There are two ways to become enlightened—the easy way and the hard way. I suppose that could be true of anything. The easy way is through a complete focus on that which is most positive. The hard way is through a focus on that which is negative. Both positive and negative come from the same source. So if you follow either path, the path of affirmation or negation, eventually you’ll come to the source, if you follow them to the source.
But positive and negative, what we call yin and yang, light and dark, are circles. In the Far East, we look at life in terms of circles. In the West, they look at life more in terms of squares and rectangles. We look at life more as circles. In the West when you talk about yin and yang, people normally think of yin and yang as something that’s linear. There’s a single line, which is yin, and juxtaposed to it is a single line, which is yang. But in the East we tend to think of yin and yang as circles. They’re two circles that actually can lie on top of each other, yet they remain separate. But if it’s easier for you to think of it that way, you can think of them as being next to each other.
Now, yang, which is positive, affirmative, and so on, is a circle, and you can come into it at any point of the circle and go around the circle. When you’ve gone around the circle, at the end you’ll come back to the beginning of the circle. And then you’ll go around the circle again and again, forever. The same is true of yin. Being on the circle of yin or yang does not necessarily mean that you will ever go beyond the circle because the source of the circle is not necessarily connected to it.
To reach the source of the circle, you have to get off the circle. But going around the circle, one can build up a kind of a momentum, a speed. And as you go around the circle more and more rapidly, you can gain enough momentum so that you can lift above the circle, and vortex, or do a pirouette, into the source of the circle. When you enter the source of the circles of yin and yang, it’s what they call tai chi, the undifferentiated reality, which is a way of saying it’s beyond description. But it is not something that can be separated—because what we’re seeking is the nexus of all possible worlds and states of mind, which is within us. The source of yin and yang is within you.
But within us there are a number of different points or configurations where we come together and join as intelligence, as wakefulness, as something that has an aliveness to it. The points are progressions, the locus points, where the nexus that we are conjoins, creates what we call bonding reality structures, states of mind in a more vernacular usage. And these locus points cause perception.
Yin and yang are outgrowths, positive and negative. Affirmation and negation are negatives and positives; they’re outgrowths, syntactical outgrowths of a nexus within the mind. But there is not one nexus within the mind. There are many. And self-discovery, the pathway to enlightenment—particularly the tantric method of attaining enlightenment and liberation and emerging into the clear light of reality, the dharmakaya, the rootless source of all being, the ultimate groundless ground, so to speak, what they would call God, nirvana—[is] that assimilation, that jump, that trajectory, to move from the states of apparent reality, which we call the samsara, in which occur birth, growth, maturation, old age, death and rebirth—those circles are absorbed or are extensions of the mind. The mind is all that exists. There is nothing else. Everything that we perceive, including the action of pure perception, is an extension of the mind. Without the mind there is nothing.
The nexus of the mind, the central nexus, the first one you encounter, is that part of the mind which creates the pageant that you call life. The pageant of life is divided into yin and yang. They’re two circles. You can follow either circle and manage to develop enough speed to move beyond this world or other worlds, dimensional realities. But the thing that the novice normally misses in all of this is that all states of mind are internal. That is to say, what creates reality is the mind’s self-reflection.
Let’s imagine that there’s someone far, far away in another dimension—very far away. They’re sitting by a lake in a world that’s made of light. It’s not a world like this, but it’s a world of light. And they’re looking into the lake, and out above the lake there’s a horizon that goes on forever, which is made up of lights that continually change coloration. And the being is made of light and the lake is made of light, yet the lights are variegated and seem to have a slightly different density in that they resonate at different frequencies. So as the being is sitting by the lake looking into it, they see a reflection. They see their eyes and their face, which is also light. And the light is moving. The light of the lake is moving, the light of the being is moving. The light circulates and shifts and changes hue and vibration. And as they look into that lake and they look into their eyes, they see a world very far away, maybe this world, and they see a person in that world, maybe you. And maybe they’re inside that person living a life, experiencing a world for a while. But where are they really? They’re looking at a lake of light, which is an extension of their mind, which shifts and changes, and has different hues.
