We’re coming into a very interesting time. The summer solstice is approaching, and I’d like to talk to you a little bit about the summer solstice. There are four times of tremendous power that occur every year. There are others that occur at different times, but there are four that you can count on, and those are the solstices and the equinoxes. Without going into the structures of why that is so—it just is—I’d rather look at what it means.
The summer solstice is the time in the physical world of greatest light. The winter solstice is the time of the greatest darkness, if you will. The equinoxes are equal day and equal night in the fall and spring. But while this is occurring in a physical sense, in the physical universe, in the inner universe, meaning in other dimensional planes, something else is happening at that time also. The manifestation may be more sunlight or less sunlight or half and half in the physical world, but in the subtle planes there are doorways and powers that open and come into view. And if we can hook ourselves onto those powers, they can carry us a long way.
Occultists are intrinsically lazy like everyone else. We would much rather hitch a ride than walk—unless we just are in the mood to walk. The way we accomplish things is by hooking ourselves and unhooking ourselves to powers, to forces, to energies. And we focus on those energies, we blend our aura, we extend our luminous selves psychically into those forces and powers and we hitch a ride. When we’ve ridden to the destination we want to get to and the destination, if we stayed with it, would take us someplace we don’t want to be, we let go. We hook ourselves onto things and we let go of things. It’s a very unemotional process. We just do it.
The summer solstice is a time in the physical plane of great light. In India, in every yoga center, every master, every ashram has a big celebration. Some celebrate the winter solstice also. The summer solstice tends to get more play. I feel equal about them, to be honest. They’re very different.
We have a summer solstice coming now; it’s the solstice of 1990. It’s a very strong solstice. Just as there are times when there are sunspots, the geysers of fire that spew forth from the sun that are more powerful and they affect the electro-magnetic field of our planet and of our universe, they affect radio waves and all kinds of things—there are times when the sun is very active and there are times when there aren’t many [sunspots]. All solstices are not the same. This particular summer solstice is a very, very powerful time. There’s a tremendous power that’s present. There is in every summer solstice and every winter solstice and every equinox. But this is a very active one; there are a lot of sunspots. There are a lot of pillars of fire.
It’s a time when it’s easier to change, to erase personal history, to do what I call “transit.” It’s an astrological term, to go through a transit—that is to say, to shift yourself, to adjust the foreground and the background of your mind, to take aspects of yourself that you don’t find interesting, that drain your power, that are just a pain or that are boring and put them in the background, and to bring other things into the foreground. It’s a very, very strong solstice. It’s like all of them, yet more so.
The last really strong solstice was around ’85 in the summer. It’s been about five years since we’ve had one like this. And it’s a time, I suppose in a sense—we have the longest day, June 21st or June 22nd, there’s more sunlight around—in a way that reflects inwardly because during the summer solstice, it’s very easy to see things that might be difficult to see at another time. It’s like everything comes out in the wash, if you know what I mean. It’s a time when you will find it very easy to see your imperfections and your perfections. It is a time to see what has to be done, and what’s done.
What a good occultist does, is they hook themselves to the summer solstice. It’s a very powerful time. It’s a feeling. You know it’s coming internally because your mind is quiet, because you meditate and your life is not filled with a lot of things that distract you, because you’re centered and you have your goals set forward and that’s what you put your time and energy into. Because you’ve eliminated anything unnecessary from your life and your mind isn’t cluttered, you can feel things that other people don’t feel. You can feel the power of the solstice.
Most people’s lives are so disjointed and they’ve got so many loose ends in their lives that they can’t feel these things, even though they’re very powerful. But a good occultist, who has their life in order, is sensitized. They’re more sensitive to the energies of the universe and the energies of life. Consequently, if you’re aware of these energies, you can hook onto them and utilize them to pull you or push you to different places, either physically or in terms of outer world accomplishments or just in terms of shifting mental states—flipping from one plane of consciousness to another, flipping from one self to another, things like that.
This solstice is really strong. And the way you do it is—as we do everything in occultism and Buddhism, advanced Buddhism—the way we do it is with a feeling. You have to feel the solstice. Now we’re about a month away, five weeks, and it’s going to get stronger every day. But if you’re sensitized, you can already feel it. You can already feel it coming. It’s sort of like when you see something in your peripheral vision, see it out of the corner of your eye, you just sort of notice something. That’s how an occultist feels energies, as a rule.
Now, we don’t really want to look directly into the sun. If you look at the sun long enough you go blind. If you look at anything powerful directly for too long, you tend not to see it. Power masks itself. When you look into power for too long, it almost overcomes you; it kind of enchants you and you don’t really see it carefully. Sometimes when you look directly at a thing you can’t see it very well. When you look at it out of the corner of your eye, you see it better because you’re not distracted by its appearance. In other words, what we want to look at is not the way the thing looks, but the way it is. Appearances are oft times deceptive. Very often the appearance of something has nothing to do with its reality.
