Treasures Along the Path

I remember many years ago, when I was new on the path, coming to master one day and saying, sir, I keep trying and trying and not getting anywhere. How often have I heard that one?

I said, Am I not trying hard enough? He really rocked me with his answer. He said, you're trying too hard in

the beginning. He said, You have to emphasize relaxation.

And the the what rocked me, of course, was the thought that, on the other hand, we have to give it everything we've got, and on the other hand, and yet, at the same time, if we give it everything we got it maybe too much. Because how do you how do you give it everything you've got in the right way? It's not an easy thing, this question of understanding the difference the dividing line between affirmation and attunement.

You can affirm lots of things. People, for centuries, affirmed that the world was flat. For example, it didn't make it flat.

And we have to understand that there is that while affirmation is very important, there's a limitation to it too. I remember a cartoon that I saw in the New Yorker many years ago of some sort of

Dowager, kind of looking person, obviously very rich and influential, and she was standing at the top of the ramp to get onto an airplane, and the airplane was already up in the sky, and all the people there, the ground crew, were rushing toward the airplane, and she was standing like this, commanding the airplane to come back,

Rockefeller himself couldn't have made it just suddenly do a loop like this.

We have to understand that reality and human desire don't always coincide, and how to bring the two together. Is one of the arts of the spiritual path. Master used to describe the path as running at top speed and performing stunts along the way. And it sometimes seems like that every spiritual teaching seems to have some contradiction. For example, Jesus said that

you when you do charitable deeds, you shouldn't even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. And then, in the same speech, what to speak of later, when he might have forgotten what he said.

He says, Don't hide your light under a bushel, but let its light shine before men, so they'll all see your good works. Does this certainly sounds like a contradiction. In fact, it isn't. He's talking of different things and different levels of reality, and I may or may not get into that this morning, but if I don't remind me the the

issue is that to understand these seeming contradictions seems to be the way to reality, and it doesn't come from sort of bulldozing your way into heaven. It's a very subtle kind of thing that you've got to to tune into to get the deeper meaning of

I remember writing master a note saying, Please help me to develop divine love. And he saw me a couple of days later, and his only answer to that was, God watches the heart.

It's a little discouraging sometimes when you find that you're forced to do so much thinking yourself and yet that's the only way to grow. He didn't sit down. What would the average person do if he wanted to answer it at all, he'd sit you down and give you a long talk. But reality isn't ever reached that way, although long talks are a part of it, but the real understanding comes from you. It doesn't come from giving you a lot of words. And I found that very often, in the important things, he was cryptic, in the more superficial things, he could talk for hours,

but one time, many times, I should say,

guests, guests at Mount Washington would speak enviously to Daya Mata and others who were with Master night and day for years, and said, How wonderful it must be to be with him all the time and hear all these wonderful discourses and so on. And Daya Mata would laugh, and she said, Well, you're the ones who hear the discourses. He never speaks around us. He won't even let us speak, because he says that silence is the altar of the spirit. Did this mean he was teaching less to the disciples? Certainly not the real teaching comes through osmosis. The real teaching.

Teaching comes in an altogether different way from what we're used to thinking. When he would correct us, he wouldn't go into a long discussion as we're accustomed to doing. I mean, what? What happens when people in this country begin to feel slightly out of it, they go to a psychiatrist who lays them down on a couch and starts talking and starts making you talk, I mean, and you talk and talk and talk, and maybe he talks and talks and talks.

Reminds me of a one time years ago I had a

very bad case of laryngitis.

And some people came from India, and so they wanted me to lead a chanting session. And there must have been one or 200 people there, and I just could hardly whisper. And they said, Oh, you've got to you're the only one who sings this well, and you've got to do it. And out of obedience, which makes me sometimes question

the value of total obedience, just anybody.

I went ahead and did it with the result that for a year I had to keep silence because I ruptured my I didn't rupture I had

ulcerated vocal cords. Yeah. And during that time, I went to a number of doctors, all of whom had pet nostrums. One suggested I not eat chocolate. I hadn't had chocolate in years, and another one suggested I put a towel over my head and inhale fumes from a basin and various things. And finally, one of them said, Why don't I take speech therapy? Well, I know something about voice placement, but anyway, I went along with the gag, and I went to this speech therapist, and she fancied herself a psychologist, and she This is my only experience with psychiatry, and she made me lie down on a couch, and then she leaned her Hatchet Face close to mine, and sort of whispered confidentially, what would you like me to call you?

I said you can call me Walters.

I'm not accustomed to strangers addressing me by my first name.

And this ended the session.

