Treasures Along the Path

Everything that we look at in life

is to be seen from it's like two ends of a telescope. If you look at things through one end, they all look big. If you look at them through the other end, they look small. If you look at life with divine sight, everything looks great and beautiful. And if you look at things through the eyes of the materialist, everything looks small, petty, mean and the same things. This is why people will,

if they have a bitter heart, if they have bitter hearts, if they have a bitter outlook, they will look on the world with all reason in their favor as a place to be,

to see no divine values, to see no beauty, no love, no joy, they see nothing but suffering. They see nothing but darkness. They see nothing but justification for their own selfishness and cynicism. If, on the other hand, people have

a transformed vision. They see, even in the meanest person, that sort of subconscious yearning after something better. And they see God in everything, even in pain, even in suffering. Because through those, we grow and learn lessons that we need to learn. Through those, we discover that, oh, this was going in the wrong direction. It's sort of like putting your hand on a stove. If you touch a hot stove, it isn't that the stove hates you and wants to burn you. It's that your hand was not made to be compatible with that degree of heat.

And in fact, that pain is a protection. If it weren't for the pain, you might leave your hand there and destroy it. So the pain is a warning. No, don't do this. And the sufferings of life are also warnings. Don't go in that direction, because if you do, you'll get out of tune with what you are, either as a body, a mind or a soul. The Laws of the body are such that we cannot break them to

any great extent without very seriously suffering. The Laws of the mind are the same, and those people who think that they have perfect freedom to do anything they want to soon discover that if you eat wrongly, your body breaks down. There's no another aspect of that is that when we look at something that we can see right out here before our own eyes, we observe that there are laws that don't depend on belief. Back a couple of 100 years ago,

the

the

aristocracy were pleased to be able to get white bread refined flour, because it seemed so much better tasting than that which the peasants had, the dark bread, the black bread, and yet the peasants were much healthier than The aristocrats, partly because of diet, partly because of exercise, partly because the aristocrats got themselves so powdered up their skin, couldn't breathe, but all sorts of reasons, belief, the belief system continued even till today that I was thinking of kill Patrick's bread. It kills more people than Patrick.

White flour is bad for you. A little bit isn't going to be devastating, but nevertheless, it isn't. It isn't a question of our belief system which supports it. It's always been considered the food of the aristocrats. It's considered considered much better, but it isn't better, and sooner or later, people have to pay the price for the reality that they don't know it has nothing to do with their beliefs. If we extend this to psychological and spiritual things, we find that indeed the same principle apply, applies that we may believe all sorts of things, and

yet, if they aren't true, we have to suffer. I have stayed in a monastery some years ago, and their diet was atrocious, and they were always having physical troubles. Well, they may have been spiritual people. In fact, they were, and they may have done it in the thought of living a very simple, austere diet, but it was the wrong kind of austerity. It was like somebody in India telling me proudly that he was going on an all candy fast.

He thought, he thought he was very proud of himself. He thought that such austerity. He wasn't having rice, he wasn't having curry,

only, only sweets. I said, that's the first thing you should give up if you're trying to fast. He didn't know any better. We need to understand that the laws of the body and the laws of the mind and so on were not made with human belief in mind, but.

We have to discover what those laws are.

We have to understand also that we will understand them according to which end of the telescope we're looking. We've come up into an age that, for example, it's only in this century that they've discovered that matter is energy. It's only in this century that they've discovered that the universe cannot be reduced to a mechanical model.

When the new physics came out around the turn of the century, one of the classic old physicists, who was famous in his own day, said that, if you don't, if you can't make me a model of the universe. I simply can't accept it.

He thought that the universe had to be that. But of course, we know now that it isn't that, that there's really no way of making a picture of it. It's just these sort of flowing rivers of energy and force and so on. It's a very, very different world. If you think I've sometimes mentioned that toward the end of the last century,

some Senator proposed quite seriously that they closed the patent office. He said, everything that could possibly be invented has already been invented, and yet it's since then that everything, basically everything that we know of as modern civilization has been invented,

the radio, the television, the airplane, the car, the telephone,

you name it. Everything that we're familiar with, virtually that we identify with civilization as we know it today was invented since then. Electronics. I mean, it's happening all the time, isn't it, with the word processors and the computers. And I wrote a wedding march for tomorrow, and I was explaining to my mother how the how they get the sound of the trumpet for that synthesizer, the music synthesizer, they make a picture of the vibration of the trumpet on a screen. And the first time, the picture was a little bit such that when the trumpet came out, it went, whoa, whoa. And I said, No, we need to have more power in it. So they changed the picture a little bit, and then the trumpet came up, Bucha, that was too sharp, so we had to get it between the two. And now it's just right.

It's incredible that a picture could produce that sound, that you could write a few numbers on a screen with a typewriter, and it will produce a lovely series of organ notes. Or alternatively, it'll put on a screen, on a page for you, perfectly written out notation. We're living in a world that's just amazingly different from what it was. But we've come up into this world with the prejudices of a mechanical universe. We've come up into this world with the prejudice, prejudices of a civilization that was geared to thinking in terms of reality as solid. When

Samuel Johnson first heard the argument of Bishop Berkeley that that

everything in this world is only in the mind, he gave poor old Boswell a resounding kick on the rear, on his rear end. And said, is that in the mind?

To him, that was a clenching argument.

But of course,

in your dream, if you hit your head in the dream, it may hurt your dream head. So indeed the pain can be in the mind. Indeed, the kick can be in the mind. Indeed, the very question can be in the mind. But we've come up from that kind of a way of thinking that has still the prejudice is it still influences our way of thinking today, such that it's very difficult for us to break free from

those patterns. For example,

I've got to talk tomorrow on the law of miracle, and I shouldn't be stealing my thunder. But in fact, it isn't thunder. It's more like sort of a gentle tap on the window. I'm not at all sure what to do with it so. But something that master wrote in Autobiography of a Yogi about the law of miracles was that that mass traveling at the speed of light is infinite,

would be infinite, therefore mass matter cannot travel at the speed of light.