So when you look into the solstice, when you look into that energy field, you might not see it. You may become so caught up with the feelings, the intensity, that you won’t see where it’s going and how you can hook yourself to it. What a good occultist does is feel; you feel the solstice. You know it’s very powerful, and so you just—it’s like having a program operating in the background—you just put a part of your second attention, part of your inner self there. There’s no way to explain these things, as I’m sure you know. You do this every solstice and every equinox.
In other words, what you should always be doing is focusing, feeling—without becoming obsessive—the next solstice or the next equinox. You should set up your life mentally so that you always are apprehending the next solstice or the next equinox. Those are the measurements by which an occultist gauges their life. Those are our time increments. Not so much the calendar, the names of the months and the days, but more the lunar cycles and the solstices, things like that. We’re more concerned with internal energies that are in this universe that affect us very strongly.
The sun has a very strong gravitational field and without it, none of us would exist right now, we’d all not be here. But inwardly it also has an energy field, it has an aura, you see? So does the earth, so does the moon, so do all the planets. We’re affected by those auras. It’s not something that you really want to reason out. It’s not necessary. What you want to do is always hook yourself to the next solstice or equinox and set up your own personal calendar in that way. In other words, it’s good to set goals and achieve those goals for every equinox and every solstice. It’s a nice way to set your life up, so you know that, “Well, I just passed the equinox, I have three months to the solstice, so in the next three months, I’m going to focus on—, I’m going to accomplish—.” You know, you have ideas like that. Then, of course, you do it. And you’re more apt to do it if you do it that way, because you’re hooking yourself onto that power, and the power of the coming solstice or equinox, if you’re aware of it, will enable you to accomplish more of those goals.
Let’s say that you wanted to make a career jump. The average person would just go out and try and get a job, get their resume together, submit it, try and get any information they can. An occultist doesn’t go about things that way. We use internal energies to accomplish what we do. That’s what occultism means—it means hidden, the other side of things. Hidden not in the sense that somebody’s trying to hide it from you, but what is not apparent to the senses. You can’t see it with the physical eyes, feel it with the hands, taste it, touch it or smell it. But it’s there. It’s more real, perhaps, than anything else.
An occultist who is trying to make a big change in their life would build that change around the energies of the next solstice or the next equinox. They’d hook themselves to it. We have a very powerful solstice coming up, which is why I particularly draw your attention to it. At this time it’s very easy for an occultist to make a major shift of any kind they choose because so much power is going to be available from the solstice. Not the day of the solstice.
The day of the solstice is just totality. It’s a very interesting and powerful time of course, but as you get closer to it, if you just think of it as a four-point ratio—we’ve gone through an equinox and you’ve hit the totality of the equinox on the 21st of March or September, but then you will stay in the field of the equinox for about another month as you leave it; you’re still really in it. We define it as a singular day but it isn’t just a day, it’s a time period.
But then about a month out, you start to pick up the radiance of the coming solstice, which is two months down the road. And then, of course, about halfway through that next month you’re right in between, which is a midpoint. There’s a secondary power spot, there are four more, that are directly between the solstices and the equinoxes, and there’s where you get involved with retrograde energies. There’s an in-between power when you’re directly between a solstice and an equinox; there’s a power there that’s even harder to talk about. You have to be more advanced to use that power.
So around the middle, you shift. In other words, it’s as if we launch a spacecraft and we’re trying to get from one planet to another—we aim it at the gravitational pull of a planet. Even though we’re not going to stop at that planet, we pick up its gravitational pull and it will accelerate the spacecraft. Then when we get close to that planet, instead of smashing into it, we fire our rockets, bounce around it, escape its gravitational field and push past it. Then a little bit further along, we’ll pick up another planet, we’ll let it pull us along. See what I mean?
Except that in the case of a solstice or during the equinox, it doesn’t trap you. It pulls you to it and then it pushes you away. So let’s say the summer solstice is coming, which it is, you can let the summer solstice pull you to it. But then once we hit the 21st of June, it will start to push you. Then you can use its energy to push off. There’s an energy that you can then use from that solstice, now that we’re into July. You can continue to gain a power from it, but now, instead of pulling you it’ll push you, if you use it properly. And it’ll push you till about halfway. Halfway to the equinox. Then around that time, you’ll pick up the line of the equinox and the equinox will pull you until you reach it, and then it’ll push you, if you know how to use it, until about halfway, in which case you’ll pick up the line, then you’ll let go of the line to the equinox and you’ll pick up the line of the solstice. See?
Occultism is really a science whereby we are able to accomplish incredible things, things that other people can’t imagine, because we’re dealing with forces and powers that they’re not aware of—we train our bodies and our minds and our spirits to be aware of these powers. We do this by continually cleansing ourselves. We purify ourselves endlessly so that we become empty, so that we’re not filled with ego, we’re not filled with vanity, we’re not filled with a lot of stupid desires. And we do this by meditating, leading very deliberate lives. By doing that, we become pure enough to be conscious of these forces and powers. And it’s much more difficult now to do this than it used to be because the population is so great. There’s so much human aura on this particular planet with 5.3 billion people that it’s very hard to feel these things. Human aura is just like a kind of gray smog that covers over things.
