In the West, people work. They get up in the morning and they go to work and they spend the day working. The primary energy that they have in their lives is directed towards their work. The work that most people do in the world tends to deaden them, deadens their mind, uses up their energy and they get a paycheck and old age -- and not much energy, not much aliveness. They’re paying you for your energy. You get the check and they get your energy. That energy is translated into corporate dollars. Your energy causes things to occur which someone wants done, which they reap a profit from. You’re trading energy for dollars, and that’s all you’re getting -- exhaustion, very often deadness. You’re being put in situations that your body would normally wish to veer away from because it feels the auras in those situations are not good for you. You go sit in a situation doing things that you normally wouldn’t do -- because it’s not your vibratory level -- because you’re getting paid. This is not a good situation if you’re trying to refine your mind. You can’t be deadening it eight hours a day and losing all your energy and life force; you’re never going to get to anything enlightened at all. Computer programming is a field in w

Computer programming is a field in which you use, particularly in its intermediate and advanced states, certain analytic techniques that are very similar to techniques that Buddhists have used for thousands and thousands of years to refine the mind. As a computer programmer, particularly working with higher level topics -- artificial intelligence, relational database and things like that -- one tends to use certain interactive skills, methods of logical analysis that refine the mind. Essentially, if you’re a computer programmer, you’re getting paid to refine your mind. Even though that’s not someone’s intention, it’s happening. Computer science is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s electronic. What you focus on you become. You’re tapping the electronic network. You’re dealing with a higher level, more volatile energy than is present. Whenever we’re dealing with anything that’s electronic, we’re tuning into a different spectrum. It’s a faster spectrum, and it has a higher and faster aura. That’s why I like the stock exchange. The stock exchange is a real interesting place because it’s a fast energy. Currency exchanges also -- very quick energy. It’s a faster processing. And we process very, very quickly as we move into upper gradient states of mind. It’s natural for a person who meditates to want to be around something fast.

Be real.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Programming, initially for most people, is a real bitch. When you start to program it’s just really hard because you don’t think that way, which is logically. But after you’ve programmed for -- initially there’s a tremendous resistance to programming, but as you get into it further and further, once you develop your muscles a little bit, it’s really fun. And people who are drawn to meditation innately make excellent programmers, often exquisite programmers. You might say it’s just an innate ability that people who meditate have. The kind of person who would be drawn to meditation is the kind of person who, in most situations, makes an excellent programmer because the two skills are very similar, the natures are very similar.

A person who meditates, who becomes a programmer, is like a duck in a happy pond. You’re in the right situation for many, many reasons. But the reason I like computer programming the most is that it has to do with visualization and creation. When we’re programming, we’re extending ourselves into a series of planes of mind in which we have to, in a very creative way, interact with data and create pathways through things, particularly when we get into the world of complicated relational databases and mainframe systems. We’re creating, kind of, neural pathways. We’re mirroring the mind as best we can. It’s necessary in complex programming to make jumps that are nonlinear -- to get to a point of understanding as to how the data pathways should flow. I mean, data pathways are God in advanced programming, essentially. In order to create data pathways, we have to get to them before they exist, in our mind. That’s the real secret. In other words, there’s a place for a data pathway

amming, essentially. In order to create data pathways, we have to get to them before they exist, in our mind. That’s the real secret. In other words, there’s a place for a data pathway that cannot be directly seen because it’s nonlinear, it’s not logical. And in meditation we develop an intuitive skill whereby we enter into nothingness, the voidness of existence. And within that voidness are all possibilities, but they’re not necessarily built upon human logic. In other words, it’s intuitive. We learn to use the nothingness of infinity to create things that we could not get