But anyway, the whole thing spelled itself out, if I had gone along with the gag into weeks, months, who knows how long of talking about all sorts of things. And I thought how different master was. He sort of would give us things that we would have to tune into and understand, and then suddenly came the dawn, but then we'd really understand. It was more than that. It wasn't as if he was just sort of giving off words. He was putting consciousness forward. In fact, I'm reminded of a delightful story which I have shared with some of you, of this one saint in India who is very he was very unorthodox in his methods. And anyway, there was a mother of a son who came. She was a disciple of his, and she asked him, one day, please, my son is squandering our entire inheritance on prostitutes and drinking and wild living, and please talk him out of it. And the saint said, Well, I'll do what I can. So the son was sent, and he came very belligerently and not at all willing to listen. And he they, the saint said, Well, what is this? I hear you. You like to drink, do you and yes, I like to drink. Well, what do you drink? Well, I drink. And he told him what kinds? He said, Oh, that's not as good as such and such.

And he started talking about better kinds of whiskey. And then he asked him Which girls he liked, and he said, Oh, you might find them over there better. And in this way he was talking in a way that you'd never expect a saint to talk. And the boy came home to his mother very proudly, saying, huh, you talk against my way of living, and your own guru tells me that this is the right way to be. And she said, You mean he told you it was right? Well, he was good, as did so.

And so anyway, the mother was crushed, and the boy went to bed very proud and happy he hadn't held a job in years. The next morning, he got up and went out and got a job, gave up drinking, gave up running around,

gave up everything, and lived a spiritual life from then on. And the amazing thing was that the saint had merely been trying to open the boy's mind so that he could get through with what was really going to help him, which wasn't words, it was vibration. That if you can get inside and introduce a new element, then only can a person change. And this new element is the thing that very.

Few people take into account when they think about self improvement, they don't. They don't take the super conscious into account. They take only the subconscious into account. We're led to believe in some way that we can tune into the subconsciousness and it'll give us everything. Well, it won't give us anything that we haven't first given to it. Our conscious mind acts as a filter to allow certain impressions to get into the subconscious mind.

And the subconscious mind sort of scrambles everything around, usually badly.

I remember after dissolving all that slide show last night and working so hard on getting everything

timed correctly and so on, my mind was so full of this stuff that I dreamed all night when I could sleep at all, and I kept dreaming of one song with another slide sequence, and it all just a total scramble.

Well, this is the way the subconscious will act if you don't teach it any better. And what we've got to learn to do is introduce a new element into the picture. This is what has happened again and again and again. A perfect example was the advent of modern science onto the stage in the old way of thinking, there was this, this

sort of an airtight compartment of logic.

Thomas Aquinas put it perfectly when he explained that the the

Catholic Church is the one

authority

ordained to explain the truth of Jesus and of the Bible. How do they know? How do we know that this is true? Because the Bible said so. When Jesus said that on this rock, I will found my church and the keys of heaven shall not the gates of heaven hell shall not prevail against it, etc, etc. How do we know that this is what Jesus meant when he said that? Well, the Church says so. It's a perfect argument in a circle. You can't get out of it. And there were so many arguments in a circle, more or less based just on that particular thought. Yogananda came along and explained it in a totally different way. He said that the rock that Jesus was talking about was Peter's higher intuition. In other words, the story behind this, for those of you who don't, don't remember it, is that Jesus said, Who do men say that I am?

And different people said, well, some say that you're Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. And

then he said, Who do you say that I am? And Peter said, You're

Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God. In other words, he he had felt something. It wasn't just people are saying, at least, seems logical, that you should be etc, etc. He was answering in terms of what he had inwardly experienced. And he only could have such an experience if he was spiritually developed enough. It's on an intuitive level only that you can perceive such things. You can't perceive them with the reason. And so that was why Jesus said, Blessed are you? Because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you. You haven't gotten it from words and from other people's ideas and so on, but the Spirit has revealed it to you from within and on this rock, I will build my church. Well, he was talking of his real church. He didn't found a church. When he talked of the temple, he said, Destroy this body, and I will destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days. And they thought he was talking about the temple in Jerusalem. He was talking about his body. He often used terms in this mystical, symbolic way. And so what he was saying here was, I will build my Church of cosmic consciousness. It's a beautiful and a very real interpretation coming in completely from the outside of that knocks head over heels the whole Catholic the foundation of Catholic dogma, which makes me suspect that the day will come when they won't like Master for a while, until they adjust to the fact that he's teaching exactly what they really believe and what Christ taught. And we're all really saying the same things, but people managed to fight about little things first, and

the the

Catholic Church had created such an argument in a circle that there was really no way out of it, and people could only argue, and did only argue in terms of what other people had written before them and so on. It went on until suddenly, science came along and said, Why don't we leave aside all these questions?

