Modular Mysticism: Storing Power
What causes us to change? Sometimes a piece of music causes us to change. Sometimes the way the light falls on a particular day. Someone says something—it opens a doorway for us. We find it happening without knowing why.
Very often we try and reason existence. We try and calculate it, to discover it. And while we can certainly discuss portions of existence and we can discover layers of reality, yet we find ourselves straying very far from existence itself—in its absolute form. We’re out playing in the world of self-discovery. We’re looking at different pictures in the gallery. Very rarely do we look in the mirror of the self.
In the practice of mysticism there are four stages.
There is a type of mysticism, a lower occultism, where there is also
We really don’t need to consider that, unless, of course, someone is doing that to us.
So we should give it enough consideration so that we’re not naive, but we don’t really have to focus on it too much because it’s not something that pertains to us.
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It’s necessary first to gain power.
We gain power so that we can walk through that doorway that leads to enlightenment. There are countless planes of existence—stages—where life is presenting itself in different ways. One description of the world, one way of seeing it, is not necessarily better than another.
What’s important rather is to become conscious, and not to be fixed in any one description of reality, but to move fluidly through all of them.
In order to do that, it takes a great deal of power;
it takes a terrific amount of power.
If the house is very cold, our first step is to get the heat going, to get the furnace going. Then once we’ve done that, it’s much easier to see where we’re losing power, and also we’ll stay warm while we work on closing the leaks.
Then once we’ve reached a point where things are warm enough and we’ve sealed the biggest leaks, then we can increase and refine the power. Perhaps we can store fuel for another time. We can eliminate the smaller leaks, and maybe if we have enough power, then eventually we can share it with someone else and help them to be liberated.
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These are the stages of mysticism.
The first thing that you need to do is to increase your personal power.
A decision is made on a very deep level of being.
We could say that power or life chooses you. We don’t know why. All things cannot be explained. To try and explain everything is to waste and lose power. Certain things are better as mysteries—mysteries, not meaning that they’re unknowable, but simply that they can’t be explained. They have to be intuited and felt and grasped in what we call the superconscious.
You have to make a list of the things that cause you to gain power.
To do this accurately, you need to take a piece of paper out when you’re home sometime, and write down all of the things in your life that have ever caused you to change in an affirmative way.
For example, there may be particular places that you’ve gone to which are for you places of power, and these environments cause you to increase power, to change. There may be certain experiences, maybe helping others, maybe reading, writing, a hobby, a career, an attitude.
You have to trace back all the moments in your life when you have gone through a major transit or change and recall the things that worked.
In many cases it’s necessary to do those things again; we have a lot of friends who help us. But in the course of life, sometimes we forget our friends. So we remember and we bring them back—exercise, a type of diet, a type of food, music.
There are literally dozens and dozens of things that increase our power—obviously,
Then we need to assess and make a list of the opposite, of those things in our life that have caused us to lose power—
No blame is necessary, it just happens. People whom, when we entangle our lives with them or similar types of persons, that causes us to lose power. Maybe for someone else it doesn’t happen that way, but for us it does.
Habits could cause us to lose power—
But try, as you create this list, to be as physical in your perceptions as possible. Very often the things that cause us to lose and gain power are not necessarily all that profound, they’re rather simple.
And it’s good to make a list because you bring these things then into your conscious field of attention. Whenever you bring anything into your conscious field of attention, you focus on it and you begin to work with it.
Meditating is certainly the strongest, most powerful, most effective means of gaining power—
What we call life is a description of existence, it’s a way of seeing that has been fabricated by others and presented to us as the truth. But what we see is far from the truth. It’s a type of truth. It’s a body of perception. From the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, we’re handed a description of reality in this world, on this earth. However the description that we’ve been given is not necessarily pleasant. It was devised by persons who are not happy and who don’t see.
Seeing1 is the ability to
and
Descriptions of reality are useful in that they enable us to go from one point to another.
There are other descriptions of reality other than the one that you have been presented with. In the process of this study, I present you with a variety of different descriptions. We call them different dreams. None of them are absolute. They’re maps that you follow.
The most important thing is not to get stuck in any of them, yet you will find that some lead you to happiness and fulfillment, whereas others lead you to pain and misery.
The description of the world that you’ve been given by societies, families and so on, leads to unhappiness. It leads to hate and violence and fear and anxiety.