We learn to use the nothingness of infinity to create things that we could not get to in a straight line. In other words, the shortest distance between two points is your mind. It’s not a straight line, it’s your mind. If we go into the mind, we can see data structures in other worlds, in other universes, in other infinities. We can bring those data structures into this world, and then we create data pathways that we could not have conceived of in a logical linear sequence, but we can just assess their thereness. Then those data structures become binding realities in which we entwine data pathways, and so on and so forth. That’s computer programming at a higher level -- other than AI, which is a little different, not that different. That’s kind of what we do in advanced meditation. We are going into nonsequential universes of mind and creating pathways between the parts of us that exist. And we interphase different parts of ourself and our being in different time/space structures and beyond time/space structures in different gradients of auric light in order to transmute our consciousness. Advanced meditation is not just stopping your thought. It’s very technical. The process of eliminating the samskaras and reaching complete enlightenment is a very technical, wonderful -- mystical of course -- process. As you do very advanced queries in

People who meditate have the mind-state to deal with advanced concepts. Sometimes it takes them, if they were raised without a lot of mental discipline, a while to pick up those disciplines. But once you get those disciplines down and you get up there, your mind will take over. And if you’re willing to be patient enough to get yourself through the basics of computer science, even though it may take you three times as long as someone else, once you’ve done that, if you’re patient, once you start to get up into higher level programming, then you rock and roll -- a person who meditates. Your mind and the abilities you developed in past lives -- you will access those states of mind to create advanced data structures and advanced data pathways. And it works really well, and it’s a wonderful workout, basically, for the mind, which is what we’re looking for in preparation for the enlightenment experience.

GarriRice.

Our subject is freedom. It’s always the same. How do we become free, free from the limitations of dimensionality? The way we become free is simple, and it’s complicated. It’s simple in theory, that is to say, all we have to do is stop our thoughts. When thought stops, a doorway opens into dimensions that are pure and unassociated. They’re nonbinding realities. They’re non-samskaric, which simply means that they’re beautiful, they’re ecstatic. The consciousness of the worlds that we can get to through thought—those dimensions are very limited. They’re limited by time and space, a sense of past, present and future. We seek a freedom we haven’t experienced yet, and we seek an ecstasy we haven’t known. Mostly, I think, we seek our own innocence, a state of joy in which we don’t feel age, a body, desires or aversions. There’s a very pure feeling of beingness, of aliveness that’s always there. We become used to thinking that attainment in self-discovery is external. We get used to the idea that we have to go someplace or that something can pass us by. In other words, we think of inner attainment as having a dimensionality, a physical structure, because that’s how our mind looks at things. Our mind is very visual. We look at the world and we see up, down, back, forward; we’re caught up in calendars and watches; we like to look at things very physically. We like to think that consciousness and the mind are dimensional, and they certainly are not. Dimensionality only exists because the mind can perceive life that way, but that’s only one simple method that the mind has for perceiving itself, for perceiving life.

There are four major paths to self-realization. Of the four, jnana yoga, from the point of view of the beginner, is the most difficult. Jnana yoga is the graduate school of selfdiscovery. Ordinarily in spiritual practice one begins by practicing bhakti, the path of love. The path of love leads to the path of self-giving. The third pathway in the normal course of evolution is jnana yoga, discrimination and absorption. Mysticism, the fourth way, is not practiced by all. It's a left-handed path that doesn't necessarily follow in the sequence of the others. Some persons follow the ways of mysticism, some do not, but normally the three paths are covered in this order: love, selfless-giving and discrimination and absorption. Discrimination means seeing that which is real and knowing that which is unreal. That which is real is that which is eternal, that which lasts forever. That which is unreal, or less real we might say, is that which is transitory, temporal, that which does not last, but erodes in time. The yoga of knowledge is a way of reflection. The central question that we ask ourselves again and again is: "Who am I?” To find this out it is necessary to meditate, to still our thoughts and to go within. We discover, ultimately, that we are the self, we are eternity. There are a number of different approaches that we can use when we practice the yoga of knowledge. The first is elimination. What we do basically is to examine everything in existence and we come to see that everything that exists is transitory and is temporal—it doesn't last. That which is left over is eternal and that is our real self. So, we look for example at nature and we see that the creations of nature—plants, animals, human beings, planets, universes—all the things in nature are transitory. They may endure for a moment or perhaps billions of years, but ultimately they fall away, they don't last. So if we look at absolutely everything in the universe and we eliminate all of those things, then that which is left over is God, is eternity, is the self. Another way the reflection of knowledge works is to see that there is nothing that is not God. That is to say, when we talk about self-realization, realizing the self and coming to know that which is, we're talking from the point of view of limitation, of the mind. The mind perceives everything in a limited way. The mind is bound up with the ego. The ego has limited perception. Real knowledge or wisdom is to see that you are that—you are eternity. To talk about realizing the self in a way is discontinuous, because there is nothing but the self, there is nothing but realization. There is really no one to realize the self. The illusion of self-hood, of an ego, of a separate identity, is false. There is nothing but eternity—eternity has always been and eternity will always be. To realize the self involves an action. It implies that there is something to realize, that there is time, that there is a temporal world and that self is not yet realized, but will be realized by the actor through action. This is not the case. There is nothing that is not the self. The self does not have to be realized. The self eternally is. There is nothing but the self. This is the knowledge that comes through discrimination.