He said masters fulfill that function because their consciousness is omnipresent. And that's a little puzzling, because, after all, it's consciousness, not mass.

But all right, let me. Let me put it this way too, that

according to Einstein.

Relativity, if you travel at the speed of light

or close to the speed of light, time stops for you,

then actually, well, supposing you were to be able to take a spaceship away from this earth and come back, according to our time frame, 40 years later. According to your time frame, it might be just a few minutes later.

You wouldn't have aged even,

and yet all your friends would be either dead or 40 years older.

It's very hard to understand this sort of thing, but they've actually had, I was told recently,

positive verification of Einstein's theory. They have very, very sensitive clocks that, in a century, will will vary maybe a fraction of a very small fraction of a second. And

they put one of these clocks on a plane that went around the world, and when the plane had come back. It was just a very little bit, just fractions of a second slower than the clocks that had been on the ground.

Time, to that tiny extent, had stopped.

Now here is the intriguing thought in this that if because time, as I've often said, is movement. But

if the mass is infinite, I'm trying to make put this together too.

If mass is infinite at the speed of light,

then maybe the speed of light is that in which there isn't movement,

and what we have here in this world is negative movement, minus movement there, that there isn't a base movement of nothing, that that's the absolute where there's no movement, and that's why mass masters are omnipresent in Their consciousness. It's an intriguing thought, isn't it, but

and then anything in excess of that would be positive movement. See what I'm saying. Does it make sense to you?

Probably not. It

makes sense to me

that we think that, that this is,

that that's movement, but in fact, it's all relative to

degrees of lack of movement. As you get slowed down toward more and more matter more and more,

the more and more frozen position associated with tamo guna, as we say in Sanskrit,

the inertial quality of nature. The

the point that

I'm trying to make here is that very often, the premises that we accept as perfectly self evident prove with a little bit more sophistication, to be not so at all that we can look at things completely around we think of this as movement and light getting faster and faster. And it may be that we look at it from the other end of the telescope, and it's rather that matter gets slower and slower and slower

from

it's a minus movement. In other words,

intriguing.

We have come up, at any rate, if not, with that prejudice, because I might have it all wrong with a great many others that science has already discovered to be quite, quite wrong. We think that this hand is solid. It isn't at all. It's really mostly space. If you look at the stars at night, you'll see that the distances between them are enormous. There's almost nothing but space out there. And yet this body, if you were able to see it with an electron microscope, you'd see that the body is exactly the same, that there's much more space, comparable to that space which exists between the stars. And if you were to remove the space from the particles in this body, the body would be reduced to such a small size you probably wouldn't be able to see

it. What makes it look like this? Vibration, movement.

Again, science has discovered that even that matter, that tiny little bit of solid matter is really only energy, that matter is energy, and matter doesn't exist except as energy in a particular state of vibration.

It's a very different world from what we see. In that case, everything that science has discovered today is turning toward a very non material universe, a universe of energy, a universe, as some scientists have said, that looks suspiciously like a thought in the mind of the Creator, not solid matter at all.

And if we sort of stagger along in our efforts to understand it, it's not surprising.

Izing, because all our prejudices are different. All our pre judgment is that this is a solid world. This is a solid body, that everything that I have is

that which I can touch and feel. And yet I've made this point sometimes before, even this body isn't what it seems to be, because the food that we take that goes into the bloodstream and comes out and forms nails and skin and muscle tissue and bones and marrow and so on. All of this is is the same food being commanded by certain energy patterns in the body to go out and perform certain functions. You can't say when you're eating that. Now I'm eating my nails, and now I'm eating that which is going to make my bones and so on. Sure, if you eat calcium, there will be some more bone structure, but basically, it all sort of mixes up and goes out and does its thing. Why?

Because there is some kind of pattern. There, some kind of holding pattern that says, to these molecules do this, and to those molecules do that. And can you say that those molecules are the reality of your body, or the holding pattern, the energy pattern, whatever it is the blueprint that's there, the blueprint, the energy, energy pattern is that which is telling you what to do. The molecules come in and move on. The nails grow out. You cut them, more nails grow and so the whole body just keeps on changing and changing, and it changes according to that pattern. But indeed, miracles that have been performed have been by changing the pattern, and under such circumstances, for example, at Lourdes, they've actually seen

tissue, limbs, organs, grow before their very eyes.

It's a rare event, but the fact, if it can happen once, then it's happened, and that's proving some sort of reality,

if it can happen once we have

a body that seems to be this body, but this is only the outward matter that has come to sort of fit into that holding pattern that goes on, goes away, but we continue. What are we really this? This holding pattern is really only a projection of our thoughts, and if those two thoughts change, the whole body can be affected. I remember when I was put out of SRF, I had such pain and suffering in my heart that I used to wonder how it could continue beating.

That mental thought was enough to create a very strong physical effect.

And that went on for a long time. Doctors have said. Peter was telling me the other day that doctors used to think that anginal pains come strictly from

hardening of the arteries, and now they're starting to discover that anginal pain also comes from mental and emotional, psychological causes. And I thought, My goodness, it's taken them all this time to discover what everybody knows, because it's perfectly obvious.

Well, at any rate, we have looked at the body from a particular point of view. We've looked at life from a particular point of view, and we think that that's the way everything is going to explain itself. It's sort of like an American Indian who, when he first heard about the steam engine, said, Oh, well, he understood how it works. There's a horse that pulls it.

And they said, no, no, there's no horse at all. They showed him a picture of it, no horse. They showed him the steam engine working, no horse. He first of all thought, well, maybe there's one pushing it. No, you go to the back. There's no horse. He said, Ah,

how clever of you. You have the horse inside,

inside the engine, but he couldn't imagine it without a horse, because he simply couldn't understand the principle. So we have this same thought that, ah, it has to be this way, and they're always trying to explain things in terms of what they already knows is human nature. It's not, it's not surprising or even laughable, but it is unfortunately wrong.