The description of the world that we deal with in mysticism is very different. We see that everything in life is an opportunity, a challenge. There are no dull moments or dull situations. Whether you’re at work, having lunch with someone, by yourself, in the desert, driving—every moment is filled with countless realities which, if you have enough power, you can see into and use to go forward to learn, to grow and to become all that you’re capable of being. It’s necessary, then, to leave the description of reality that you now have behind and to enter into another one, one that’s much cleaner, much more complete and much more open-ended.
In your version of the world, a man is one thing and a woman is another. Day and night are different. There is love and hate and good and bad.
In my description of the world, these things don’t exist.
These are ways of seeing that you use to ultimately entangle yourself in very painful emotions. Your life lacks light. It lacks power. It lacks total being, a prescient awareness of all that is.
I present to you another way of being. A way that is not easy, however, in my estimation it’s much easier than the description of the world that you’ve been given, which leads you to pain and frustration and incompleteness.
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I’ve talked a great deal about gaining power and losing power. But one subject I haven’t dealt with is how to store power. That’s what I’d like to talk to you a little bit about.
Gaining power—as I said, you can make a list and see the things that cause you to gain power. If you do them, your power will increase. Go back over the moments in your life where your power has increased. Of course, hopefully you’re learning new skills that cause you to increase power.
Losing power—you’ve experienced that. So again, make a list and go over these things. You’ll find that if you avoid them, you won’t lose power. Observe yourself in situations when you’re with people. Observe certain attitudes and thoughts and see if they cause you to lose power, and what attitudes and thoughts cause you to gain power.
But to store power is a different matter. To store power you must use specific occult methods.
When I say, “store power,” what I mean is
There are many, many ways to do this. Tonight I’d like to allude to a few of them.
One of the easiest ways to store power is in a physical location. You won’t exactly be leaving power in a physical location, but let’s say in a plane of reality that corresponds to that physical location. For example, when you go to a place of power, a place that you’re drawn to—outdoors someplace let’s say, perhaps a certain beach, a certain hilltop, a park, a mountain, wherever it may be, a shopping mall—something draws you there and when you’re there, a certain chemistry takes place within you. You move into another level of attention. At that time, if you observe the place very, very intensely, not just physically, but inwardly, if you see the place as it really is and if you move into a higher level of attention there, the words that you speak there, the thoughts that you think there, the emotions that you feel there will engender a power to that place. And no matter where you are, you can draw on that place as an ally, as a helper.
When you go to a place of power with someone who is a teacher, someone who has a great deal of power, it’s very easy to store power because they will lift you into another level of attention while you’re there and it’s easier for you to leave power there, or, you might say, to draw power from that place. There are different ways of talking about something that’s a little bit hard to pin down in words.
There are objects that afford you power.
For many people, plants are very good.
Plants have a power all their own. If you make friends with plants, they have a certain strand of luminosity that, in times of difficulty or transition, you can draw from.
When you know how to, you can go into the inner worlds and touch those strands of luminosity and connect them with your being.
Right now, you are a bundle of fibers—luminous fibers—and your luminous fibers in your occult body are connected
These are the so-called “lines of the world” that exist everywhere.
They are actual.
But you will find that you have
and that you can also
In other times, if I was giving this talk, let’s say perhaps 1,000 years ago, I would say that another way of storing power—aside from going to places that are very powerful for you and feeling heightened emotions there and being there with good friends and just feeling eternity there and knowing that you can; you’re creating a bond with that place so that at the moment of your death when you try to move into another vortex, or during any time of great transit, you can do so; you can draw power from that place, at that moment, because you’ve created an affinity with it—but if this were another time, I would also suggest that building things is a way.
When you build something with your body, you store power in it. When you create something, when you build a house or a musical instrument or a floor, you can store power in it. Now, not everybody who builds things does this.
Remember, what I’m suggesting is that there is another side to life than that which most people are conscious or aware of, and that you can become conscious and aware of that side and that side will bring you freedom and perfection.
Whereas, the side or the description of life that most people have only causes them eventually to die.
You can go beyond life and death in this world now. You can go beyond being a shadow and become free and luminous and no longer of this world although you will be in it, for a time.
But today I would not recommend that you build things because we live in an age in which the body is being replaced by the intellect and all of you are intellectuals. You use the mind more than the body. You relate to it more, it’s a societal condition. In your description of the world, the mind predominates, the body is secondary. In other times the body has been the central focus. One is not better than another, they’re different ways of looking at existence.
So to store power in this age, the mind is the best vehicle.