Everything is transient and it’s a good thing, as I said. I celebrate the transient constantly. I don’t find that sorrowful in any way. I don’t see anything sorrowful about death. I don’t see suffering as sorrowful; it’s unpleasant, but it’s not sorrowful. The only thing that creates sorrow is attachment to the transient, which is like betting on a horse that you know is going to lose -- doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Since you know that everything is transient, it just makes absolutely no sense to be sorry about anything, even ourselves. Mostly ourselves. The good news is that we don’t last. Thank heavens! Because to continue the drama of who you are is boring, ultimately. The universe is our friend because it kills us, and that’s what friends are for.

No, it’s only when you, the eternal part, are eternal and that’s all there is, that you’re meditating. There’s no thought, no sense of self. That’s meditation. Up until then you’re learning how. You can either meditate or you can’t meditate. You know, you can’t be a little bit pregnant. Right? So they say. You can’t meditate a little bit. You either meditate or you don’t. If you meditate, there’s only eternity. Then you’re not meditating. Well, here we are in the transient again, experiencing a transient body, a transient world, a transient moment. And we forget about the eternal part. But the more we meditate, the less we forget about it. After a while, we have a kind of a dual awareness. Enlightenment is a dual awareness where we’re aware of the eternal as the eternal. We’re aware of the transient as the transient, and something else that I couldn’t describe to you in words -- the void. There are no words. Words don’t mean anything in the void -- for the experiences that are beyond words, for the reality. Words are terrible traps. They’re pretty, but they’re terrible traps if we think that in any way they explain anything about reality. They just point us in lots of different directions simultaneously. So then, when you practice meditation, know that you’re not meditating until there’s no thought, no sense of self and only eternity. Only eternity. Only eternity. And the more you try and make yourself stand out, the more you try and be noticed by others, that means the less adept you are in meditation. Because it just means that you’re clinging to the transient self and trying to glorify it. Well, the only one who does that is someone who doesn’t know anything about eternity, who really is mistaking the transient for the eternal.

The more you want to be noticed, that simply means the less you know about meditation. The people who know the most about meditation aren’t noticed. There’s no need to be noticed because they know they’re not the person, so why glorify that? You’re glorifying the transient; the transient is God, of course -- and Goddess. The transient is perfection. It’s not less than the eternal, it’s a manifestation of the eternal. But you don’t bet on a losing horse -- unless you’ve got tax problems, you know what I mean? Discrimination, vivika, means you know the difference between the transient and the eternal. It doesn’t mean you know the difference. It means that you know that you are the eternal, and you are also the transient and you can tell the difference. That’s what discrimination means in Shankara’s yoga. That’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about knowing the eternal. To discriminate doesn’t mean intellectually you’re going to say, “Oh yes, I understand, this is a transient idea, this is something that’s eternal.” That isn’t discrimination; those are ideas. Discrimination is the ability to meditate. Unless you can meditate, there can’t be discrimination because there’s only transience and transient ideas of the eternal. Only in meditation is there discrimination.