Reality is perception. And within the mind there’s a lake that contains everything—all possible realities, all possible universes, all possible perceptions. Not just of external things, but of oneself, as oneself as a god or a goddess, as oneself as an ant, as oneself as a reality, as oneself as nirvana—all things exist in this lake. And as we stare into it, we tend to focus on something, we tend to select something. Without thought, we’re looking into the lake. But something will kind of solidify in front of our eyes. For a moment, the color combinations will join or bond in a certain way. And at that moment, if we’re distracted from the continual flow of perfect mind that we’re in, suddenly everything configures, everything solidifies. Suddenly a shape appears out of flux. Suddenly a world appears, karmas appear, pasts, futures, presents, time structures, yin and yang appear.
In other words, there wasn’t a single day in which the world was created. It’s created anew at every moment. The structures of eternity are completely fluid but they are bound together by the mind, and as the mind binds them together, forming a nexus or a point of configuration from which structures emerge, so reality comes into being.
The world wasn’t created. It is created anew at every moment by mind. By your mind. As your mind reflects and perceives, so it configures past and future, good and bad, success and failure. The pairs of opposites.
Now, by the time we get down to the world, we’ve forgotten all about the lake, and we’re sitting, living, walking, talking, sleeping; we’re existing and we’ve forgotten about the flux of perception. We’ve solidified into a karmic configuration from which there is, in a way, no escape. We’ve gotten on a circle. It’s either a circle of affirmation or negation. And we will just go around and around that circle in what we call a karmic progression.
Karmic progression implies that we are kind of alliterating steps in life. There’s an alliteration, a kind of a rhyme structure. That is to say, once we’re in time and space, the variable structures are somewhat limited. Once we’ve conceived of time and space, once we’ve accepted or endorsed their existence, then that implies that there is a structural order to binding realities.
For example, a map. If we take a map of the United States, we can see North, South, East and West. We can see Maine and California, Wisconsin, Florida. And there’s a sense of order to that map. There’s direction—places have names. There may be highways, mountains, cities. Looking at a map, we accept that reality exists in a certain defined way. We are admitting that what we are seeing is not just a fluid mass of moving, changing light, which does not have any particular definition or any particular structure, which is always in flux—rather we are giving a solidity to reality. We’re admitting that there’s a solidity. But in other states of perception, there may be no North, South, East or West.
If one is enlightened, one does not perceive life with North, South, East and West. There is no California, there is no New York. In a higher bonding state of attention, everything is fluid light. And the way that you perceive life, the way most people perceive life, doesn’t exist. It’s not there. The structures become fluid. The ice that’s frozen on the pond, that’s been there all winter, that’s created a place for people to skate, a landscape, something that we drive by in a car every day and we see—suddenly spring comes and all that ice goes away, and there’s water, which has no definite shape. It looks like it has a shape, visually. But if we go over there, the water’s in constant movement. The particles of the water are constantly combining with other particles of water. It is not solid. We pick it up and it slides through our fingers. That’s what life is—it’s not solid. But at times it appears to be solid. And it is that appearance of solidity that creates reality on basic levels, on sensorial levels, basic mental levels.
The process of meditation, the action of what we call the tantric path to enlightenment, is melting the ice. It is assumed right now that your entire world is frozen. The ice is very solid, it’s very thick, which is your life, your mind, the way you perceive things. But through raising what we call the kundalini energy, which is a very hot energy that exists in a part of the mind, by raising that energy we raise the temperature and we melt—sometimes just a little, sometimes a great deal—the ice that is the solidification of life as we perceive it.
The primary solidification, of course, is always a self-objectification. That is to say, we perceive the solidification as the world around us, which appears to be relatively solid. But that solidification is just really a reflection of the solidification of one’s sense of self.