We very often what we need to do. It's like the theory of ether. Back about 200 years ago, they got the theory that that there had to be some sort of a medium through which light traveled. And so they postulated ether.

Then they discovered various other things in science. And so the way they had described ether had to be modified. Then other descriptions, other discoveries came, and they had to modify it still more. And each.

Of them was sort of a an original theory with a footnote, and pretty soon you had more footnotes, more footnotes, and it became so hopelessly cumbersome. Imagine reading a book, and every two every second word, you've got to look down and read the footnote about it, you end up forgetting what the sentence was all about. And similarly, with the theory of ether, they finally decided it was so complex that just the only thing to do with it was throw it out the window. And similarly, with our approach to life, it's only when it becomes so over poweringly complicated that finally we just throw it out and start again. Until then, we cling to our cherished beliefs, and once we've found some new thing that contradicts them, we modify those beliefs only slightly in order to accommodate them, but bit it takes a long time before we finally say, well, all right, let's start again.

Max Planck, the famous German physicist, said that new scientific discoveries are accepted not because

they're seen to be logical and true and valid, but because the old scientists die

and new scientists grow up, who haven't are more able to adjust to new ways of looking at things, when we think of healing, we need to keep these points in mind, because they're very, very pertinent to the to the whole subject.

We've grown up from a particular point of view. It wasn't very long ago that doctors were also barbers, and because they used to cut people's beards off, they had razors, and with those razors they would they would

take out a tonsil here and there, or

the barbers also would pull people's teeth out if they needed it. And I think that their method was to wallop them hard on the foot while pulling a tooth, and the divided pain made it more bearable or something. But they came up from this rather outward, you might say, definitely material frame of reference, and as a result, bit by bit, everything that they've discovered, they've always discovered it in terms of things that you can do to a thing. It's sort of like taking a car into a garage. When a mechanic looks at a car, it doesn't say, oh, there's Old Joe.

It says, this is a car that has a carburetor wrong with it, and he thinks in terms of the carburetor. He doesn't think about the integrity of the entire mechanism. He doesn't think about the personality and whether the car happens to like a green or a brown carburetor. It doesn't think about the car's tastes. It's concerned with the carburetor. And we have come up from that way of thinking as applied also to the body.

A doctor will think about the body, not as a person. He will consider his knowledge of the person. Many doctors, at least, will consider their knowledge of the person to be rather an abstraction, an obstacle to the real focus, which is on the heart. I mean, once you think about poor Joe, then you worry about, is he going to suffer where you can't afford to think about, is it going to hurt him? I've got to do this to help make his heart Well, or set his leg back in its socket and so on.

So the tendency is to think about the body in a mechanistic way. And I suppose we've all had experiences of going into a doctor's office, and there he is looking at the clock, thinking, When am I going to get this knee out of my office? Or when I'm getting

when am I going to get this gallbladder out so I can go on to the to the liver,

and this is humorous, but it is a fact. And they refer to their patients in terms of my liver case or my heart problem or various things like that. It's not a person. And yet, doctors this is, this is the sad thing about an age that has gone more and more towards specialization, one man I know, not only does only heart surgery, but only a particular kind of heart surgery, and there are two disadvantages to it. One is that the more specialized the knowledge, the more you lose touch with the whole and the less, the more difficult it is to keep up even with the information that's coming out in your own field. If you were to know,

or to use an illustration that I have

written in my book crises in modern thought, if you were to teach somebody

all the.

Are mechanical things involved in putting a piece of egg from your plate into your mouth.

It would become impossibly complex, wouldn't it? You'd have to describe all the muscles and their relative functions, the angle

of

twist in the in the wrist, the place that you would need to hold the fork in order to get the right the right fulcrum for balance the possibility of slippage on the fork from perspiration. The

a teacher of mine, she he was, he was our choral director in high school, came back from his summer vacation with a great inspiration to teach everybody how to sing. He had discovered that the voice is composed of individual vibrations, and so he had everybody go back to that pristine form of voice production, and he had them all croaking

like this. This This was supposed to finally result in putting all these little croaks together and finally, hold your breath. It made a voice. Well, of course, it didn't. Everybody I ever heard was still going around

hoping that they would produce some sort of glorious sound. Eventually never happened.

The more you think in terms of

of all the mechanical things, and you can divide those things finer and finer and finer. It's like one of the the hmm,

who was it? Zeno, I think, but I'm not sure, one of the Sophists in ancient Greek who proved quite conclusively that it's not possible to cross a road.

Why? Because before you cross the road, you have to go half the distance. Before you go the rest of that, you have to go half that distance. And you can go on halving the distance again and again and again through and through eternity, and you'll never reach a point so small that you can't have that distance too therefore, of course, it's impossible to cross the road.

He was showing how, by too much logic and too much dividing and too many little details, you get away from that flow.

Movement is something very different from individual realities if you shoot an arrow. And this was another of his,

his logical paradoxes, he said that the arrow can't move because at any point in the arrows journey, it will be stationary, and at millions of points it will continue to be stationary at that point. Therefore, of course, there can't be movement, because you can't have movement if there's something

stationary. An interesting argument, but all it does is prove that stationary things are not the components that the essential components of movement, any more than then all these little vibrations are the essential components of that final thing, which produces a beautiful voice, any more than knowing a great deal about anything painting, for example, will guarantee that you'll be a good artist. There are some people who don't know anything about good artistry, and yet they have that intuitive flow that produces something beautiful, even if it looks primitive, a classical example that engineers use is that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, it is not, it would not. It simply isn't possible for the bumblebee to fly. But

the bumblebee doesn't know those laws,

and therefore it flies.