We don’t have to hate the transient. We don’t have to dislike the fact that we are young or middle-aged or old, it doesn’t matter. It just rolls around forever like the seasons. Here it’s about to be spring. Winter has passed, finally. Shortly leaves will be everywhere, for six months. And then in six months, they’ll all go away and the "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare called them, the branches will dominate again. No leaves. But there are about to be leaves. We’re going to go from one condition to another. That’s life. In California they have palm trees. Palm trees have seasons too, they’re just not as obvious. Unless you’re an aficionado of palm trees, which I happen to be.

You can sit in your room and think someone should bring you food. And you can sit in your room in your house alone day after day and no one will arrive. No matter how strongly you think that should be the case, unless you go out and find food it’s not going to come to you. That’s up to you. To think that in some way -- as people think both in the East and West but more so in the West -- that the knowledge that brings freedom from all limitations is in some way supposed to come to you and be at your service is ridiculous.

This is where Buddhism differs from Christianity, Christianity as it’s presented to us. Buddhism suggests that simply because you were born in a certain religion, because you were baptized, that has nothing to do with salvation. There are no elect. Everything rests upon your own self-effort, which is the good news because that means you don’t have to wait around for some nebulous God to help you. You can pick yourself up and go do what you want to do, and if you want to remove yourself from the world of suffering, you can. The universe is not seen in Buddhism as some giant machine, some cold mechanism -- not at all. Nor is it seen as a big human being that thinks like a big human being. Most people’s Gods are self-reflective. God just has to be like you. You get concerned so you assume God must get concerned. You get pissed off, so you assume that God must get pissed off. You’re attached to things that you create so you assume that God would be. God doesn’t care. God is a pure and perfect awareness that has no knowledge of any of this. It’s beyond all of this. You have to elevate yourself to that point and bring your mind into the Godhead, into nirvana, into that perfect and pure radiant knowledge. It will not come to you. It never does. Why should it? It’s oblivious because it’s ecstasy and in its complete self-ecstasy of perfect beingness, why should it be aware or aroused by your suffering or your joy? One can stay in the samsara, in mortality, forever. One do

Idealizations are problematic because they prevent us from acting. If you’re sitting in your room alone and you’re getting more and more hungry and it’s beginning to hurt, but you really think someone’s going to come through for you, you may just sit there and no one will. But if you know no one’s going to come, and if you’re going to eat you’re going to have to move it and get your body up and down the hall and down the stairs and out to where there’s some food, then you’ll move.

It’s nice if you wish well to others and you hope that they will become enlightened, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s a strictly individual situation. And how can you possibly assist anyone in their enlightenment unless you happen to be enlightened yourself? It’s a joke to think you can help anybody become enlightened until you become fully enlightened. Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. Get real. The only issue is your own enlightenment. Anything else is only an interruption of that process. If you do have a genuine need for some reason to assist others in their enlightenment, the greatest thing you can do is become enlightened as quickly as possible and then you will have something at your disposal -- right knowledge to assist those individuals. But otherwise, you’re just being self-indulgent and ridiculous. A little truth goes a long way. It goes forever. The truth

A little truth goes a long way. It goes forever. The truth is that you are alone. That you’ve always been alone, and that you’ll always be alone in an infinite series of infinities. And the truth is that at this point in infinity, at this moment, you have become aware of your aloneness, and you have become aware that it is only through your self-effort that that aloneness, that separation, can end. You can wax philosophical, religious, logical, extralogical, it doesn’t matter. As Joe Friday used to say, “Those are the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” If you choose to ignore them, it’s to your disadvantage. Your self-encased fantasies will end in pain. And if you accept that, then the mere acceptance of the reality causes a transmutation. You’re motivated. And then you begin your search.