So what we’re seeking to do is not really melt the map—of America. We’re seeking to melt the self, the solid form that we consider ourselves to be, which is relatively unchanging [in] the sense that it is a solid self. I have been thus and such a person, I was born this way or I grew up this way, I am this way, I can make minor modifications, perhaps—change a few habits even though that’s somewhat challenging. But to take “me” as a structural being and melt myself down, the only time that happens that we know of is in death.
At death we all accept that the self ceases to exist. There are various theories that maybe the self continues on in another life, in another body, in another plane of consciousness, a heaven, a hell, something like that. But I think everyone would realize, or everyone could kind of feel or construe, that after death the self would not exactly be the same, even if it did continue on. The perceptual body that you are at the time of death ceases to be. It is not structured quite so tightly.
So what someone does who seeks enlightenment—deeper, clarified awareness, a finer way of perceiving life—what they’re seeking to do is melt the self. This is not done in one fiery blast. It’s done very gradually, a little at a time. And as we melt the self, we then—after it melts a little bit—we allow it to solidify and it solidifies in new patterns.
What we’re seeking to do is become transparent. Sort of a transparent window on reality. But that takes time to do. We’re starting with a very solid, objectified view of ourselves and existence. To change that around, it’s necessary to gradually loosen up the glue that binds the self together. I suppose you could say you’ve become unglued, right? But each time we loosen the glue, we only loosen it a little bit and then we allow the self to come together again in a new structure, just as it did at birth.
Now, what makes all this work is velocity. That is to say, the theory of personality transmutation is that the self follows—is an aggregate, it’s a series of formations that has a karma to it. It’s going around a circle. There’s a pattern to it, just like the DNA causes a growth structure pattern. So that you start out at a certain size, you grow larger, and there’s an orderly pattern, there’s a progression that’s implicit in the DNA, which the coding of the DNA causes the body to develop in specific ways.
The self, too, has some kind of—it’s like a DNA. We call it the causal body. There’s a part of us that has a coding, and that coding follows a progression just as the growth of the body does. The progression of the self is implicit in its own structures. But normally those structures only change at the time of death. If we think of each death and each rebirth in a series of lifetimes as a day in the life of a human being in which there’s growth and development and change, but that growth and development and change are following a pattern—we can say it’s a logical, orderly pattern if we like that kind of language. It really doesn’t matter, it just is. You may like it, you may not like it, but the DNA does what it does. It doesn’t sit around waiting for your opinion.
Opinions are secondary when dealing with reality. They’re subjective reflections, but they don’t change the DNA—unless you get into the DNA and change it, which can be done. But who’s changing the DNA? You know, it’s the old thing. Is it the DNA through the person who’s changing the DNA that’s changing the DNA? In which case the DNA is not changing—you know what I mean. You see, you go around on one of those circles. Obviously God is changing the DNA through God as God for God by God, and all that sort of thing. See what I mean?
So in self-discovery, what one does is—the way you change is simply by liquefying the self. It’s not necessary to know how to get to the next structure. It’s implicit in the self that the self will automatically evolve if you can dissolve it. It repatterns itself after archetypal formations that exist deep within the mind—way back up in that lake, with that being of light that’s looking into the lake of light, with the endless horizon of light that’s constantly changing hue and intonation. Another image will come. Suddenly the being will be looking into the lake again and everything will have liquefied. And then another image will come up of another world, another time, another space, another body that suddenly they’re in again. That’s implicit in reality. Reality takes care of itself very well. Nirvana is perfect.
Our part is not to try and determine with thought, desire or aversion who or what we should be. We allow life to do that, in other words. There’s an implicit faith or trust in the processes of life. Not simply the physical processes of life—you know, you can say, “Well, I trusted life and I walked out onto a freeway and I got hit by a car. So much for trusting life.” OK. But we’re discussing the part of life that makes us what we are, that has given existence what it is, that ultimate intelligence which everything is a reflection of.