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Now, one of the most effective ways to store power is writing because you’re engaging your intellect in going over moments of power, and as you write them down, on a secondary level, you’re fixing that power in a specific place. For example, in other lifetimes I have gone to places of power and I have left power there. And in this lifetime when I’ve returned to those places, I’ve been able to pick up what I left there.
Recently I went to the Grand Canyon, for example, a place I’d been to a long, long time ago and I had left certain things there which I was able to reintegrate with upon a return there. Again, when I saw the Grand Canyon, I didn’t see the Grand Canyon as the average tourist might. What I saw was not the physical but the inner structure of the beings, the vortexes of energy, the doorways into other worlds and so on—the things that exist but that most people are totally unconscious of. So I was able to go there and go through those doorways and see what I left there and bring it back again. This is a way, of course, of trying to describe something that’s quite beyond words.
Whenever you write something, meaning write about a moment of power, if you write about a desert trip that we go on or a meditation that you have, or whatever it might be, when you write it down you are pressurizing it, you’re compacting it. You’re taking all the force and energy of that experience and you’re squeezing it into a few words. By doing that—forget about the paper for a moment and the words—but [in} the moments that you are sitting there struggling to do that, you are compressing power, you’re storing it. You’re taking something that’s every large and making it very small. Later you will be able to come back to it when you need it and make it very large again. This is an occult practice, a mystical practice. At the same time you are creating an identification with something specific.
When you go to the bank, you give them money. Now if you just give them money, when you go to take it out they won’t give you anything. So what you have is a passbook with an account number or a checking account number. When you give them that number and you have some piece of identification or something, then they’ll give you money. But it’s gone once you hand it to them, you see.
You have to have a medium of exchange. The medium of exchange
In our world, words are power. Our world is run by words.
When you write something or when you say something, but let’s deal with writing at the moment, you compress a level of attention. The reference point is the words. For example, we recently wrote a book together, The Last Incarnation, and what we did was we all wrote stories about our most powerful experiences, spiritual experiences, and we put them into words and we put them into a book. We collected them.
The book is a collection of over 100 peak moments of experience, when a doorway opened and someone walked through. Now, if you wrote one of those stories, you stored power. If you read that story at another time, maybe a year from now or six months from now, a day when you’re just not in a good level of attention or a day when you’re in a very high level of attention, at that time it will bring that power back to you. You will reenter that moment. Because when you wrote it, you compressed power. You’re not just going back to the moment.
What I’m suggesting is that there was that moment, which will always exist, which you can return to. But also in the action of writing, as opposed to just thinking about what had happened and not writing it down, you were compressing that moment and actually storing power. When you read that, you will let it open again. Or if someone else reads it, of course, to a certain extent they will draw the power from that.
Recently there were two women who are students of mine who were in a very bad automobile accident. They didn’t listen to anything I’ve said about driving. They didn’t wear seat belts and they fell asleep. The passenger fell asleep and the driver fell asleep. And they were in a terrible car accident. They were both very severely injured.
Now while one of them was in critical condition in the intensive care unit, I of course went down there, did what I could. But I asked one of my students who was a nurse, who was also present there, to read stories from The Last Incarnation to the woman who was in the accident who was lying at that time reasonably close to death. The reason I was doing this was there was such a volume of compressed power in that book that as she listened to these stories, it changed her power level.
In other words, as she was injured—having even broken a steering wheel in half with her chest when she hit it, she had lost all her energy and she wasn’t obviously in such a hot state to begin with, otherwise that whole thing wouldn’t have happened—this caused her to access a tremendous amount of energy and get her life force moving again so that she was able to keep going.
This is why The Tibetan Book of The Dead was read aloud, not so much to the dead as to the dying because there was such power in it that it could cause a tremendous transit, even at the moment of death. When a person heard the words, the power of the words—even if the person didn’t exactly understand them—would be unlocked, and the person could draw upon that power.
At the time of death, they could gain power, and move into a higher sphere after death—to a higher world—than they would have been able to. It’s a very powerful book. You don’t have to understand it but just to have it—the words in it are extremely compressed.
The I Ching is the same way. I was recently looking occultly at some books that I have, which are my favorite books that I find are the most powerful books that I’ve encountered in this life. As I was looking at all of them it was interesting, I was looking at The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching as the two most powerful of these 12 books, just in terms of power. There are many other books—The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Way of Life, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads are all extremely powerful books, not in terms of what they say but the energy.