In the time of ancient Egypt, or whatever, it was a lot easier to feel these things. You could feel the solstice coming much more strongly. Now, you have to be very, very sensitized. The power is there, it’s just as strong, but there’s so much interference, there’s so much gray sludge from the overcrowded earth that it interferes with your ability. An occultist today has to train themselves to a much higher degree than an occultist did even a hundred years ago.
That’s why we call this a dark age. It’s a dark age in the sense that there are so many people on earth who are so unattuned that they create such a level of white noise, in a sense, that it drowns out things that we’d like to see. They [astronomers] try and use telescopes, and in a lot of cases they’ve had to move them, when they built the telescope, because a city appeared nearby and there’s so much light from the city that if it’s a reflective telescope, they simply can’t see the sky anymore. There’s too much light, even at night. You have to put your telescope in an area, unless it’s a radio telescope, that’s very dark. They just can’t see the stars.
So occultists depend upon—for their very existence as occultists—the internal powers and energies of the universe. We train ourselves; we go through a long training process and purification process, whereby we become highly sensitized. Then we have to guard that sensitivity because once you’re sensitized, you can also pick up a lot of junk. In other words, we have to become so much more sensitive now because the earth is so polluted, but that pollution poses a tremendous danger to someone who’s sensitive. It’s always been that way. An occultist, in other words—once as an occultist you sensitize yourself, you now have to guard the sensitivity. Sensitivity is a two-way street like everything, and the sensitivity will enable you to do amazing things but it can also be incredibly painful if you don’t guard it properly.
Today it’s necessary to become much more sensitive than a hundred years ago, let alone several thousand. But also because the toxic residue of humanity is so much stronger, you have to guard yourself, guard that sensitivity even more heavily because otherwise you become so psychic. In other words, if you don’t guard that psychic sensitivity, you can pick up so many pollutants that you’ll become more toxic than before, if you see what I’m saying.
We spend a tremendous amount of time doing two things, three things, really. One, we spend a lot of time as occultists purifying ourselves, eliminating all the crap from our lives so our purpose is straightforward, we know what it is, our intent is straightforward. We’re honest people; we work hard and we have our own specialized interests. There’s nothing vague in an occultist’s life. There’s no down time. There’s no, “Gee, I’m not quite sure what to do today.” We have our projects, our development, and we just do it. That’s what being an occultist means. It means there’s no vagueness in your life.
You don’t start that way. You start as an average human being who is filled with vagueness and not much purpose or definition, who is controlled by their desires, their mind spins all over the place, their senses spin all over the place, out of control.
If you have an apprenticeship with an occult teacher, the teacher will then teach you how to become sensitive. But the teacher will also have to teach you how to guard that sensitivity. And so we spend a lot of time developing things that are extremely beneficial to focus our minds on, because once we’ve developed the sensitivity, if we don’t have those things that are very positive to always put our mind into, our mind naturally is going to pick up the toxic residues that are around from humanity and it’ll make us very ill, or it’ll drive us absolutely nuts.
In other words, when I go into New York City—hey, I’m completely clairvoyant. I’ve eliminated all traces of self through countless lifetimes of purification. When I go into New York City, if I was not careful—if there are seven million people there, I am so psychic that I could be thinking and feeling all seven million minds. Simultaneously. So when I’m in New York City, I stay completely focused on certain things that shield me from picking all of that up. The same is true at home. You know someone who is unhappy, someone who’s depressed. Now if I think of that person for a few seconds, my mind will enter their mind and I will pick up everything that’s in them and it’ll make me very depressed. Suddenly I’ll be filled with their thoughts, even if I was happy and radiant and feeling great. And if you pick up enough of that, it begins to affect your physical body. It makes you very ill because these are plasma energies that are very, very strong. You may not be able to see them, but it’s like radiation. You can’t see radiation but if you were exposed to too many rads, you’ll die.
We’re dealing with inner radiances. And just as there are radiances that are harmful, there are radiances that are extremely helpful. When I meditate, I generate a tremendous field of energy. I’ve spent lifetimes in monasteries refining my ability to push a lot of kundalini, a lot of high gradient, radiant light through me, and anyone who is around me when I do that, picks it up. It’s like a transfer. They pick up a lot of energy and power, and the more sensitized they are, the more they have developed their ability to focus, the more they pick up.
But at the same time, you have to be very, very careful not to pick up too much of the lower energies, the toxic energies, because they’ll make you very ill. They can kill you. They can cause cancer, debilitative diseases of all types. Or, if you don’t have a very strong mind—if you’ve developed the sensitivity side of your being but not the mental strength—then when you just walk down the street, all the thoughts of all those people will flood your mind, their desires and their ideas, and there may be some people with some very strange thoughts and ideas and desires. If you can’t separate those out and sift those out and recognize them as being other than your own and push them aside, then they will overpower you.