Then you want to sit down and for whatever period of time is apropos for your level of study, you want to practice concentration -- focus. All meditation involves focus until we enter into the qualityless, thoughtless essence, when we perceive ourselves as the thatness. So really all you’re doing is learning to focus. Let’s say you’re going to be meditating for 30 minutes. I would suggest for 15 minutes that you meditate with your eyes open, focusing on an object of some type, hopefully an object that’s beautiful or powerful. You could find a pretty colored stone that you just feel good about. It’s a little rock that you found somewhere, life drew you and the rock together -- your karma. It has a nice energy, and you could place that in front of you on the ground or on a table at eye level, if that’s more comfortable. And you could focus on that. You could use a flower, a candle flame, anything you want that’s bright and suggestive of beauty and eternality. Then with your eyes open, you’ll focus on that to the exclusion of all thought. Naturally in the beginning, if you’re undisciplined, which everyone is mentally when they start meditation, you’ll think a million thoughts, a lot of images will come through your mind. But if you focus on the object and you keep focusing, gradually the thoughts will become quieter and quieter, gradually the images will disappear from the mind. What’s happening is, through the power of focus, as you look at something and concentrate on it, the kundalini energy which is situated in the base of the spine, in the astral, begins its long journey up through what we call the shushumna, which is an astral nerve tube that goes from the bottom of the spine up to between the eyebrows and a little bit above, which is the agni chakra. And as that energy begins to radiate and rise, it causes the mind to become quiet, and the further that energy goes up, the higher we go into different planes of consciousness. The planes of consciousness are correlated to what we call the chakras

Normally, kundalini is always flowing through all your chakras, through your subtle body, subtle physical body, what we call your astral body. Kundalini is the blood of the astral. And it’s doing everything it needs to, but it doesn’t need to flow much more than it is, unless there’s reason, unless there’s demand, unless there’s activity. So in human life, unless there’s something very major that happens of an emotional nature, there’s very rarely an elevation in, kind of, the seratonin level of kundalini. It doesn’t change much. But when you seek to enter into other states of consciousness, that requires more energy, and so the kundalini flows. Of course the more complete your concentration is and the less thought, awareness of self in the mind, the more the kundalini flows and the higher you go beyond body, mind, time and space and so on. It’s hard to talk about some of these things; you have to really experience them.