I happened to have a copy of The Last Incarnation there, which contains stories that you have written.
And what I observed was that that book was as powerful as The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the I Ching and much more powerful than the others in terms of compressed power.
As far as I know, another book like it has never been done. It’s unique in the history of spiritual writing in this cycle.
So I had her [the nurse-student] read the stories because she [the injured student] related more to them, of course, than to the I Ching or to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Plus, if we read her The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it would probably have scared the life out of her. It caused her to access a tremendous volume of energy and power; she was able to draw on the power that others had stored.
So I recommend writing as the primary vehicle for storing power. I suggest that you keep a journal and in that journal you write down your most powerful experiences.
When you write them, I suggest that you do them in story form, as stories in The Last Incarnation are written. If you don’t have time, just make notes. But it’s very important to do it as close to the experience as possible, because the further away you get from the experience the more of the power you’ll lose. If you can write it down that night or the next day, that’s the best because you’ll compress more power.
Then it’s very important to refine it. The rewriting is very important. In other words, you write the story down or the experience down. That will compress a certain amount of power but as you go back over it and rewrite it, when you rewrite it you’re seeing. You’re looking beyond the words to the actual experience. You’re going over it again and again and trying to make it tighter and tighter, and as you do, the closer to the experience it gets, the more power it will have.
That’s why rewriting is so important, because you compress more and more power.
Then, of course, what I suggest you do is set aside a copy for yourself, and send me a copy. You know, always bring one. You can always drop one off with someone who takes attendance here. If it’s a particularly powerful story, if I feel that you’ve really hit something, then I might even ask you to rewrite it, because I see that you can do more with it. Then there’s the possibility that we’ll use it in a book or in our newspaper, which will be starting next February and will consist of these stories, or in a Self-Discovery [magazine published by Rama and his students], which means that you will then share power with others.
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Writing is very, very important.
I recently gave an assignment to people who’ve studied with me for over two years to write a paper on Tantric Mysticism. The reason I did this was so they could compress power. I asked them to survey everything that we’ve ever done together and in five to 15 or so pages to write it down.
I didn’t do this to give them a hard time or to give them a meaningless assignment. If they did it properly, they will change completely.
I had asked them to compress all the power of everything we’ve had together, all the moments—
to compress all of it, the tapes, the books.
And if they’ve done a good job, then they will have compressed so much power that whenever they read that or just think of it, it will cause them to go through a major transit.
So I recommend as the primary forum, writing. I think that all of you should do that, if you’re really serious about changing levels of attention. You’ll find that it’s very easy.
The moments while you’re writing, once you get the hang of it, you will find you will shift into a tremendously high state of consciousness just while you’re sitting there at the typewriter. You’ll see that you go through a tremendous transit.
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You have to avoid losing power.
Most people lose power in relationships. About 75 to 95 percent of all attention in this world—so says don Juan and I think he’s right—is devoted to romance. And it’s such a waste, it’s incredible, because you get almost no return on your investment, as power lost.
So I think you need to look at yourself a little bit and assess how much of your energy you’re putting in that direction. I have no argument with romance or with love but if you’re fixating on it too much, you’ll find that you’re losing a tremendous amount of energy.
If that’s the way you look at life, then you’re an amateur from a spiritual point of view.
At the same time, you have to think of ways to increase power.
I suggest writing them down. Do you see why?
When you write down the things that cause you to [gain and] lose power—when you make a list—if you go home tonight and do that, you just sit down and take two pieces of paper.
Don’t use the same piece.
Use two different pieces, very important.
On one piece, put down all the things during your life—yoga exercises, eating a yogurt, whatever it is, sometimes there are silly things—
Write those down. As you write them, you’re obviously going to be compressing power, compressing some of your strongest moments, you see?
Then write down those items that cause you to lose power.
When you write those down, what are you doing then?
You’re negating them because what you’re doing is making a list and putting a list
Just list them very simply. You don’t have to list them individually. You can list types.
But as you do that, you are going to retrace them in your mind.
and
These are mystical practices.
So if you make a list of all the people in your life who ever hurt you, they were vicious and hostile, let’s say. You know, unfortunately sometimes we run into people like that.
When you make that list, you are disconnecting yourself from them.
If you don’t do that, you can have an experience with someone 20 years ago and still be connected with them today.
And they can be
because you were too nice
You can be drained by people thousands of miles away, and because you’re a nice person, you’re not going to think that someone will do that.
It has a lot to do with illness of both physical and psychological types, and generally keeping you in a very lowered state of awareness.