Somebody’s thinking about eating; you’ve just eaten. You pick up those desires and suddenly you have to go eat because it seems like it’s coming from you. Somebody has very strong sexual desires. And if you’re around somebody and you’re highly sensitized, suddenly their desires become your desires and suddenly you may find yourself having sex with someone who you really didn’t want to have sex with. They weren’t even your own desires. Naturally, it’ll be a deleterious experience because it’s something that your own being did not want. But you find yourself doing things because you have not developed your mind to an extent to filter out and recognize and eliminate the psychic pickup, the desires and thoughts and feelings of others—you follow?
As a teacher it’s even more complicated because what a teacher is, is someone who meditates with you, who transfers a tremendous amount of radiant high energy, which enables you to complete your occult tasks much more rapidly than you would on your own. It [the energy] enables you to enter layers of mind that at this time you don’t have the ability to enter, to make structural changes, to overcome bad habits, to tighten yourself up and to bring yourself into high radiant states of mind—it speeds it up. But as a teacher, it’s really quite impossible to just send out radiant energy without picking up a certain amount of the energy of the people you work with.
Now, when I do a meditation, if I just go do a public meditation and I’m sitting down in a room with a bunch of people who I’ll just see once, I don’t pick up that much. A certain amount. But what I do is, I go in, sit down, meditate and I just project energy. And if you’re just projecting you really don’t pick up much.
But when you have apprentices, when you have people you work with on a regular basis, part of what you have to do is escalate their development very rapidly, and the way that is done is not only by transferring something to them, but you also absorb a certain amount of the negative elements in their psyche and it goes into your body, and then it’s necessary to burn that off. And if you have a lot of students, of course, and if your students are not doing their homework and if they’re just hanging out in low states of mind continuously, it’s extremely toxic. It can make a teacher very sick—a lot of teachers die quite young, for that reason. But the same is true of every individual.
In other words, the teacher is just doing it in a larger capacity, in a larger way, but the same thing really affects every apprentice. So what a teacher does, is they set their lives up in such a way that that doesn’t have to happen. In other words, I come in, I do five nights of meditation with my students. I come in feeling good and looking good. By the end of the five nights I’ve gone very, very high, as high as I could, to transmit as much energy as I could to the people who are there. But at the same time, after the five nights, I’ve also picked up—I’ve cleansed their psyches, I’ve pulled everything out of them which, in most cases they’re unconscious of; it’s in your subconscious. I pull out all this stuff, and at that point my whole body is toxic. It’s like—I’m very high on the one sense because I’ve really had to push it to transmit the energy of enlightenment to several hundred people simultaneously, which is no easy thing. It’s fun, you know, it’s great, because I have to go even higher than I would for myself and I get to enjoy the ride. I love it.
But if they’re apprentices, if it’s not just a public meditation, I’m also—because I want them to advance—pulling all their energies through my body. So then it’s necessary for me to go—normally I spend a great deal of time alone after that. I go off into the mountains or to a power place and I cleanse myself. I do a lot of physical exercise, which helps purify the body. I do a lot of meditation. It’s a lot of work! No, I mean seriously, it’s a tremendous amount of work, which obviously one would not have to do if one were just meditating for oneself.
But it’s understood—there’s an unwritten contract between student and teacher as there is between parent and child—that yes, with a child, I’m willing to change your diapers and clean up your shit for a couple of years, but it’s not going to be a lifetime thing. Then after a while you’re going to be toilet trained and you’re going to dress yourself and you’re going to clean your room and eventually, there’s a level of payback. You’ll clean the house, you’ll go out and mow the lawn; no, it’s a symbiotic relationship. That’s how it should be. That’s proper. So with a teacher’s students, what should be occurring is initially, when they first come in, you’re just going to pick up for the first year or two a tremendous amount of their toxicity. But as they advance and enter their third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and so on, as they go further and further, every year they should be less toxic, because if they’re following the prescriptions of occultism, they’re purifying their lives and purifying their minds. They’re cutting themselves off from everything that’s impure and only focusing on things that are highly radiant. And then after a while, they can assist the teacher in a lot of different activities and projects that are fun for everybody. That’s the basic theorem.
So we’re approaching a solstice, and a solstice is a time when you can hook yourself to something. That’s what an apprentice does with a teacher. The teacher is a continual solstice. You hook yourself to the teacher—not as something that is always going to be there. It’s not—I drive my car and every time I need gas I go to the gas station and it’ll always be that way, since my car is never going to produce gas. But in occultism, what you’re learning to do is develop energy for yourself. And you have to go through a period of time where you have a teacher who transfers power to you in a massive way. But the purpose of that is to enable you to develop your own power and then, if you do what the teacher suggests, you will learn, over a period of years, to develop your own power. As time goes on the teacher will still continue to transfer power, but the power will take you higher and higher because you have more of your own, if you’re developing power yourself. Then anything that I add is on top of that.