So we have because we've approached the world from a purely mechanistic viewpoint. We think that we're going to understand things if we can break it up into enough little pieces. We think that we're going to understand the body again, if we can narrow down further and further and further and get all these little points and put them all together. And it's sort of like a child taking your watch apart on the rug, but he can't put it together again. We we see that there is always another element that comes in, that element of movement that is something really quite different from these things. We think that these little individual components produce the movement. In fact, if you look at it from the other end of the telescope, you'll see that it's the movement that produced also those little individual components. A very intriguing thing was when I visited Sathya Sai Baba, this

saint in India who performs miracles, He just did like this, and there was a

mala of crystals, garland of crystals. And I saw him do this before my own eyes. Some people say, Well, he has it up his sleeve. Well, his sleeve was pretty tight. And besides which, he just gives these things out right and left. He couldn't possibly have

all this. I.

How did he do it, just like that? And there it was. If he had thought about it, he would have thought that crystal is made up of such and such a thing, and then string. And then, I

think it was a demonstration of this opposite way of looking at things, which may seem like total insanity, except that you find people who can make it work that when you get the sense of flow, when you get the sense of intuition, when you get the sense of movement, then somehow the details fit into that pattern, and everything works well.

We've looked at the body from this standpoint of

body first and then life second, life and consciousness being the product of this component of vessels and muscles and everything else. What about if it were the other way around, that those things are really manifestations of life,

that when you have the right kind of consciousness, when you have the right kind of flow of energy, then everything else fits into place. We see that it doesn't work the other way around.

We see also,

well, there was a woman who phoned me she wanted to take some classes with me,

and she said she'd worked as a lab technician in a hospital for 17 years, and finally she left in disillusion because she discovered that they were killing as many people as they cured. I said, Well, let's be positive. That means they're curing as many people as they kill. But

anyway, she still wanted yoga.

The the the fact is that

this, this this method, doesn't seem to work as well as it ought to.

And just as there was a very interesting thing that I read of Charles Fort, he was always trying to poke needles into scientists balloons they made such a big thing of having discovered Neptune on the basis of an,

sort of an erratic orbit in Uranus, I think those are the two planets. And so they just, they, they this was a great triumph for science and astronomy. So they said. And so, by the same thing, the same token, they discovered an erratic pattern in mercury. And they discovered, they decided there had to be another planet inside which they already called Vulcan. But the trouble was that they never discovered the planet. And Charles Ford had great Glee in that. He said probably they only discovered Neptune by happening to look in that place, and it had nothing to do with with mathematical probabilities, because they will only tell you when they're right, but they won't tell you all the times that they were wrong. There's a lot of truth to that. The doctors also will point to the

living cures, the others, as we say, are buried.

The i Yeah, the

I mentioned to you a week or two ago an interesting fact that whenever they have a new drug on the market, they have a control group. They test the drug, and they have a control group that take a placebo, thinking that they're taking this drug, but it's really only sugar.

And they found that that the placebo works in such a high percentage of cases that, generally speaking, the drug succeeds only in 10% more cases than the placebo. If, let's say, the placebo works in 50% and the drug works in 60% then they figure it's fit to put on the market.

So much of the time, man is cured or killed, not by anything that the doctor can do,

but by his own consciousness, by various factors that we don't have any control of. And in this respect, it's a great pity that we've gotten away from that family practitioner who had patients whom he knew as friends, I was told a very intriguing story by an Indian doctor who was a classical trained in the classical medicine.

He had a there was an old man in their community who was a doctor sort of midway between the old and the new. He knew the Old Ayurvedic methods. He also knew the new methods he'd retired from practice. He was a general practitioner, and these this doctor knew the case personally. I don't think he was personally involved, but it was a case that that he was close enough to to know personally. There was an old man who was on the point of death, and two two physicians treating him said that there was nothing they could do for him. It was hopeless. This friend of his, who was a retired doctor, knew him personally, and.

You a somewhat more intuitive method of healing. They can, they can, from the feel of the pulse, know what's wrong with many parts of your body. He came in and just looked at him and said, you know, there's nothing wrong with you that yogurt won't cure.

And these doctors said, Well, he's getting senile. It's just absurd. And the friend said, Well, if these doctors give me up and there's nothing more that they can do for me by their own admission, then I might as well try it, because

what alternative Have I got? So he tried it, and within a week, he was in radiant health.

This doctor told me that, sort of shaking his head in wonder, but offering it as an illustration of the importance of intuitive medicine, the importance of not just treating the body as a component of carburetor and exhaust and spark plugs and all those things, but as a flowing organism of which those were merely sort of outward manifestations. This is the point that I think that we're coming to gradually in our understanding of life, of nature, of all things we see it in many ways. For example, the way to write poetry 100 years ago even was a very rigid thing. It had to be a certain versification, certain rhyme patterns, and you couldn't get away from it without being accused of writing bad poetry. The rules of a sonnet are A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, G, G, I believe that's how it goes in the rhyming. It has to be iambic pentameter all the way through. It has to fit that exact and very rigid pattern. If you have

an inverted, you can do an inverted I am sometimes make it a Troche, if you wish, but you got to make up for it in the next way, lightly he went. Instead of he lightly went, you can change it, but it's all got to finally add up to just exactly the right number of syllables, or you're a bad poet. Then suddenly comes somebody like Walt Walt Whitman. And for a while, people I've read, I've read diatribes against Walt Whitman, back in those days, that this isn't poetry. This is just absurd. But nowadays, people sort of feel in tune with that, because they realize that it flows free. Verse can be written in such a way as to fit much more easily the natural rhythms of speech, and this is what poetry tries to do in a way anyway, but in the more classical style never quite succeeds. A dogma that I was given in high school was that the iambic pentameter in which Shakespeare wrote most of his plays

is the most natural style of speech for the English language. And what helped me to realize that this was sheer nonsense. Was seeing a movie on TV called the night of the Auk, which was set in the future in spaceships and so on, and to hear those people speaking in iambic pentameter was ridiculous.