Yama raja

The path of knowledge is said to be difficult in that it is the path of samadhi. For most persons there are three states of existence: the waking consciousness, when we're awake and walking around in the dream; the dreaming consciousness, when we're asleep, but active in our dreams; and the deep sleep consciousness, in which there are no dreams. But for one who practices the yoga of knowledge there is a fourth state. This is the state of samadhi. Samadhi is absorption in God. In the state of samadhi one has only the sense that one is perfect being. There is no awareness of separativity. There's no sense of time, place or condition. Samadhi is the actual awareness of what you really are. There are two types of samadhi: salvikalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi. In salvikalpa samadhi we are aware that we are God. That is to say, there's no thought in the mind, there's no sense of being a physical being, there's no recollection of a past, there's no concern for a future, there's no sense of the senses or the objects of the senses. We are pure, undifferentiated consciousness, but still there is a subtle sense of “I am.” Now that your awareness has become God, now that you can feel yourself stretching through all of the universes and encompassing them, now that you know that you are the knower, that you bring forth all things and transform them and sustain them, now that you are in that mystical awareness of pure being, absolute reality, still there is a sense of being “That.” There is some self-consciousness, not the self-consciousness of the human nature and the ego, where one feels and believes that one is an individual personality structure, that one has birth and one has death, that you are the doer. This has fallen away. There's no longer a sense of feeling "I am this, I am not that, I do this, I accomplish this." The “I” is gone or we can say the “I” has been transformed into an eternal “I,” into an ever present “I.” The finite forms have fallen away and we have become God. Nirvikalpa samadhi, on the other hand, is beyond description. It is the entrance into nirvana. Anything that I say to you, anything that we discuss, anything that I describe, is presented from the point of view of the relative world. That is to say, I am addressing to some extent your mind. Your mind works through concepts and ideas. You respond through feelings, emotions. You recollect, you think about the future. So anything I could possibly describe to you has to be couched in these terms—the terms of this world. That which is beyond these terms, that which is beyond description, that which is beyond understanding, is nirvana. Nirvana is a word that we use to describe that which is indescribable, the endless ocean of existence. In nirvikalpa samadhi we merge in that endless ocean of existence to such an extent that we dissolve completely and there's no "we" to even be conscious that we have dissolved. There's no sense of having ever been anything, there's no sense of being nothing, there's no sense at all. This is precisely the point that stops most people from attaining self-realization. While they're able to meditate and follow the advice of their spiritual teacher and reach a point of great knowledge, while they're able to enter into salvikalpa samadhi and have that extraordinary illumination experience where you just sense and feel your oneness with God, not as an abstraction, but as a reality, the self is threatened by the idea of dissolution, by the idea of no longer existing. But you must know that this is an illusion. Anything that you can think is an illusion. Anything that you can feel is an illusion. Anything that you can see, even your highest understanding of truth, of dharma, is an illusion—an illusion in the sense that it's a limited thought. A limited thought is a limited thought. You must understand that anything you understand is not a true understanding. Anything that you feel is not a true feeling. Anything that you know is not a true knowing. Anything that you believe is not a true believing. While all of the things that you believe and know and see and feel do exist in their own right, in the relative existence, still, they're finite and limited. They're ways of looking at existence, but existence is infinite—infinite meaning that it's beyond all ways of looking.

The kundalini varies, not simply through breathing techniques or by meditating on chakras, but by stopping thought. To stop thought it's necessary to put your life into a state of balance. Otherwise you can sit and meditate for hours and hours and all kinds of conscious and subconscious thoughts will flow through you. It is possible with pure willpower to force the kundalini up the shushumna, through the chakras. Then, as I indicated before, you will develop visions of other worlds, but these visions will not necessarily stop or go away when you want them to. This is a condition that we call insanity, when you cannot clear perceptual fields. It's like watching 20 stations on television at once, and after a while, you can't tell which is the right one. This is what happens to individuals who force, who push, the kundalini out too far without having the balance. When you have the balance, it's not a problem -- it's a snap. Then you can easily segment the realities, when your attention field is fluid. But to develop that fluidity, it's necessary to follow the dharma. So my recommendation is -- if you seek to practice kundalini yoga -- to meditate, of course, and you can meditate on the different chakras and feel what that's like. But what will really release the kundalini is something much simpler and more effective, in addition to meditation techniques, breathing techniques, and so on. And that is by creating a stillness in your life. This stillness will come about through deep caring and introspection. It will come about slowly and then quickly. It builds in momentum. Begin with your daily life. Take your life as a challenge and try to bring yourself into harmony with each thing in your life -- with your occupation, with your relationship with nature and the earth. Bring yourself into harmony with your friends, your family, your country. Harmony sometimes means withdrawal. Sometimes it means leaving those you love for something that you love more. Sometimes it means duty. It means so many different things. You will have to go through a trial and error process, but you will always know when there's a deeper stillness in your daily meditation, a deeper stillness in your life. That means that what you're doing is working.

