio thing. My experience with Silence is an experience that is so overwhelming; it's more of a stillness. It’s a nothingness. It's not something that you hear in your ear. It's absolute nothing. Everything is gone.
L: The Silence is the lack of self, not the lack of audio. The Buddhists talk about "the Void". The trouble is that any word is wrong. It's not a void. You can recognize a void – a void is something you can recognize. It's like, if you have a blackboard, you can't write on it in black chalk, right? Nobody will see it. In order to recognize something, it's got to be a different color from the background. Okay? What we're talking about is the background against which we can recognize Silence – against which we can recognize void – against which we can recognize space – against which we can recognize nothing – we can look and say, "Wow, there is nothing here". Now, what's the background against which we can see the nothing? It's that that I'm talking about. If you've got a word for it, that ain't it, because if you've got a word for it, that's a concept. If you've got a concept, it's in your consciousness. This is outside of that. This is the . . . there are so many words, the Godhead they call it, the Womb of Creation, this is that which is beyond everything. Of course, the other thing that is confusing is that when we have an experience of It, we're having the experience through our 3-D human body, so it gets translated back into human terms somehow. That's why I said, it's not the lack of noise, it's the lack of self. The self I'm talking about is Consciousness, not Lee. It's not just the lack of Lee, it's also the lack of everything. That's the Silence; no nothing.
S: How does that relate to, when you say happiness is the default. How does that relate to this void, the lack of self.
L: Two different levels. First of all, at a much more pedantic level, happiness is in the default in that if you just don't worry and don't think about things, you'll be happy. In a very human sense; happy as compared to unhappy. At the much higher level, when you're in the experience of the Silence itself, the feeling that translates back into the body is blissful, which is even a step beyond happiness. Really, bliss is the default – really, you are bliss. It starts out with happy. By not creating misery, by not creating anything, you are happy. There is just nothing wrong, unless you think something is wrong. Then, the next step is joy. The next step is bliss.
S: You know, Lee, for me it's been, I'm at a state where the success is improved humanhood, if that's any form of a measurement.
L: Absolutely.
S: It's like those things that used to plague me no longer plague me and I experience moments of joy, but it's not continual.
L: Sure.
S: It's like the measurement to me is right now improved humanhood.
L: It will always appear that way until the humanhood disappears. The rule is that your experience is the out picturing of your own state of consciousness. As your state of consciousness gets higher, so does the experience. That's necessarily true. Certainly, it used to be for us alcoholics if you were like me when I first came in, I always wanted to drink. I always wanted a drink. Then it got to where there were periods when I didn't want a drink and the periods where I did want a drink weren't as intense and it sort of backed up until there were gaps, by doing the steps and hanging out in the consciousness with people who didn't need to drink. Then I was very happy to not be obsessed with drinking. Two years later, the requirement for happiness was I had to not worry about jobs. My humanhood improved. I didn't need to drink, my life was now starting to happen, my head was just as active as it could possibly be and is now worried about careers, jobs and girlfriends and yadah, yadah, yadah. So now, happiness was not having to worry about something. So the default was, if I could stop worrying about my job and all this stuff then I would be happy. So you do a lot of happiness.
Then, as you start getting quieter, you start feeling joy. Now, joy is different from happiness because joy doesn't have a reason. I'm happy because I got a new car I'm joyful, because . . . I remember the first time I felt joy. I was out on my motorcycle and I was riding up the hill out into the Valley and it was a gorgeous, sunny day, before we had to wear helmets, so my head wasn't in a bucket and it was just gorgeous. This feeling started way down here below the solar plexus, like bubbles coming up, just this tingling that was filling me up, like champagne was down there or something, this tingling feeling – it was just joy bubbling out of me for no reason except that it was just God-damned neat! That was my first feeling of joy. Then joy started happening more frequently. That was one joy in 40 years, you know. I was 36 or 7 at the time. [Laughter]
Then joy started happening more frequently. Now, sometimes when I'm in the Silence – now, I'm in the Silence longer and longer and more and more, and that too is progressing. Every phase along the way, my humanhood was significantly better. I tell people, I'm 25 years sober and I guaranty that every year of my sobriety has been significantly better than the preceding year. By that I mean that there is more love and more joy and now I can have more bliss by a significantly measurable amount than there was the preceding year.
Now, Robert had the experience that he got thrown into the permanent, perpetual state of bliss.
S: And the bliss is being in the Consciousness, that's were the bliss is.
L: Not being "in" the Consciousness, "being" the Consciousness. Yes, that's it. The bliss is the Silence. That's the real default. If you could just stop believing in the lie of Lee . . . so, really I lie when I say its happiness, the default is really bliss.
S: Right, because Robert also talks about the duality. As long as you live in the humanhood, as long as you're in the mind and body phenomenon, there is going to be that duality of happiness and then not being happy and then, you know . . .
L: Exactly. Everything I have I can lose. Everything I don't have, I can get and then lose. Birth is the first step of dying, from the duality viewpoint.
Robert's teaching is called Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means "non dual". It's not singular, it's not called one, it's just not two, because even one has the implication of . . . to say there's "one" you've forced duality, because there is that which is not the one, so it's very carefully called "not dual".