If you were able to trust life implicitly—that which creates you, is you, changes you, dies with you, is reborn with you—if you can let go to that, then automatically the set point, the self, becomes what it should be. What we seek to do through the process of meditation and through the practices in Tantric Buddhism is simply to liquefy ourselves. And then life automatically will bring us to the next stage. You don’t really have to know where you’re going—it’s like breathing.
In yoga what they call pranayama is the science of breathing. And in pranayama you don’t worry about taking breaths, you focus on exhalation—because if you exhale properly, you will inhale. And the more deeply you exhale, the more deeply you will inhale. So we really don’t have to worry about breathing in. It will happen, I assure you. But we focus in pranayama on exhalation. Breathing in will follow automatically.
It’s not necessary to know where you’re going; you just have to get out of where you are, and automatically you will be someplace else. That’s how the universe works. The structures of the universe are perfect in that way. People are always thinking, “Well, I want to change.” You don’t have to know what you want to change into, you just have to change. You just have to get out of where you are and automatically, the next step will follow. If you pick your foot up, it’s going to come down someplace, do you follow? Even if it’s going to be the same place, but it won’t really be the same place—it’ll only look the same if you’re in a state of mind that is not seeing reality, which is constantly in a state of transmutation. No place is ever the same because everything is shifting, always. Change is continuous and the aggregate of the self is constantly shifting. But on outer structural levels, which you call a personality, it can look—because of striated states of mind—very definitive, very hard.
Meditation is a process in which we are seeking to liquefy the self by raising the kundalini energy. When that happens, we experience an ecstasy. That ecstasy is the freedom of moving beyond a self that is much too structured. It’s like you’ve chained somebody and they’ve been sitting in shackles. Suddenly you take the chains off and there’s just an innate ecstasy to getting up and moving and being able to just get around and not being chained to a particular place.
No one likes being a slave, and the ultimate slavery is being a slave to yourself. Being stuck in who you are is the ultimate slavery. In other words, what causes pain in life is being specifically who you are. The less definitive, the less you are who you are, the more ecstasy there is. The pain in life is caused by being someone.
Now, being nebulous is not particularly ecstatic. It’s a condition of light—hard to explain in words, obviously—it’s a condition of light that creates ecstasy. It’s being up in the world of light, looking into the lake, watching the shifting aggregate formations of existence perfectly moving without a sense of direction, constantly forming new patterns. That sense of freedom, when the mind stops and folds into itself, when thought stops, when the perception of self as separate from the rest of life ceases—at that point reality is apparent.
Naturally there are countless realities and every perception is a reality, every state of mind is a reality. But all of those realities are circles that go round and round forever. They’re like rides at Disneyland. You can go to Disneyland and get on Space Mountain and it’ll be the same today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day. That ride is there for you. You may like the ride, you may go on it again, you may get a kick out of it. But it’s always there. So every lifetime, every state of mind, every dimension, every reality, is just a ride. And eventually what we seek to do, we realize that we can go on all the rides in the world, but we’re still who we are.
In Buddhism what we seek to do is not necessarily just find a better ride, but we seek to find a better us. We seek to change ourselves into someone who’s beautiful to be. The pure act of being who we are is beautiful, a beauty so overpowering that it becomes ecstasy. In other words, it isn’t the action of doing something that produces ecstasy. The act of doing or engaging in something will only reflect who you are.
If you’re a mean, nasty person, then whatever you do will be kind of mean and nasty. As you’d be riding on Space Mountain, you’ll be mean and nasty, and you know, (Rama talks like a bully) “Well, I got ahead in the line! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Look at those people down there, they’re stupid!” (Back to normal voice.) See? You’ll bring that with you wherever you go.
If you’re a high-minded person, right? Then you’ll walk around, sort of in your self-reflection of being someone who’d always go, “Gee, everything is so wonderful. Look at those nice people down there standing in line. I let those people get ahead of me because they were in such a rush, they were so excited to be on the ride.” Right? And you’re stuck in that state of mind. In other words, states of mind engender reality. It doesn’t matter what ride you get on, you are on the ride that is you.