If you come in and you don’t have much power, which is how people come in, the transfer takes you to a certain place. But then, as you apply the dictums of occultism to your life, gradually you’ll be—it’s as if I’m giving you a thousand bucks a month and you have no money. You spend the thousand every month; you just need it to survive. But now you’re making money, and now you’re making a thousand a month because I’ve shown you how. Now when I give you a thousand a month, guess what, you have two, see? You can do more things. Soon you’re making ten thousand a month. So now, if I give you a thousand a month, or maybe five thousand a month, then you have fifteen thousand, and so on and so forth.
A teacher continually, as long as they work with an apprentice, augments their power, but the way that we get you there sooner is obviously because you are developing power. If you’re not developing power, you’re going to stay at about the same level. You’ll always get your thousand; you’ll always spend it. You won’t get anyplace new. And if the teacher goes away, you’ve got nothing. You haven’t learned to develop power.
So in occultism, we hook ourselves to things, but not just to do it again and again and have the same ride. But we hook ourselves to something to take us to a place we’ve never been because we enjoy that. We want to reach levels of mind we’ve never been in. We want to transmute ourselves. We want to become perfect, enlightened, whatever these words are.
We do that every day by gradually eliminating the negative energies in our being and augmenting the positive energies. It’s just a balance sheet, really. And if you continue to do that, even without a teacher, you’ll go higher and higher. But, of course, a teacher can show you ways to develop power that you would probably not find yourself and they can augment that process with massive transfusions of energy.
In some cases we have students who do what we call “ride the energy.” What they do is, they come in, pick up some energy, ride that energy till they see the teacher next time, and they don’t develop power themselves. This is a very dangerous practice—because power is a weird thing. I didn’t invent it, just as I didn’t invent the atomic structure; it’s just there.
Power works in certain ways. And a person who’s given power of this type, occult power, who does not use the power properly—if you just ride the energy and you don’t use that energy to do the practices that would evolve you as an occultist, clear you out and enable you to gain more power, if you don’t use the energy—in other words, I give a person power not just to have a fun life. But I give them power to do things that would be very hard—it [power] makes it easier. These things are to practice occultism. I give a person power to practice occultism, for no other reason. It’s like giving a kid a scholarship in college. If you give a kid a scholarship, instead of having to work at the local grocery store and wait on tables, the kid can be home studying. The scholarship is not intended to subsidize the kid to go to the local bar and party every night. It’s not. It’s to enable that individual to spend more time studying.
So a teacher transfers power to enable an apprentice to go through their apprenticeship more rapidly. But in the West, we seem to see, I’ve observed, that people take a lot of things for granted; they don’t understand this. In the East, occultism has been practiced for a long time and it’s more popularly understood. More people understand it.
It’s considered very, very bad karma, if I can cut to the chase, to take power from a teacher and not use it for something very positive. Now, bad karma is not a moral, ethical idea. In other words, in the world of power, we’re not philosophical. You may believe in God, you may not; you may believe that a good person does such and such, a bad person does such and such. I don’t know about all that, that’s human philosophy. Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s just somebody’s idea that they like or they’re laying on other people. Occultists are scientists. We deal with cause and effect.
The reason someone in the Far East—if they went and visited a teacher and they were empowered—would then use that energy in a beneficial way, is because they know something. They know that to use that energy in any other way, or to not use it, will cause the energy to reverse. This is how occult energy works.
What occult energy does is intensify everything. So if I were to transfer power to a person who was just your average person—their average desires, average loves, average hates, average mess—and if that person did not say, “Oh great, this guy gave me all this power so I can get out of this average mess and become an exceptional being and open my horizons in ways that I didn’t know they could be opened and become something far more interesting than the normal human usually becomes”—if a person just sat with the energy and just stayed as they are but just had more energy, what happens is that power will intensify their humanness. A person’s desires will become stronger, their hates will become stronger, their angers—in other words, if we’re assuming that the person, when they start out, has more negative energies than positive energies in them, then if you just amp ’em up, what’s going to happen is those negative energies are going to increase and if there are more of them, the person’s gradually going to become more negative than positive. After a while the negative energies and propensities will totally overwhelm them.
Let’s say a person is your average angry, hateful, spiteful, feel-sorry-for-themselves type individual. That’s what most human beings are like. You know, “the world owes me a living,” and all that kind of stuff. If you empower a person like that and you just keep doing it and they don’t do yoga, they don’t do Buddhist practice, they don’t do occult practice, meaning they don’t spend a number of hours a day meditating and all of the time monitoring their thoughts, eliminating negative thoughts, only having positive thoughts, reading books, focusing on things that are extremely positive—if they don’t do that, then what will happen is their hate will become overwhelming. After a while, they will be nothing but hate, they’ll be nothing but desire, they’ll be nothing but frustration. In other words, you’ll create a monster.