You'd expect them to put on Elizabethan garb, talking like that, even though they were using modern English, modern idiom, no free verse is the natural rhythm of human speech. We've broken away from the rigid patterns of

writing and come into a more free thing with which all of us are coming to be quite we're feeling in tune with it. The patterns of music are changing in the same way some of the so called new age music is very formless. It doesn't have a specific melody, and yet there's something about it that's very pleasing. It's relaxing. It seems more in tune with a kind of flow of energy, but it doesn't fit any of the old patterns. And when new kinds of music have come, I know that when I believe it was afternoon of the Fauci by Debussy was first performed,

not the performance by Nijinsky, which, again, raised lots of objections, but when it was first performed as music, I believe Most of the audience walked out.

This has happened again and again in the history of music, and we looking back on that time, think, well, why it's so pretty? Our tastes have changed, but they've always changed in the direction of less form and more energy. We're coming on all levels into that same consciousness that science has been giving us coming away from form into energy, realizing that the universe isn't composed of matter, but of energy, and that matter is really a manifestation of energy, rather than the reverse. All our thinking gradually is adjusting in that direction, young doctors to.

Have much more that sense of

natural, more natural approach to medicine than their elders. They're much more open to

new ways of healing, new ways of approaching the body, recognizing the importance of the mind. It's becoming more and more common knowledge that there are often times in the life of an individual where absolutely nothing the doctor can do will determine whether he will live or die. It's up to the patient.

They're realizing more and more that it's not a question of passively being treated that the patient needs to enter into the healing process. Even in the New Age healing methods, there's too little of that understanding. Mostly it's the thought that the healer does it for you or to you. The doctor does this for you. You're You're just not supposed to do anything. You're just sort of to sit there and allow him to tell you everything, do it all. And if you're a good boy, then he will heal you. More and more they're discovering that no if the will of the patient is not to be well, if the will of the patient is not to live, he'll die anyway. And if the will of the patient is to live, no matter what the doctor does, the patient will live the more. And this is something that Yogananda used to emphasize very strongly, the more we understand that that the healing process is a two way thing, the healer or the doctor and the patient, they both have to work together. The will has to be there. It isn't just that the patient cooperate with that idea of passive acceptance. Rather it's it's a matter of energy, of will, of consciousness. We're coming gradually to such a new view of the world, of the body, of matter of life, and it eats into all levels of our consciousness and activity. Into I gave you only two examples, music and poetry, but it's true in every other field that you'd like to discover, that you'd like to explore. Look at look at the stores. I mean such simple little things as the fact that a century ago, you came into the shop, and you told the clerk what you what you wanted, and he would go into the back room, or turn to the counter behind, to the shelves behind the counter, and pick out what you wanted and give it to you. And then came along the supermarket, and the supermarket they found was actually a way of earning a great deal more money, because people could choose, they could look, they could they could select, and they ended up selecting a lot more. And then came along the problem that people would tend to pocket some of these things and slip out the door with without paying. And so naturally, there was a certain amount of fear of opening up the store to the public until they discovered that, well, never mind, because the energy was more toward buying. They got away with selling a great deal more anyway. And whereas they tried to stop shoplifting, they've seen that in any case, there's no point in going back to that system where they can't do it, because there's more energy in shopping with the present, much more free access to what they're doing. There was a man who came into a bank to look for a position. This was fairly well known. Let me tell you two stories. They're all they're tied together. The first one was this man came into the bank for a position, and he was told that there was no job for him. This is these are both true stories. As he was leaving the bank, he saw a pin on the ground and picked it up, and the bank president happened to notice that and called him back. He said, anybody who's that careful would make a good banker, and so he hired him, and the man went on to become a very outstanding banker, President, etc. Well, the interesting thing about that story, too is that a few decades later, a similar story, a similar thing, was given somebody who came to

the person hiring personnel for the for the office. The personnel director gave him a box all tied up to open

and the if the man very carefully untied it all, he wouldn't be hired. But if he just tore the string and tore the paper off, he would be hired. Why? Because saving a little bit of string is trivial. You're wasting a lot of time. And anybody who's so petty and is thinking that he's got to worry about little details all the time is going to obstruct the flow of work and creativity and so on. That's really responsible for.

For the success of the business. These are perhaps trivial examples, but they definitely are symptomatic of a change of thinking from things to energy. The reason that American business is so dynamic compared to European and they've discovered this to be true, and Europe is gradually trying to change it. But it's because the American doesn't worry about, well, if he does this, he might fail. He just figures, well, if he fails, he can try again. And the European with this more

traditional way of thinking, this is my father's business, etc, is afraid of taking those little steps that that are required for some new venture, there's less courage involved. The courage, again, is energy. The European tends to think in terms of Yes, but if I do this, that the American tends to think, oh, the heck with it. The things I'm doing don't matter. If I have the enthusiasm, it'll work anyway. And in fact, it's proving true. That's, I think, probably much more than our natural resources. There are plenty of countries that are poor, even though they have they're rich in natural resources. I think it's much more this American consciousness that that the

difficult will do immediately. The Impossible will take a little longer, as they used to say during the war,

this total confidence, this total reliance on energy, what we're seeing then is this shift from a material outlook toward energy. And the more we do it, the more we recognize that we can really depend on energy, and the more we depend on that energy, the less we need to worry about the little details, because they somehow do take care of themselves. We can't do it in an impractical way, and yet, once we've learned how to do it, then we reach the point where we see that it's the only thing that really seems to be important, that probably is the reason that saints are so totally indifferent to what they own and what they don't own, feeling that they own nothing anyway. They just don't worry, because they know that there is some sort of a power that takes care of them. Ultimately, we find that that power is something behind, not only behind matter as energy, but behind energy as thought, and behind thought as the divine consciousness of God, that everything is really a manifestation of him. When God created the universe, He created it first in thought, then he projected that thought into energy, and then that energy into matter. And as we go always back and back behind each outward manifestation, we see that there is a subtler reality responsible for that manifestation. And here we see too, that the more we are in touch with the subtle cause of the

obvious outward manifestation, the projection of it, the more power we have when they now that they can unleash the energy in the atom, they have a power that's infinitely greater than that which they were able to accomplish with pulleys.