What we do in Buddhism—changing rides is inevitable. That just happens, you can’t avoid it in life. Life is a cyclic, changing situation. But what we seek to do is what other people don’t do. We seek to change ourselves. Most people think that if I can simply get a better ride and ride it all the time, everything will be good. You know, that is the approach to life that most people take. They assume that what makes a difference is a better house, a better car, a better lover, a better job, better possessions, a better body—these are the things that make one happy. But all rides come to an end. The coach changes back to a pumpkin. You outgrow the glass slipper because your feet get fat. They don’t show what happens to Cinderella ten years after—after five kids.
Buddhism, then, is the study of changing the self. Naturally, as the self changes, it will select different rides to go on because there are different tastes. You really don’t have to worry about that part. In other words, today you like Space Mountain; tomorrow you’ll like It’s a Small World—various rides at Disneyland. Your tastes will automatically evolve as you do. So, if instead of putting all your attention into always trying to get a better ride but instead you put your attention into creating a better you, then whatever ride you go on is much more beautiful, is much more ecstatic.
Meditation is a process of liquefying the self temporarily and then allowing the self to rebond. The ice melts and then it comes back again. But when it comes back again, it comes back in a more evolved configuration. It’s less dense. It’s less structured. It’s more lucid.
Now, why does it do that? It’s because in between the liquefactions we’re building up a level of power. In other words, why shouldn’t it just come back in a structure that’s about the same? Why not come back in a structure that is less ecstatic or more, if we can use ecstasy as a measurement. Ecstasy is a relative measurement of freedom. When we’re not free, there’s no ecstasy. The more free we are, the more ecstasy.
We’re using gradients of light as an auric measurement, a quantified auric measurement of the ascension of consciousness from the relatively sensorial, material perceptions of existence to the more refined, spiritual perceptions of existence. And obviously there’s a lot more ecstasy in the spirit than in the flesh. Flesh has its moments. But the spirit has a much, much higher processing rate. The body is very low-level language. Machine language.6 The language of the soul, of the mind, is much more evolved. There are many languages.
What causes that change is not simply the detonation of the self. What causes the change is that in between the restructurings of the self, one is directing oneself towards light. Now we get—we must wax metaphysical. Up to now, it’s been an occult discussion, which is basically the chemistry of change. We’re dealing with diurnal structures, which are relatively easy to understand. This is just physics. The physics or the chemistry of the soul, kind of. The DNA structures of reality.
But the magic of life, of course, is not something that can be explained. Structures can only take us to the point where they begin or end. Beyond structures is the white light. The white light is reality in a form that cannot be apprehended or understood. It can be admired, it can be feared, it can be focused upon, it can be rejected, it can be forgotten. But it’s there, just as the sun is there. You can forget it’s there; you can get so involved in your thoughts as you walk around today that you forget that there’s a sun up there. You never look at the sky once during the whole day. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If it’s not there, you’re in serious trouble. The world will freeze and you will be dead.
The sun is there, whether you’re aware of it or not. The white light is there. And the magic of the white light is—when we step into it, it transmutes us, it transforms us. It just does. That’s mysticism. Mysticism is the acceptance that everything cannot be logically explained. I mean, everything can be logically explained, but it has nothing to do with what’s really happening. Those are just appended kind of algorithms so we can discern the motion of a mathematical equation. But what does that have to do with the equation itself? The equation just exists because there’s a flow in the world of mathematics.
Algorithms are not dependent upon understanding. They just exist—like pre-bonding structures of reality. In other words, the cellular structures that compose the body do not need scientific explanation. They work without it. They worked before it. They didn’t come into being because somebody understood them.
Human beings like to think that, “I think, therefore everything comes after that.” But that’s bullshit! That’s science. Science is bullshit. Interesting bullshit—nevertheless, it’s still bullshit. Only because there’s so much ego correlated to it. The assumption is that, “Ah! We have discovered the universe.” Excuse me! I beg to interject that the universe was there before you “discovered” it. Your discovery did not give it life.