Power by itself without direction makes everything worse. On the other hand, power with direction makes everything fantastically better. So a teacher really spends most of his time admonishing his students to employ the methods of occultism. Not because they have some philosophical idea about, “Gee, let’s be nice,” but because they’re smart. They know what happens if you don’t use the power. If you don’t use the power properly, it reverses; it goes retrograde. It pulls you down. A person may say, “Well gosh, I don’t use this power negatively. I just don’t do much at all. I just sort of continue to be my usual human self.” Uh-uh. If there’s a rape taking place and you just stand and watch and you don’t try and stop the person, you’re culpable also. You get locked up, or you should be.
In other words, just the excuse that, “Well, I don’t do anything wrong”—power doesn’t care about what your rationalizations are. It’s intensifying everything in you and if there’s more negative than positive, then gradually you’ll become more and more negative. So it’s incumbent upon a person who practices occultism to realize that power is exactly that, and it has to be treated with intensive respect. You can’t idly be empowered and then just go your own way. It’s necessary to make an extreme effort to utilize that power to practice the occult exercises and to lead the life an occultist leads, which is bright, efficient, beautiful, humorous, filled with radiant light, energy and positive beyond belief. You have to do that. The energy is given to you to do that. If you use this energy in any other way, if you allow it to enter into your angers, if you don’t control your anger, your anger will become hate, your hate will become obsession.
An occultist has to have complete emotional control. You get the emotional control that would otherwise be very hard to get because someone is showing you what emotional control is, explaining it to you, and they’re giving you the power to do it. The average person—how can they get emotional control? Emotion is like a wind, it comes and it blows them wherever it is.
But the empowerment gives you an edge. The empowerment enables you to control your emotions. So if Sally’s a new student and Sally’s your typical angry, frustrated, confused, “I want this”—she doesn’t know what she wants—you know, average human being. Her mind is guacamole. Every two minutes a new idea, a new desire. That’s how people start.
So I say, “Now, Sally, I’m going to give you power. OK. Let’s meditate together.” We meditate, she sits in the room with me, I amp her up. “Now Sally, go be a better person.” In other words, no more hate, no more anger, no more jealousy—when those thoughts come in your mind, push them out.
Now, normally your average person couldn’t do that. It’s a nice idea but it takes a lot of willpower. Ah, that’s what I just gave her. I just gave her willpower. Some of mine. I’ve got enough to keep myself going to do what I need to do, and because I work extra hard and earn extra money, I make extra power, I can also give some to someone else.
So now Sally has power and with that power she can do what would be unthinkable for an average human being. She cannot hate anymore. Oh, the thoughts will come in. She’s also learning to be psychic; she’s meditating every day and she’s becoming sensitive, and she could pick up the thoughts, angers and frustrations of the world more readily than before. But if she’s been paying attention to the lessons that she gets on a regular basis from me, then she will be able to distinguish her feelings from the psychic things she picks up either in dreaming or in waking, eliminate them by meditating twice a day and by monitoring her mind all the time. With this boost I give her, she will be able to purify her emotions. And in doing that, of course, she will eliminate the negative aura from her body and her mind and her spirit and become a being of light, become a being of radiant happiness.
As an occultist progresses, they’re given tasks. In the beginning you’re just told, “Do this, avoid this.” You know, the kind of do’s and don’ts. You’re offered suggestions on how to develop power. You learn about places of power, places to live, lifestyle, all kinds of ideas that are just very energy efficient. That’s what a person learns, usually in the first year.
But then after you’ve been an apprentice for a year or so, you are given tasks. These tasks augment your power incredibly because they come from the world of seeing. An occult teacher can see. He can stop his thoughts, or she can stop her thoughts, completely. And when thoughts stop completely for protracted periods, it’s possible to see beyond one’s own desires and ideas and to see the designs of the universe. The universe has designs. In other dimensions, things just are. An occultist can see that and know what should be done.
In other words, occultists don’t do things because of desire. I might have a desire to do something, but I won’t do it because desire means nothing to me. Everything an occultist does, if they’re more advanced, comes from the world of seeing. We can stop our thoughts and stop our desires and see past them and see what is appropriate, what will lead to more power, more enlightenment. We only view things that empower us and enlighten us and we avoid things that drain our power and bring us into lower sentient mind states of confusion, delusion, hate, anger, psychosis, neurosis, whatever it might be.
We become completely psychically whole and we hook ourselves to higher and higher bands of auric light until eventually we hook ourselves to enlightenment itself. And whatever we focus on we become, particularly if we’re empowered, particularly if we’re very sensitive—if we refine our sensitivity.
An occult teacher sees things that the student should do. Not some paltry desires that they may have, that they want fulfilled by their students, but in seeing in other planes they can see what will be the best for that student to develop. They then will provide that opportunity and in doing that, the student will become more empowered because the task comes from not the human world but the world of seeing. It has a very heavy charge, aurically. So now you’re not only picking up the empowerment that the teacher gives you on a regular basis, but your own meditation is improving, which is causing you to gain more power, plus you’re learning to avoid things—those are lifestyle recommendations—how to be more energy efficient, you know, avoiding negative people, negative emotions, negative experiences that drain you.