S: Does God play a part in any of Robert's teachings?
L: Well, what do you mean by God, is the answer to that. It depends on what you mean by God. If you listen to the Christian mystics talking about the Godhead, what they're really talking about is the Void, the Vacuum, the Silence. So, if that's what you mean by God, then yes. If you mean the God that created the universe, then that's in mind, but not necessarily created by people. If you believe in a God in a white cloud, then this is a God created by humanity. The closer your God is to sugar daddy or Santa Claus, the more human he is. Most Gods are created in the image of the person who is worshiping them. But there are higher Gods, like the God that created the universe and the God who is the law and who is all that, but even that is in mind. So it depends on what you mean by God.
S: I have a question. In reading some of the Joel books, I get a little confused because there is mention of God, there is mention of Christ and there is mention of the Master, and I just get really confused.
L: Okay. The "Master" is the word Joel uses to refer to Jesus. He is very careful to call him the Master because he wants you to recognize that he thinks of Jesus as a Master, like Buddha was a Master, as distinct from the only begotten Son of God. Okay? Now, he uses the word "Christ" in the sense of Christ Consciousness, and he says that is exactly the same as what is meant by "Buddhahood" or what is meant by the "Tao" – all these words are the same thing. He uses Jesus because his students were the Christian Science and the Unity people and the metaphysical Christian churches. So, in order for him to communicate with them, he would talk about Jesus and Jesus' teachings. Joel was very clear that Jesus was an enlightened Master, as was Buddha, as was Shankara, and Joel makes a list of several of them that he is aware of.
Joel, when he was in Europe, used to take a side trip to India, which is not mentioned in the Joel books and he used to go to Ramana Ashram, which is were Robert went when he was enlightened, he went to spend some time with Ramana. Joel used to go to see Ramana. There is a thing called the "Mountain Path" which is a newspaper that's published at the Ramana Ashram and Joel used to write for it. So Joel was not – his name is Goldsmith, but he certainly was not Jewish and he certainly was not strictly Christian, although he was probably the most Christian person you would ever meet. Much more so than the Pope, who is locked into their interpretations. Joel lived very closely to the ideal as expressed by Christ, the Master. So that's what that is all about. When he says God, he is talking about the experience in the Silence, and he talks about Buddhahood or Christhood or that sort of thing as the human experience of that; the one who is wearing a body and having that experience.
Joel knew what he was talking about and his teaching was very limited by his audience, of course, because he didn't want to freak them out. He spent his time traveling around the world raising them like children. He would go around and teach everybody the truth and then go around a year later and teach them the next level of truth. He went essentially from 1950 to 1962 teaching higher and higher metaphysical truth and in 1962 he finally started teaching them the mystical truth because by now he had been working with people for 10 or 15 years and they could hear him. So that's a lot about what's going on, but if you go back and read the Infinite Way itself, you will find that there is a lot of mystical truth in that. Also in the Thunder of Silence; it has a great deal of mystical truth. Read chapter VI of the Thunder of Silence on the Nature of Mind.
What else?
S: You were talking about the different Gods. You said there was a God for the universe and a God for something else. What did you mean?
L: Different people have concepts of God at different levels, is what I was talking about.
S: But there is only one Consciousness.
L: There is only one Consciousness and there are all sorts of . . . my answer to the earlier question is what do you mean by God? People use the word God at all different levels. All there is is Consciousness. There is no God. Or it's a whole God, whichever way you prefer.
Barbara tells the story of going to Joel saying she finally got it, you know, that there is no God in the sense of her concept of God, in the sense of a nice, handy concept of God. She finally went to Joel and said "I got it, I got it, I got it", she says, "I know what you mean, there really is no God", and Joel nods and says, "But there is something!" So, you know, if you've got a concept of it, that's not God. Okay? But there is God. That's as good a name as any for it, whatever it is. For Consciousness, for Silence, for the Way – God is a perfectly good name. They're all wrong if you think you know what I'm saying, what the word means.
S: So when my 5-year old asks me "what is God" or "who is God", what is the answer?
L: You tell him as much truth as he can hear. God is love is maybe what he wants to hear. God is Consciousness is probably something he won't understand. With children, you typically give them the most simplistic true statement that you can give them and then if he wants more information, he will immediately ask you the next question and if that's enough, he won't. It's like a 6 or 5 year old asking where do babies come from, you know, he's not asking for the full sex lecture. They come from mommy is probably a fine answer, you don't need to go into all the details. Same thing with God. Tell him something that's consistent with your experience of God. God is a loving force, or whatever word for force a 5-year old can hear. Maybe just God is love. I would tell him a truth that feels to me to be consistent with where he's at and that's in the right direction.