The more you can get to the cause,

the more you can get to the cause of something, the essence of it, the more power you have. Even though it's something that isn't so obvious, it is something you can see and make a gadget a model of.

So we see that the doctors came a long way from the old witch doctor idea.

But I venture to say that 100 years from now, we will look on the present level of medical science as comparable to that of the witch doctor today,

I don't say therefore they should throw what they're doing out the window, because everything that they're doing is what needs to be done in order to learn further and further and further. They're doing a fine work, but it's still in the beginning stages. Just as psychology is in the beginning stages, I haven't seen very many successful results, for example, of psychoanalysis,

mostly, it seems to make people too egotistical, too tied up in themselves, but I've seen some because it is necessary to

help a person to be honest with himself, to face what he really is, and so on.

But it doesn't work as well as people think. We're just in the interim stage. We're so proud of what we've found. Let's look around at the results. Yes, we've got airplanes, but we also have ulcers,

cancer, all kinds of things today that are not a part of our natural heritage. They're not something that you find in in societies that live more naturally. Cancer, for example, is hardly known in some cultures.

Years, and yet it's rampant today. Why? Because we don't know that much. We don't know how to find peace of mind. We don't know how to be happy. We don't

There are cultures where people seem to live a lot longer than we do, and they don't know any of the things that we consider civilization today. I think the time is going to come when we're going to see that all of this is just an interim stage. Let me give you a little example.

A friend of mine many years ago,

took up Jungian analysis and later became Jungian psychologist and became very prominent. Became the president of the Jungian psychologists in, I don't know, Europe, maybe, or whatever, a large area.

And she told me she had been practicing yoga and so on. And she told me that that this is, this is a dimension that is missing in the teachings of yoga, that there are many people who take up yoga, but they've got these subconscious blocks. They don't know how to get rid of them, and as a result, they'll never be, never be able to meditate. Well,

and I didn't know what to say, because it seemed like a perfectly logical argument, so I just had to sort of accept that, yes, of course, there are some people who can't meditate. Well,

I didn't raise my hand. I might have but

they've got a lot to learn still, and

yes, no doubt there are subconscious things that they don't know about that are preventing them from meditating better. I wasn't prepared to go the second or third step in that process of rationation by saying that that,

therefore they should take up Jungian psychoanalysis. But I was, I didn't have an argument

very recently. This was quite amusing to me, except that she's a friend, and therefore I felt badly for her, too. But after all these years, she was complaining to me of how badly she meditates,

and she was thinking, kriya is not doing me any good, and so on. I was thinking, Gosh, and I feel such joy doing kriya, and I love meditation. What's she talking about? She's been thinking too much about all these blocks. It reminds me of a of a stage, that of a place that I went to in Germany. It's a town, a little village called richte,

and they all practice Jungian psychoanalysis, and they're all convinced that you've got to see all these darknesses. It's like seeing all those little stages, or in the process of putting the fork in your mouth, or seeing hearing all the little croaks croaking vibrations in your throat to produce a sound. And so if they can see all these little obstacles and get them all squared away, that then they're going to finally break out of the clouds into the sunlight. But in fact, I didn't see anybody smiling in that whole community. I didn't see any happiness. They were coming at it from the wrong angle. They were coming at it from the angle of problems instead of solutions, instead of energy, instead of a higher consciousness of joy. And in fact, I was told confidentially that

there have been a number of suicides there.

They try, they try not to talk about it. They sort of sweep it under the carpet, because people are so overwhelmed by the darkness that they see in themselves that they finally just think there's no hope.

You don't have to see all the shadows to understand the light.

You don't have to see all the details to understand the flow.

And this is, I think, the approach that medicine is going to end up taking to get away from all those pills and get away from all the the

different outward mechanical things that we understand now in the present stage of medicine, and understand how to get how to introduce that energy into the body in such a way as to bring about that healing

energy, in fact, has been the cause of radiant well being. If you eat a lot, that doesn't do it. But if you have a joyful attitude, everybody admits that an attitude of joy is perhaps the best healer of all. Norman Cousins learned that by laughing deliberately every day he could cure himself, and he did cure himself of a supposedly incurable case of leukemia. He was a terminal patient, and yet, now he's well,

we had that intriguing thing that happened here. The man who sold us the land here at the farm sold it because he was a terminal cancer patient.

And he just had to clear up his assets. And

after selling us the land, whether it was God's blessing or whether it was the sheer relief and not having to take care of all those hogs anymore, I don't know.

Naturally, we'd like to think it was a miracle and it was God's grace, but he was cured.

And I met his doctor later, who happens to be the husband of a childhood friend of mine,

Harriet Gibbon, and he told me that, yes, in fact, he had been a terminal patient. And he said, there's nothing we could do about it. We didn't. We did all the right things, and he was dying. And then suddenly he was well. He attributed to a will to live or something, but he didn't really know why that man became healed.

Energy has been the cause of

seemingly miraculous cures, and Yogananda said that the cause of energy is willpower. He said, the greater the will, the greater the flow of energy.

But now I was pointing out to you that it's not just a question of will and energy. It's a question of knowing how to make them work. I had a very interesting experience like that in Europe recently, as you know, I had an anginal attack. That was quite a severe warning.