Is that we can't prove except in terms of other deductions and other

proofs based on deductions. Why don't we just base our our knowledge on what we actually see, what we can actually test? And they had to limit their their

field of investigation to very few things, mass, weight, motion, but on the basis of that simple inquiry has been erected a structure of the universe so much more complex, so much more glorious, beautiful, awe inspiring, divine, if you want to see it with with higher vision, much more wonderful than anything that the church had given us when it talked of the Earth as being the center of it all, and the few

centuries of our era as being the only time in history and God is being somehow stuck forever on a on a throne somewhere up there. And all these, very limiting concepts of reality, suddenly we have seen, by introducing a wholly new

way of looking at things, how fertile it has been in its results. Well, the same thing is true with everything that ever is accomplished, you'll find that there are problems and people can't think their way out of it. And then they they introduce some new element, and suddenly they see the way that new element is far more than most people realize. It's not subconscious, it's super conscious. People receive an insight in a flash, and they know it's right. You never know it's right. If it's subconscious, it's always sort of a muddle.

It may be a beautiful muddle, but it's never there's never that absolute certainty that comes if it's something from the super conscious that somehow clicks and you just know it and it is right? There is an intuitive level which all of us have tapped at one time or another, where we've just known that this had to be.

This is the level that we need to bring into the picture in our lives if we want to grow spiritually or in any other way. I reminded of an amusing episode in my own life where somebody told Kalyani that he thought I must have been Shakespeare because I write so nicely. Well, I was naturally pleased. I didn't I haven't the slightest thought that I was Shakespeare, but naturally, if you're writing and working hard at it, you're pleased that people like what you

do. I don't think it went much further than that, but maybe it did. I hope not. Anyway, I sat down to write the next day, and with this thought in my mind, the first thought that came to me was, I mustn't disappoint my public and I tried,

I tried to write a good sentence, and it wouldn't come for anything. I moved phrases, clauses, backwards and forwards, like railroad cars in a railroad yard, and

nothing would come out right? I came up with about 50 different alternatives. None of them clicked. And then I suddenly realized what I was doing, and I sat back and had a good laugh at my expense, and I said, All right, God, what should I do? And I just asked like this in the at the spiritual eye, instantly I had the answer. It was quite different from any of those other 50 and it just flowed. And I've seen this happen, and I'm sure that many of you have seen it happen again and again, that when you didn't have the answer, and then you put your mind here, suddenly the answer was there. It's quite a mistake to say that it's the subconscious.

There's so much in modern art that tries to

present this great, startling revelation, but it's all from a subconscious level. I remember going to Kauai, and there's a large shopping center there, sort of a mall, or one of those shopping villages, you know, where you can't drive. You leave your car, and then you walk around. And

I came inside and I saw all these pipes like this, painted various colors, but it still seemed no excuse. I said, Listen, why couldn't they,

instead of painting the pipes? Couldn't they have just covered them? And somebody said, Oh, it's a piece of sculpture.

And

I I don't know how they get away with it, but there is so much. It was sort of like one person that I I saw this sort of welded nonsense. I couldn't figure out what it was all about at an exhibition. I said, Well, what it was called the fourth allegory. I thought.

Well, allegory means that it has some meaning. Fourth means that there have been three others before it,

and so it's probably something in a long sequence of meaningful stories. So I asked the

artist, the sculptor, what does it mean? They said it has no meaning.

Well, then why call it an allegory? What to speak of? Fourth allegory?

There is so much of that that people have the idea that somehow, if they dredge something up from the subconscious, and it sort of feels good. Other people are going to look at it and say, wow,

it never happens.

What really happens is, however, if you've been touched, others will feel a little bit of what you felt. It'll always be filtered down, not up. If you don't have much inspiration, they're not going to have more, but if you've been absolutely inspired, like,

who was it? Who wrote progress and poverty? George, Henry, George. Wasn't it?

He? He came up with a new system of economics, which has a lot of merit, although it won't work, but it's maybe the basis for something that will work someday. But anyway, he had devoted his whole life to writing it, and it's quite an exciting book, if you if you read it within its own context, but it's definitely not

double oh seven thriller or

when he came to the end of it, he was weeping for joy. And this is the experience that people have when they've come up with something that really grips and like Master, when he'd finished the interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita. And he was saying a new scripture has been born. He was so thrilled. He just kept saying it again and again. And he said, millions will find God through this book, not just 1000s, millions. I know I have seen it. And he had such tremendous inspiration in that, and it wasn't from ego, it was the joy of being a channel for something true. You know, it's not yours. You know, just it is right, and it's there. And if you don't feel an enormous inspiration, others aren't going to feel, they're never going to feel as much as you feel, because you're at the source. You're right there where it's all coming out of the tap. After it's come out, it sort of goes out and diffuses itself. And look what happens. Look at what happened to Christianity after a couple of centuries or so.