All of our concepts of God have been just fine for as high as we were. You know, the sugar daddy idea of God is a lot better than the devil idea of God; Santa Claus is a much better idea – at least we've got a loving God and we've gotten away from the hateful God, the punishing God, we're into the loving God that will take care of us. Then we find out that we need to go a level higher because a sugar daddy God is a little impractical and doesn't really work, so we go a little higher. The sugar daddy God wasn't wrong, it was just limited. It was on the right track and the next level of God is not wrong, its on the right track, but it's limiting and what we're doing is throwing away the limits. The problem with God is that to characterize something limits it. As soon as I say anything about something, I've limited it. So, you can't say anything about God, or Consciousness because the discussion is going on within it. So you'll just have to be It – what you can't avoid.
S: So once you are in self realization that you are It, it's real difficult to be satisfied in this worldly . . . because its like a joke.
L: Yes. It’s a very funny joke. But it's not when you're believing it. The joke is, that there never was anybody that needed to become enlightened. The joke is, we spend lifetimes trying to grow spiritually and that one who is trying to grow spiritually, never was. That's the joke. Lots and lots of people have seen it and it's always the same truth.
S: The joke about Step 3 is that there's nothing to surrender.
L: Uh-huh. Well the idea – I love all the words we use to describe God as Omniscient – if God is Consciousness, then God clearly is conscious of everything that's in Consciousness because God's the Consciousness, so what is this Omniscience? It's impossible not to be. And Omnipotent – there's no power to be used and nothing to use it on. Omnipresent – there is no where. God is everywhere? No, there's nowhere. God has all the power? No, there is no power. God knows everything? No, there's nothing to know. The whole thing just gets really ludicrous.
S: What is the definition of Consciousness? When you start going through that whole circle?
L: Well now we're in the bind, because if I tell you what Consciousness is, that would be a concept within Consciousness.
S: It's nothing, it's just nothing.
L: But even nothing, if it has any meaning. Awareness is another fine word for Consciousness. Rather than being aware of something, can you just be aware of the fact that you're aware? Can you be aware of awareness? You are. You're aware that there is awareness. So you can be aware of awareness. You know, that's pretty clean, that's pretty much like Consciousness. It's one step removed because it's being conscious of Consciousness, but that's what I'm talking about. It's the awareness without being aware of anything. Like, we always add one of the 6 senses into what we're aware of – we're just talking about "pure awareness", Robert would say.
S: What's the other two words that go with that? Pure awareness . . .
S: Effortless, choiceless, pure awareness.
L: Choiceless, effortless, pure awareness.
S: Say that again.
L: Well Robert always talks about choiceless, effortless, pure awareness. But those words are extra too, because choiceless sounds like there is somebody to make a choice and effortless sounds like there is somebody to make an effort. Pure awareness is an equivalent for Consciousness. Bliss is synonymous with Consciousness. Love is synonymous with Consciousness. God in that sense is synonymous with Consciousness. He also used Ultimate Oneness – another one he liked to use – Ultimate Oneness, which brings in the concept that there's nothing else. The trouble with Oneness is that you immediately get into a space picture of it and want to know what's outside of it. Minds are fiendish things, aren't they?
S: But there's a purpose for them, otherwise we wouldn't have them.
L: We who?
S: I haven't gotten that far yet
L: Fair enough. We who. It's all a movie. This is all a movie.
S: The whole purpose is to awake.
L: But everybody's already awake. Now we're back to the Leela, last week's talk. It's all a play, just a play.
S: That was really helpful to me the last couple of weeks. I had a whole lot of fun with that.
L: Good.
S: I do creative writing and it really helped to see these characters, to really look at them without that personal thing.
L: I love the name Leelaa. I would have used Leelaa even if it didn't have Lee in it. I obviously like Leelaa because it has Lee and AA in it both.
S: There are some good actors out there.
L: They are all really good at their jobs, aren't they. I have a friend who had, this is years ago, a five-year old daughter who was just as contrary as she could possibly be. She was not going to do what she was told. He was telling me that one day he came home and he wanted to get her to do this, and she actually pulled down her pants and peed on the rug right there in front of him, you know, and I was laughing and thinking, wow, she is really good at being her. Awesome, how could you do that better. This little girl is so good. I see the whole thing, and I know where he's at and it's just perfect for him – it's a script event is what it was. She was reading his script. It was just perfect. You've got to look at that with Leela and just love it. Perfect.
S: I'm sorry I missed last time. Can you just quickly . . .
L: No. There's a tape. No, I can't just quickly . . . that would not do it. You see people like that. They are all so very good at being themselves. If you look at it that way, it's such a kick.
So this is the third one in this series of talks. I don't know what we'll talk about next. The next talk is on January 8th, I think, yeah. Two weeks from tonight is Christmas, so we probably won't hold one that week, and the next week is New Years, and the following Tuesday we'll have our next gathering. Feel free to drop me an email, or call me or something if there's anything you would like to talk about, because it makes no difference to me at all. All we're talking about is Consciousness. All we're doing is just getting together to be in the Silence and share the Consciousness, so it doesn't matter what we talk about, so feel free.
I felt led to talk about "Leela" and "Maya" and "the heaviest burden" just because it's good to see that. To the extent that you see that, your humanhood will improve. To the extent that you see that, it will lighten the burden. It's a good approach to let things be the way they are; seeing them for what they are. So we'll do it again on the 8th.
So let's be quiet.
Thanks for coming.