The structures of existence just are. Blame it on God, I suppose. “God did it” sort of thing. They’re just there. But if one is wise, one can learn to move within those structures in ways that create ecstasy, or pain. Now, in a simple civilization like the one we’re in now, they don’t know too much about DNA, they’re just sort of figuring it out. If you were born with a certain structure of DNA, you must live that way. In other civilizations, they have known how to take the DNA and completely manipulate it. And when you manipulate the DNA, you can change and regrow things and restructure the body.
Most people don’t know what to do with their minds and their lives—they’re kind of stuck in their own DNA. But Buddhists have made a study over thousands and thousands of years, of how you can change the structures of the self, how you can manipulate the DNA of being. You can’t change the fact that it’s there—everybody has it. But you can cause it to move into new formations, into more lucid formations in which there’s ecstasy.
I don’t think I have to explain why there’s a desire to be ecstatic. I think that’s implicit in any understanding of life. It’s just there. We seek ecstasy. We seek freedom. We don’t particularly seek the lack of ecstasy. We don’t particularly seek the lack of freedom, although looking at the human race, one would think it does. The human race seems to go heavily out of its way to avoid ecstasy and to avoid freedom.
So if you seek ecstasy and freedom, and again those are kind of intangible words, but—if we can get beyond them—then the only recourse is the study of the dissolution and the reformation of the self. And of course, there’s something beyond that, which is—complete enlightenment, in which we go beyond selves and reformations of selves and all that stuff. This is a process we go through just to build up speed, and if we get enough speed through either the path of negation or the path of creation, if we get up enough speed, we can flip beyond creation or negation to pure enlightenment, which is a structure that is not even a being up there somewhere looking in a pool of shifting light at itself shifting its light.
If we can get up far enough, then there isn’t even a being looking in a pool. There’s something beyond that one that’s creating that. We can get back another level—that’s nirvana. No way to talk about it. Not from here. Maybe if we get up to the point where the being of light is looking in the pool, maybe there’s a way of understanding it from there a little more, or at least seeing the direction. From here, it’s necessary just to get up to that point, then the next step will follow automatically.
It is through many lifetimes of shifting the aggregate of the self and refining it and transforming it that one finally reaches a point of maximum velocity whereby one can snap off the circle completely and move into a freedom that’s not simply, “Gee, now I know how to get around the circle real well, whereas before it was kind of painful and I was stuck in it and didn’t really get its motion. Now I know how to get around and get to where I want to go and avoid the places I want to avoid.” But that in itself becomes another circle, which is another kind of trap. So now we know self-discovery very well, we know a system very well, and we become trapped by the system and by our knowledge of it. Ultimately one can snap beyond systems to something else that is even more free, more ecstatic—whatever words we want to use—more liberating, more enlightening.
It’s by building up a kind of a momentum that that is done. But that step and all the steps are really the same. It’s the transmutive power of the white light that is God, that is the central nexus of being. Not the peripheral nexus, or “nexees” maybe (Rama laughs). Not all those little guys out there, those other nexes, those other points that cause the ten thousand states of mind to come into aggregate suspension. Not those things, nah! The central nexus is the white light. Because it’s a nexus, it does not have an opposite point. And when we step into it, it’s like taking a shower.
You’re all dirty and grungy and you go step in the shower and you come out clean. So when you enter into the white light, it does something to you. It frees you, it shifts you, it changes you. Then there will be points when one can make an ascension—one is not simply stepping into the white light, which is the equivalent of meditating each day and doing a variety of other things that give one speed in terms of energy flow.
It’s sort of like—remember when you were a kid, they had the little local bank? And they had the Christmas Club. And you’d go down every week and you’d put ten bucks in and then by Christmas time, you’ve got a bunch of money and you go shopping. So you’re saving and suddenly you get enough money and you go do something.