And

all through the first part of the trip, and in fact, all through the trip, but it got less after this, I was having quite severe discomfort in the chest. And anytime I'd do anything, then I'd start to feel it again. I had to carry my own bags up the steps from the underground passage at the station, and that little bit, I was really quite worried about carrying my bags up that little bit there, and at the end, I was just it was very hard on me. Now I'm feeling great, so you don't have to worry about me, and don't shake your heads. And no dear sort of thought, because, in fact, I feel wonderful. But this is one thing that's making that making me feel wonderful somebody, first of all, my my feeling about it is that whether I live or die doesn't much matter to me. I'm not attached. But then the thought came to me that I don't have to prove my non attachment to myself. I just am not attached.

It's ridiculous for me to make that point again and again and again.

And so I thought, Well, really, out of kindness to you all, I owe it to you to stick around if I can.

And so I decided, all right, I'll do the things that I need to do to be well and enough of this non attachment stuff. And so I started taking care of myself and not overdoing and not driving myself, as I tend to do. And I'm determined to change my patterns of living in that respect, because I've always tended to live at a crisis stage. If I can't drive myself to exhaustion, I'm not totally happy, it seems. But anyway,

so I was doing that, but I noticed something very interesting. I went to Frankfurt to give a lecture,

and at the end of an hour and a half lecture, I was feeling a real pain in the heart, and I was slightly anxious about the next day, because I had not an hour and a half lecture, but a six hour seminar preceded by lots of interviews and things like this. And I thought, Gosh, I'm not sure the way I was feeling, how I'd carry on. And so I tried make willing my heart to be well. And in that sense, in that sort of thought, it went fine. I felt much better at the end of the six hour seminar than I had at the end of the hour and a half lecture before I felt great at the end of the day. Well, that's interesting. I should, I should think more in that way. And every time I'd start to feel a little bit more discomfort in the heart, I'd just try to will it to be better. And then Rosanna said, Why don't you try sending energy to the heart. I thought, well, I hadn't thought of that.

What a jerk

here. I've been teaching about sending energy into on all my these 35 years, and I didn't even think of

that. You don't tend to see that which is closest to you, I suppose. Anyway, I started sending energy to the heart, and this is when I made a really interesting discovery, that it wasn't just a question. You all know that through our energy, say.

Exercises, we can charge the body with energy, but in that we're just sending energy to tense the muscles. And this was a different kind of thing, I found that it didn't seem to work if I just sort of,

at the end of it, my heart felt sort of attacked. I

then I discovered that if I send sort of a happy feeling to the heart,

I don't know, it's a little difficult to explain these things, but if I put it in another context, then maybe I can make myself slightly more clear. That is a point that I made in a talk in Italy when I was talking to a group of nuns and priests, and this point really got through to them. I was saying I found that it works when you say that I want to work with God instead of just for God, it's good to do it for God, but when you're doing it with him, there comes sort of a cooperation into it, and the flow becomes different. It becomes subtly but very, really different, that when you do a thing with him, amazing things seem to happen, and the flow seems to just be harmonious and right? And so I thought when I was sending energy to the heart, well, all right, God, let's do this together. And in that came this understanding of just a different kind of energy. When we talk of sending energy to the body, then I'm proposing this to you that you don't think of it only in terms of the energization exercises, but also of working with the body, with the divine flow,

sending happiness to your body, sending a will to be well to the parts that you're working on and so on. If we can understand how to make it work, then it seems to work much better. Since, since doing that, I found that my heart feels much, much better. I just it's been quite surprising to me how quickly it's it's improved, and I think I probably had the experience to teach me this particular lesson. That doesn't mean I can go back to the old ways of driving myself. I don't think I should. I don't think anyone should. But

anyway, I've managed to get things moving here well enough so you can all pitch in, and then we don't have just one person pushing the engine. It's all working much better this way. So

what I think we're going to find objectively in the world, and what we certainly can find in our own lives is that if we will try to work more with consciousness and energy, consciousness acting upon the will, the will, acting upon the energy, and if the world will works with the energy rather than merely a driving kind of thing, that we will find that that there is a great deal that we can do for our bodies. We don't need to constantly get medical attention. I know Yogananda one time said, Every time I turn my back, I find people here starting to go to doctors all the time. But if they have faith in God and faith in the divine flow, everything seems to work better.

A very interesting experience in that regard was Reverend Bernard, who lived at Mount Washington. He had one lung, double curvature of the spine. He'd wake up in the morning paralyzed. He was a mess physically. And you know the work that Yogananda had him doing driving a tractor, you'd think that would be the worst possible work,

but as long as he was in tune, he was driving a tractor, he was plastering the walls of the building, and he did all the sorts of things that common sense would tell you shouldn't be done, but he was doing it with a spirit of attunement, and that's what Yogananda was trying to teach him. He was every year he was better. He was just in radiant good health. His paralysis left him. He obviously still had those physical things of only one lung and double curvature of the spine. But the thing is, you'd never know it. He could outwork most people work rings around them, and then some doctor told him that, after all, with your body in that shape, you shouldn't be doing this kind of work. And he listened, and he started thinking that, well, I shouldn't be doing what? After all, Yogananda is not a doctor, and he doesn't really understand these conditions, and I really should, should be following what I ought to do logically. So he told Yogananda he didn't really feel he ought to do this work. And Yogananda said, Fine, and he wanted an office. And Yogananda helped build him an office because there wasn't one, and fixed it up beautifully. He told us, one day, look, just look, as long as he was in tune, he could do all those things and nothing ever went wrong. He.

And now he's out of tune, and I'm doing everything I can for him in the way he wants, and nothing is going right. He gets it gets just gets worse all the time.