Not at all the original pristine beauty. So remember that a super conscious thing is going to be coming from the top down, not hoping to filter upward from below this super conscious level of reality, like Einstein discovering the law of relativity and then having to take years to explain it to other people, like St Teresa, saying that

in one instant of ecstasy, the soul learns and absorbs more than the mind could absorb through years of studying and thinking.

This is a level of consciousness that our society doesn't understand yet, but more and more people are coming to you all have come to that's why we're here, and it helps to understand what it's about, because there's a great body of influence from outside there talking about how wonderful it is just to affirm and get yourself straightened around. When you can finally get yourself moving right, then everything will go right. And it is true, but only up to a point. That point being that

if you can move in the right direction, then you can be open to that which brings in this new element, but you can't create that yourself. And almost all so called New Age teachings and movements leave God out of the picture and talk only in terms of what man can do for man, it doesn't work that way. You don't have to use the word God, it helps. But you certainly can't think in terms of I, the ego, doing it all

the

when you make an affirmation, the purpose of the affirmation, you see there is a tremendous power within you. Indeed, you could develop lots of the

yogic siddhis or powers even without super consciousness, even just by learning to get all your energy flowing in one way, even under hypnosis. It's amazing. What can.

Be accomplished, but it's always only for a time. There was a friend of mine who told me that when he was in school, he

slept in a dormitory with a lot of other boys, one of whom slept, sleepwalked, and he was the this sleepwalker was the captain of the football team, rugby team, I suppose, because it was in England and was a strong boy, but not not overwhelmingly strong, not as strong as the story would indicate. He saw this boy go down one time in his sleep, and he got to the front door and tried to open it, but the front door was bolted with a he said it was a two inch thick bar across it, and this sleepwalker, in his sleep, took that bar and bent it double, something he couldn't possibly have done under his wake in his wakeful state of mind. How was he able to do it? Because it simply didn't occur to him in that state that he couldn't. So many things that we try to do are blocked by the thought that we can't.

I remember in that same context quite a few stories. One was of a brother disciple called Jerry torgeson, who was a big man, quite strong, but not as strong as this. One day, we were working on the India house, and a girl about 13 years old, started to cross the street on her way to school, when a car spun around the corner and without seeing her, knocked her over and dragged her about 50 feet, and she was lying there screaming, and fortunately, not, not very badly hurt. Hurt certainly, but not, not seriously injured. Anyway, she was pinned under the front end of this car, which was a big, heavy American car, not a Volkswagen. Jerry went over there and picked up the front end and pushed it off her. He couldn't have done that under normal circumstances, the sorts of things that we can do under stress, adrenaline is a part of it, but a large part of it is the thought that we that we can, as opposed to the thought that we can't. And it works on many subtle levels. I've seen, well, all of you are aware of the principle of beginner's luck. I remember my brother going to Reno with his wife and children, and the children wanted to play the slot machines, and my brother thought, well, this is a good opportunity to teach them that gambling doesn't pay. So he gave them a couple of dollars,

and they put their dimes or quarters or whatever it was in the machines and won every time. They came away thinking this is the best way to make a living.

So many times, when people start to do something, they aren't aware of the difficulties involved, and as a result, they're able to accomplish a great deal more. It's like that

whole episode in the path where I had that theory in college that if you want to be lucky, then don't wait for luck to come to you, but go out and meet luck halfway. Expect things to go well. And in fact, incredible things happened, like the time that I hitchhiked to Mexico and got one ride from Philadelphia to Mexico City, 3000 miles. Not bad,

or like the way, I earned money for the trip writing an article for a prize that I was the only entry. So the fact that I didn't know anything about the subject didn't really matter. I won it anyway, and so many things happened, as long as I had that sort of buoyant expectation that everything would go right. When I came back, I remember it was just at the end of the war, just after VJ Day, and the priority system was still in operation. So that

army personnel were able to bump civilians and lower Echelon army personnel off these flights. And I got as far as Louisville, Kentucky, and at that point I had to give up my seat to some officer, and there I was left with almost no money, and they told me I'd get on the next plane available, but I had no idea how soon an available plane would be available, and so I

I wasn't quite sure what to do. As I was standing at the counter talking, an Army sergeant came over, and he too had been put off the plane, and so he was talking of chartering a plane. And they said it would be $35 which in that time was like 350 or $500 now, a lot more money than it is now. And so I said, well, listen, as long as you're chartering a plane, we He will. He also was going where I was going, which was Cincinnati. And I said, Why don't you let me.

Pay $5 since that's all I can pay and I'll go with you. You'll have empty seats. He said, Sure. Why not? So? Anyway, it was Sunday morning, and the

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