Remember the stamps in the supermarket and the books you used to paste them in? And you get enough stamps and then you could go get a neat thing, right? But for a while we don’t have the neat thing, we only have the apprehension of it, looking at catalogues of neat things, you see. For a while we just have the licking of stamps and the placing of stamps in booklets, and shopping carts. And one day we take them down to the center—they used to have these little centers where you’d bring all your coupons and you would select from wonderful gifts—this was back in the day when they believed America was immortal and science was all, and we could do no wrong. Products were the ultimate answer to all problems. “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.” See?
Now, who knows what Ronald Reagan had in common with General Electric? Do you know? What? (An inaudible audience member responds.) Well, yeah, he was the host on what? (Audience responds, “GE Theater.”) “GE Theater,” that’s right. Now there’s a nexus for you. And he spun from that to being President of the United States, from being the host of “GE Theater.” So there must have been a power to it. Sorry. (Audience laughs at the pun.) Oooooohhhh!
So all yoga and meditation is essentially the accumulation of coupons. (Audience laughs.) Now, this is different than the lottery. The lottery is very different. The lottery has no certainty. Actually, it has a pretty large certainty that you won’t win, because out of millions of tickets, only a few people score. And you could buy those tickets theoretically forever and never score. It’s entirely possible. Forget this chance theorem. There’s a chance that you could always buy a ticket forever in eternity and never win. You do realize that.
You know, when they say the odds—“Your odds at winning are one out of two million.” So that means if you buy two million tickets, eventually you’re going to win? Not true! Not if you know anything about probability factoring. Probability factoring implies that there is absolutely no such thing as probability. There’s only luck. Unless you buy every single ticket—then there’s no luck. But then, of course, if you bought every single ticket, that costs more than what you would win. That’s a very, very frustrated person who wants to win very badly.
You can do that in self-discovery. I’ve known people who have done that. You know, people who finally get so pissed off that they’re not enlightened that they just go to ridiculous extremes after thousands and millions [of lifetimes]—in other words, the fact that you’re reborn does not mean that you’ll ever become enlightened. You know, there’s a theorem you read in some of the Far Eastern spiritual books where they say (Rama talks in a high-pitched voice), “Well, Sally or Bob, sooner or later, after you go through enough lifetimes, you will become enlightened.” (Return to normal voice.) Wrong! All dogs may go to heaven, but that’s—no. No, it’s like the lottery. You could buy lottery tickets forever and it’s possible you will never come up with a winning ticket. Obviously, I should not be the spokesperson for the New York State Lottery. They will not hire me, I can tell.
So you could go through incarnations forever and never become enlightened—unless, of course, you do something about it. But just the fact that you exist—“I exist, therefore some day I’ll become enlightened.” No. Some people say that though. They believe that, so therefore they don’t do anything, therefore they never become enlightened and they go around the circle forever.
Sooner or later you determine that it is through self-effort that one advances, not through luck. It’s through self-effort. You finally realize, “I can sit here forever, waiting for a date, waiting for someone to call, but I haven’t met anybody.” Now there is a possibility that the phone will ring. But it will probably be one of those terrible computer things that calls you up. Do you see what I mean? Whereas if you get out and commingle with humanity, there is a likelihood that you might meet someone who might ask you, or you might meet someone you could ask. But sitting at home with no one there, looking at the walls, the chances are slim, if you see what I mean.
It could happen, you could get a wrong number. “Gee! You have a nice voice!” “Well, so do you!” “Do you like Bingo?” “Love it.” “Do you like sunrises in hell?” “Love ‘em!” “Gee! What a great coincidence that we’re talking to each other.” “No coincidence at all!” You know, that sort of thing. So hang up the phone quickly. Disconnect it. Burn the house down. Change countries, change time zones, change anything. Somebody wants you that bad and finds you, you don’t want to be around them.