Gradually what you’re doing is—it’s like taking an unhealthy corporation that has more money going out than coming in. We gradually cut out the expenditures except those that are necessary and we increase our balance of payments, we have more money coming in. The United States is unhealthy. We have more money going out than coming in. We should reverse that. It has to be the other way. So an organism, in order to stay healthy, let alone become more healthy and more empowered, has to have more energy coming in than going out. Meaning we have more good aura coming in than bad aura, you see?
In the beginning, the teacher gives you some power and teaches you basic concentration, gazing, meditation, ways to create power. As you practice you’ll be creating more power, plus the teacher is handing you power, so you’re getting more power, plus you’re losing less power because you’re becoming more energy efficient. And there are other ways to gain power that I’m not going to discuss right now.
So you’re getting more power, and then at a certain point when you should have some level of self-control and understanding, and if you’ve survived the first year of your apprenticeship, you’re given a task. The task gives you a lot more power. A lot—because it comes from not the human world, but the world of seeing. As you perform the task it interfaces you with other dimensional realities. The task obviously is always something that’s either beneficial to the apprentice or to the world at large or to other apprentices, or whatever it is. We only do things that assist others because that’s the only way we see life. We’re not mean, angry, petty people. We get all of that out of ourselves. We live in higher auric states where we only see beauty, light and perfection and we have no negative intent towards any organism. We remove that from ourselves. We also remove the self, the ego.
We refine ourselves completely by going into the light again and again and again, and focusing on it totally until there’s only the light. But an apprentice who not only doesn’t follow the direction of the teacher to go through the purifications, meaning monitor their mind, use this energy to control their thoughts—if they just use this energy—you can use it in a lot of ways. You can use it to look better and have people admire you. You can use it to make a lot of money. You can use it to be successful. You can use it to hurt others. You can use it to injure others. This is a powerful energy. You think very badly about something, someone, some pretty terrible things can happen to them. It’s power.
A person who doesn’t monitor themselves properly as they continue to meditate and gain more power and particularly once they’ve started doing the tasks of occultism, which gives them even more power, such a person is headed to disaster. Because as more and more power flows into you, if you’re not using that power as you should be to continually refine yourself to even higher levels, sooner or later something’s going to happen.
Now the teacher, for a while—because teachers understand how difficult it is, how confusing the world is, and how weird the whole path to enlightenment is—they have a sense of humor about it and when they see the apprentices getting in too deep, they pull all that—everything that was supposed to happen that would be awful to the apprentices—they pull into their bodies so the apprentice doesn’t have a major disaster. And that goes on for some time, because it’s hard. It’s confusing sometimes. It’s hard to sort out the thoughts, the emotions, the desires. It’s hard to stay on the path. It’s the “razor’s edge,” as we used to say in Tibet.
But still, there comes a time when you must be culpable as an apprentice. There comes a point where you have to bear the responsibility for your actions and your thoughts, and the teacher will not step between you and your karma. Meaning, whatever you’re drawing to yourself, finally, you have to experience. Because if you still are screwing around, if you’re still not doing your homework, in spite of everything the teacher has said, and they’ve absorbed all kinds of disasters for you time after time; if you still continue to not do the right thing, obviously this could go on perpetually and you’re not getting your hand burned, so why should you be motivated to straighten anything out? So what the teacher finally does is step out of the way. And they say, “OK, sucker, I’ve pulled the karma for you. I’ve taken this bad energy in my body, you know, it hasn’t been much fun, but I’ve done it because that’s what we do for each other.” The same way a parent changes the diapers and does a lot of things for kids that may not be fun, but that’s what we do as a race—we help each other out, if we’re at all intelligent, as a species, in order to survive, we do that. It’s just a life process.
But there comes a point where you’ve got to figure something out and for the teacher to continue to absorb your problems, if you’re not going to do anything to straighten them out, is not going to help. You’ve got to experience your karma. And in that experience you will learn something. You will learn how unpleasant it is, when someone is not always cleaning up your messes. You know, the mother gets tired of picking up after the kid and finally says, “OK, you want to live in a slum, live in a slum. That’s your business. OK, see what it feels like.” You see?
So we’re getting near the solstice—this is one of these multi-level Rama conversations—and it’s a very powerful time. It’s a very good time for you to examine your life and ask yourself what you’re doing as an occultist. What are you doing? And you should ask yourself this question every time you get near a solstice or an equinox—every day. But particularly four times a year you really need to go through yourself and really look—with a cold eye, with no condemnation, no guilt, just you want to know what’s what.
It is most important that you understand that there are tremendous repercussions for using power improperly. And you could say, “Well, I don’t use it improperly.” Well, to not use it properly is to use it improperly. It’s not like money that you can just leave in the bank. Maybe you’re not buying guns to shoot people. Good for you. But in this case, if you don’t use it, if you don’t use the power to improve your occult practices, it will intensify what’s already there, which is obviously going to be more negative than positive. This is not the intention of the occult teacher, and it should never happen. It only happens when you have an apprentice who doesn’t understand the repercussions. Now, the Far East people understand the repercussions.