But if you list them
you will
and then
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On the other hand, also make a list of all those persons who have helped you in life. I’ve been lucky, I’ve had wonderful teachers all my life. I’ve had professors at the universities and spiritual teachers when I was a student and so on, all the way through. I’ve met remarkable people all my life, I’ve been helped that way, so when I write them down, I compress that. Even if it’s not in story form, just to note that, you compress power.
Again, I bring your attention to the last story, the epilogue story in The Last Incarnation where [my student] Ganesha does exactly that. In writing that story, he has compressed all the moments in his life in a particular way; he used gratitude and he compressed them before he made a major transit and moved to Malibu. It was very nicely done.
Carlos does that. Don Juan and don Genaro have Carlos do that at the end of Tales of Power. They have him stand there and compress power.
You can compress power with words too. When you go to a power place, if you speak very powerful words, it does the same thing.
When I bring you to power places you’ll notice that very often I give you a very hard time if you say things that don’t mean anything—that don’t have heart and feeling—because you’re doing the opposite.
But when I get someone who can see and actually says something with feeling—even if it’s very simple—they’re compressing power in that moment.
You can always go back to those moments that we’ve had together—whether they were ten years ago or ten lifetimes ago—if you can remember them.
And the way we remember them is, we think of the physical location, if it was a vortex of power. And you remember that, you see. So when you go to a power place, you say powerful words or you have powerful experiences. You compress power there. Then if you write it down afterwards, you compress it again.
This is how you store power.
You also store power through love. Whenever you love, you compress time. Time stops. The world stops and you step outside of it.
Moments of self-giving compress power. Now, some people give but they don’t pick the right moment—or they don’t pick the right way—so there’s very little power in it. But you compress power.
What I’m suggesting is that as you compress power—as you store it—you’ll go to higher and higher levels of attention.
Why is one person enlightened and another not?
Why is one person able to see the lines of the world or see the different vortexes?
Why does one person go into samadhi and another not?
Because they have learned
Sometimes sharing power with others increases power and compresses it. That’s what I do constantly.
At the same time, you need to be aware of people who drain your power, and they can be in your past, years and years ago. All you have to do, though, is list them and recognize them.
As they say in The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
When you recognize something,
Your occult body is doing something at an entirely different level.
So try writing all of your experiences down. Initially it will take a while.
If the stories don’t come out clearly, it tells you that you’re not clear yet.
As you write and as you take the time to do this over a period of time—six months, a year, two years—as you keep doing this, you’ll find as your writing gets clearer, it’s because your power is getting stronger.
If you find your writing is real sloppy and all over the place and the stories aren’t good, that’s your consciousness. Don’t be embarrassed, improve it. Meditate more deeply and write more. It doesn’t have to be a grandiose prose style. That’s not the point.
The point is to be accurate and have power in your words.
That’s how you should live—
When you move into a higher level of attention, you will understand.
You need to learn how to see. To see means to look beyond what most people call the visible. There is dreaming and seeing. Seeing, of course, means perceiving what things actually are, not what they appear to be.
Dreaming is not what you do at night when you fall asleep. That’s having dreams.
Dreaming is either
or it’s what I call
In dreaming what you would do is, while awake or asleep, you can travel to another place. Of course the time will always be the same. That’s one of the ways you know you’re dreaming. In dreaming, if it’s daytime when you’re dreaming and you go to some place 20 miles away, it’ll have to be daytime there. In other words, you are using the etheric double to travel to another locale.
Then there’s the very sophisticated dreaming, which is the Tibetan rebirth process, which I’ve talked about. That’s a very advanced form of dreaming.
But in order to see, you have to have more power. The thing all of you lack is power.
Before I can teach you the arts of seeing and dreaming and all these different things,
You have to store it
So if you would do these very simple things—make a list of those ways you gain and lose power, and then start to write.
Also, when you go to powerful places, be in a higher state of attention and write these things down and then, of course, give them to me so I can see how you did.
If you don’t get them back or you don’t see them in some form of writing, it means that they weren’t quite there. They were good attempts and you did store some power, but when I feel that you’ve done it properly, I’ll let you know. You will get some positive feedback.
If you do these things, you’ll find that
1. As a convention, See and seeing, when italicized, refer to the perception of an object or situation as it’s fundamental essence. When not italicized, it refers to ordinary perception. The chapter “Modular Mysticism: Seeing” explains this mystical power in detail.