He's all he was always sick, always feeling weak and troubled,

attitude, attunement, energy. These are, are they may not be logical. If we think of logic in terms of point A to point B, but then nothing seems really to follow those laws. You look at life from the other end of the telescope, and suddenly it takes on a whole new dimension, that movement isn't the cause of objects. Objects are the cause of are caused by movement. I mean, movement is the cause of objects. It's not the it's not caused by them. That energy is that which causes the body in its state of well being, or whatever. It isn't that having a body that you get the energy. It's always, if we look at it from the other end right now, we're sort of in the middle of the telescope,

and we're coming to the other end, and we'll be looking back in another 100 years, and we will be seeing the world in a very different way. All the symptoms are there. Every single development in modern civilization is moving away from too much dependence upon form into a concentration and awareness of flow

of energy, of sort of patterns of movement.

Our understanding of the body is bound to go that direction too. It's going in that direction now. The younger generation of doctors are already much more aware in in that sense.

Well, what does this mean to us individually?

What it means is that we should first of all accept that we're in a transition state we don't understand all that we'll know later on. We should not discount what doctors know. They know a lot.

It's probably through their discoveries that we will reach that stage. It isn't as if engineers had suddenly muscled into the whole poetic scene and said, Get out of the way, you guys. We're going to write poetry for you, and that's how free verse got written. It was the poets who discovered that no there were newer and better ways of writing poetry, or at least newer. It's not always better.

Yes, the doctors are doing their best to learn, and it's bound to come through their knowledge, but it will come, I think, through a fusion of their knowledge and something else, because we've got different disciplines that are converging on a single point, and so it's not a mistake to think that it's also going to come from those who are on the spiritual path, those who are aware of the of the action of energy, the action of consciousness upon the body and so on. And that these two fused together are going to produce the new discoveries. The new thing that we know ties in with this consciousness of being essentially bodies of energy, of knowing how we can direct that energy to the body, of knowing how, with that energy, we can strengthen our body and make that body well.

Of realizing that being in tune with a higher force, a higher source,

can accomplish things that pills would never do, an

experience that I had years ago, I'd like to share with you also, which involves, in this case, not a deliberate sending of energy on my part, but does involve being in tune with that higher consciousness. I don't like to pray for myself, even thinking about my heart. I'm doing it because I know it may be helpful to a few others

for me to be around, and to the extent that it might be helpful, I might as well hang around.

Years ago,

I got an attack of kidney stones. It was extraordinarily painful. I've never experienced a pain like it. My body was just quivering like a leaf in every muscle I couldn't speak. Somebody was trying to get me into a car to go to the hospital. The thought of driving over those bumpy roads was totally out of the question, but it was just getting worse and worse and worse for about two hours, and I didn't want to pray for myself. I just didn't feel like bothering God about that, and so I just hung in there. And

can't say, I grinned and bore it, but I bore it.

And then I looked at my watch. It was Sunday morning, and in 15 minutes, I was supposed to give the Sunday service.

And I thought, Well, God, if you want me to give the Sunday service, then I'm totally incapable of giving it in this shape. So if you want me to give it, then please take this pain away. And do you know it was quite amazing that within the length of time it took me to say that prayer, just just that fast? You.

The pain went away.

The moment I'd said the prayer, the pain vanished. It was really quite a miraculous cure. It was replaced by such intense joy that I hadn't felt in a long time. It wasn't just the emotional joy of release. It was a feeling of God's presence. And in fact, that joy was so great that I couldn't speak anyway,

in my lecture, like it was very hard to talk. It was so I was so overwhelmed with this joy. But there was a case of not sending energy to the kidney, but just offering it up to God. And he did it. It can happen in either way, but the most important thing of all, I think, is to understand that if we do it together, if we send that energy with His grace, if we send it with his consciousness, if we ask him to heal us, if we understand that all true healing should be according to his will and not ours, because sometimes it isn't right that we be healed. Sometimes we need the experience to learn certain lessons. We don't always know that. So bringing his will into it, I think, is important from that standpoint too.

There was one man in India that a saint was asked to heal, and the saint said, No, you'll see what will happen if I do. And they kept insisting, insisting, and finally,

the saint said, All right. And the man was healed, but after that, he'd been living a more or less controlled, somewhat spiritual life. After his healing, he began living a very dissolute life,

and that remember what Jesus said, Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you. That disease had come from not living right in the first place, and the disease acted as a sort of

an impediment, what is the word, a curb on his activities, and when the disease went, there was the danger that he'd fall right back into it. That's what happened with this man, that those actions were not possible to him as long as he was unwell. And the fact of being unwell in his case was a blessing, because gradually he was working out that thought, and finally he would have been able to be well and not go back to those things that caused it in the first place. Sometimes disease is good. We always think it's bad. But even as with fever, they used to try to break fevers. Now they've understood that sometimes fever is a very wholesome part of the body's self curing mechanism, and they even try, sometimes, to induce fever in order to to heal people well, in that same way, disease, illness, these things sometimes are

a natural process of the psyche in its effort to cure itself of sin, of delusion, of various kinds of error. And so it would be very wholesome for you to not just will it with your will, but if it's God's will, let this be so. And if not, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. What's most important to you

is who you really are, not your body, but your soul. The most important thing that you really have to live for is your own spiritual growth.

If you grow in God,

when this body goes you'll go on growing. But if you've only grown physically, you've only created a beautiful mausoleum that's all

a whited sepulcher. Jesus used to call it.

So the most important healing of all is the healing of your consciousness. Learn to change your attitudes, because very often they are responsible. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that, in the last analysis, they are always responsible for anything that goes wrong with you. Yes, even the accidents that you have.

There's something that you're putting out that attracts those things.

The most important thing of all is your attitudes. But again, if you put energy into that, and that's a whole different subject. You can change yourself on those levels, too.

The final thing is to realize that you want to be a part of that divine flow, that when you go with that, after all, saints have been ill too, maybe they're taking other people's karma. Maybe they're working out their own. It doesn't matter we go through what we need to go through in order to achieve the highest healing of all, the healing of our ignorance of who we really are children of God.