The Buddhists believe that everything in life is random. There are patterns that are intrinsic to life. We don’t know why, we just know they’re there like the DNA. We have no idea, we just blame it on God. We believe that the universe is a series of patterns, and those patterns go on forever. They themselves change because they themselves follow. Patterns are patterns. All of life is a series of patterns that transmute and change, but the patterns follow patterns. Cycles are in a cycle themselves. Those cycles exist just by themselves. They will always be. And we’re a pattern that follows a pattern, and we will always exist following that pattern. If life is a circle, we’re part of it.
But the Buddhists also feel—they’ve discovered, observed, come to know, learned that, bothered to listen to life—that it is possible to click through different patterns and get to that which makes the patterns, even though it’s not observable in the patterns. You can apprehend that there’s an order to creation by the fact that it’s extremely—obviously—orderly. And that implies that something has created that order. Unless, of course, you’re simply mad and you’re imposing your mental order upon it and there is no order whatsoever, which is entirely possible. You have to consider everything. It’s the Buddhist way. We take into account every possible variation, subvariation and negation of all variations and subvariations. Let alone the negation of the self that creates and is implicit in the variation and subvariation of the various selves. So once you know everything, and you know nothing, and you know all subvariations, nonvariations, lack of variations, variegated variations, you go through all this ridiculous stuff, you’re still at the same point. You’re sitting in a room being stupid. (Audience laughs.)
It’s like in The Little Prince, the guy goes up the trail in the planets and the guy’s counting the stars, right? And he’s very busy. Once in a while one of the stars goes out, and it pisses him off and he has to redo all his calculations, because there’s a super nova, do you see what I mean? What that leaves out is the white light. In other words, without the white light, there would be no hope. It would be very bad, because you would only exist as the pattern within patterns, bound to a circle forever—Prometheus bound.
The white light is the joker in the deck. It does not have a fixed identity. It creates transmutations that are completely unpredictable, which is what makes it fun, which is why it scares the hell out of most people. All of meditation and Buddhism has to do with going into the white light. And if you go into the white light, which is a direct formation of God beyond patterns, that white light repatterns you, shifts you and transmutes you. And you don’t have to know how, since God is God, and inherently God therefore does godlike things. You don’t have to hassle it, you just have to get there.
You get to Hawaii, you go outside, you lie down, you get tan. Don’t worry; it is Hawaii’s nature to tan one. If you lie in the sun, it will happen. Stay in the sun too long, you burn. You build up to it, see? Or if you just like to be in the sun, you get, of course, a total sun block. That’s what most people have—total enlightenment block.
So then, you can follow the path of negation or the path of affirmation. I’ll talk about the path of negation and affirmation another time. They’re two different paths. One is the easy way, one is the hard way. But either way can take you into the white light.
In the West, they’re only aware of the path of affirmation. In the East, we also have the path of negation. In the West, the very concept of the path of negation taking you into the light doesn’t exist. Here they believe that only through affirmation can one enter into the light. Negation, they think, is the opposite of the light. The light does not have an opposite. That’s why it’s the light. If it had an opposite, it couldn’t be the light. Darkness is not the opposite of the light.
The light that I’m talking about, which is why we usually call it the “clear light”—I’m using white light because it’s easier for Westerners—but we call it the clear light, and the clear light cannot have an opposite. White light can have an opposite—dark light. The clear light can’t have an opposite, therefore it is superior to your common light. See what I mean? The light to which I refer, which we call the inner light, as opposed to the sunlight, which is perceived through the senses, the inner light does not have an opposite. Dark and light as you know them come out of the inner light. But the central nexus of the mind where the flux of the inner light is, is all you need.
Buddhism is the path that leads through affirmation or negation, or if you’re really kind of techy or confused, through both, to the clear light. Once you get in the clear light, you get in the shower, you’ll get washed off. You get remade. You get reborn, transmuted, purified. And if that happens enough times, in enough ways, you build up enough momentum to blast off the circle completely and go into that clear light so totally that you become it. There’s no way to explain it, in other words, there’s something else beyond that. Existence doesn’t end with nirvana. It just—no words.
6. A computer’s native instruction set, at the chip level.