In the West, my experience has been that people are basically oblivious to power, solstices, enlightenment and everything that matters. They don’t understand the multi-life sequences; they don’t understand anything. And anything that they can’t see in a laboratory, they think is nonsense. But I’ll be interested to see how they do when they die, these great empiricists. We’ll see what all this great empirical stuff is worth at the moment of death, you see?
The powers of life could care less what you think. They are what they are and they work the way they do. Life is wonderful; it’s amazing, but it has to be taken very seriously. And we draw repercussions from our actions, not just in this life and at this moment, but in our future lives, and there are definitely future lives just as there have been past lives. The karma that you bring upon yourself, if you don’t use occult energy properly from a teacher, is stronger than most karmas. If you use it really improperly, if you use the power that was given to you to become enlightened, and you use it for the destruction of others, if you let it flow into hate, anger, violence and things like that, deception, whatever it may be, what will come back to you will be horrible beyond imagination. I’m not trying to scare you, I’m just telling you—that’s how karma is.
If the President of the United States or someone to whom we’ve given power commits a crime, or the head of the police department, his punishment should be much worse than the average person’s because they’re in a position of responsibility. So a person who works with an occult teacher is in a position of responsibility. You’re given a power that human beings can’t imagine, that you wouldn’t be able to develop for countless lifetimes. Someone’s giving it to you to augment your self-discovery. The purpose is pure. Now if you think, “Well, ha, ha, that person’s just sort of an asshole and they’re a goodie-goodie and I can now go do what I want,” you’re in for a big surprise, buster. You’re going to have a lot of problems for a long time.
You don’t understand the repercussions because in the West they don’t believe in reincarnation. They don’t believe in energy. This is the consumer mentality. “I’m just going to grab what I want and screw everybody else.” You may be able to do that with things that don’t have a lot of power to them, but in the world of occultism, you can’t bring that mentality in. You have to bring a very severe respect for the power of the occult. If you don’t, if you don’t have the respect, obviously, then you will not pay attention to it. If you don’t know what it can do either way, it will still affect you. The effect of the occult energy doesn’t depend on your awareness. You may not know that there’s an area where they had a nuclear test that’s radioactive, but if you walk through it, you’re going to die. Your awareness is not necessary. Your lack of awareness is what kills you.
An occult teacher will, for some time with apprentices, come between them and their own foolishness because that’s part of learning. But there comes a point where, if you want to keep putting your hand in the fire, sooner or later somebody is going to stop grabbing your hand out because they see that that’s not teaching you anything, and I guess you’ve got to get burned.
The solstice is coming. And what a good occultist does is they hook themselves to the next solstice or equinox and they let it pull them. By that I mean they allow it to work—that power to work through them—to accomplish their occult tasks. And the occult tasks—there’s only one—and that’s to get as high as you possibly can. That’s the only task worth doing. Everything we do is designed to bring ourselves into continued states of newness and brightness and beauty and perfection. That’s the only task there is. Everything we do is supplemental to that, aids that; anything that gets in the way of that we eliminate.
We want to see the universe in its absolute, pure, naked perfection. We want to know its wonder. We want to know the totality of ourselves. That’s done in steps and degrees and not in one day—gradually, with a great deal of common sense, a lot of hard work, a happy sense. A wonderful sense of humor is necessary. It’s a very complicated study, the study of enlightenment, the study of power, the study of perfection.
So as we approach the solstice, and this particular solstice being as powerful as it is, perhaps the power of this solstice will enable you to understand this. Because I’ve talked about this before and it’s obviously gone over people’s heads, by and large. But we haven’t had a solstice this powerful for about five years, since 1985. There’s a power that you can use now to understand things that maybe—it’s hard to read in the dark, but if it’s really bright, it’s easy to read. It’s about to be really bright, and that brightness, if you don’t cover your eyes, will enable you to see what’s what.
Occultists just like to know what’s what. We’re—inquiring minds want to know. We’re your basic consumer. We just want to know what are the good choices, what will make us happy, how can we avoid unhappiness, what will make us healthy, how can we avoid disease, how can we make money and not lose money, how can we be successful. But in addition to all that, we also want to know what will bring us to fulfillment, what will bring us to the totality of ourselves, what will bring us beyond all the limited states of awareness into those perfect states that are even beyond ecstasy itself. And so we study that, we learn that, and it’s a very specific art, and it involves complete control of the mind and the body and the spirit.
At the same time, we learn to hook ourselves to powers and forces that make it easier. It would be very hard to do otherwise. We use the ki, we use the flow of the universe. The energy of the opponent is used to throw him. You can only beat a bigger opponent if you use that person’s energy. So we use the gravitational forces and powers of the universe to escalate our evolution, and the downward energies are avoided. We use the uplifting energies.