Change your job, change your friends, change the place you live. Change your goals, change your attitudes. Work harder, work less. Travel. Don't travel. You've got to mix it up. And if you keep trying with that intent, then eventually you will stumble upon or be guided to that which will bring about the highest good, the highest stillness. Then the kundalini in your daily meditations will release. This is my experience. Don't worry about techniques. Don't worry about chakras. Instead, concern yourself with finding the dharma and meditate. Then the kundalini will release. This is real kundalini yoga, not simply a series of repetitive exercises and movements that you could practice for hundreds of years and never substantially open up the fields of kundalini energy to have them release into your being. The release comes about through a balanced life, and, of course, through periods of formal and informal meditation. Through association with other higher beings, with a teacher, with people along the path, with nonphysical beings -- whatever works, do it. That's what makes it exciting and fun. And then life is wonderful. It's terrific. It's jazzy. And still, there will be obstacles, of course

So the power that is most interesting is the personal power that changes or shapes consciousness. And that’s Kundalini. Kundalini exists everywhere. It’s called shakti, another name for it. That is to say, a latent energy field, an invisible energy that is present in all life, everywhere, in this dimension and other dimensions. Then more specifically, Kundalini exists within us, it exists in greater amounts in certain places. Some people have more of it, some dimensions have more of it and initially a student of Buddhism has to be come aware that there are variations or differences in power. Some people have more than others, some places have more than others, some activities create and give more power, some are draining, some take power away. Since power is necessary to go into happier states of mind, and sustain them, to stay in them, and to go beyond them, to the Enlightened states of mind, which of course is the most desirable thing. Since power is necessary to be healthy, to heal one’s body, to assist others, it’s the primary concern, it’s the first space on the totem pole in self discovery. Kundalini, in a human being, rests, in potential, at the base of the spine. We have a physical body and we have a subtle body and a causal body, and then of course, there is the eternal part of ourselves, there is a touch of Nirvana in all of us. Something that is nonphysical, non-dimensional, non-astral, non-causal, the real in us. But it’s obscured, it’s hard to get to because of the physical body, the emotions, thoughts, the mind and in general, because we don’t have enough power to perceive properly. So, Kundalini is at the base of the spine. The subtle body surrounds the physical body. It’s a body of energy. It’s also known sometimes as the astral body. And it’s composed of chakras, energy fibers, astral tubes that are similar to veins. Basically the part of the subtle body that concerns the practitioner of Buddhism and Yoga is the shushumna. The shushumna is a tube, an astral tube, kind of like a reed, that runs from the base of the spine to between the eyebrows and a little above. And there are six chakras or energy vortexes that lie along the tube. The first is at the base of the spine, the second is around the area of the spleen or sex organ, the third is about an inch below the navel center, the forth is in the center of the chest, the fifth is in the throat, the base of the throat, the sixth and topmost chakra or energy center on the shushumna is between the eyebrows and about an inch above. There is a seventh chakra which is located several inches above the top of the head, but it’s not connected to the others directly. There are many other chakras or nadis as they’re also called. There are chakras in the hands, fingertips, feet, in a number of other areas. They’re not really in the physical body. If you lost an arm, it wouldn’t affect the subtle body or the chakras. They are non-physical, they’re astral, but they are in approximately that same area, it’s a way of trying to talk about them. The release of power, the power that enables us to transform our awareness to be successful and happy in life is the release of the Kundalini. All Yoga, either directly or indirectly, all Buddhism, relates to the release of the Kundalini energy. The Kundalini energy is in the first chakra, at the base of the spine, it’s called the root chakra and through meditation, through going to certain places around certain types of people, participating or not participating in certain types of mental or physical or emotional activities, it’s possible to take that energy and allow it to move, to unleash it from the base of the spine up to the third eye and eventually to the crown center. This energy, as it moves is often compared to a snake. It’s coiled up and it seems kind of small. But because it’s coiled, it can spring very quickly, it can jump and extend itself very fast. So the Kundalini is seen as a serpent, a coil of energy at the base of the spine but it can shoot right up through the shushumna, pass through the chakras, opening them all and bringing you into different states of awareness and finally bridge the gap into the crown center, also known as the thousand petal lotus of light which references the dimensions or planes of light, of Enlightenment. Each of the seven chakras references different dimensional planes, that is to say, it’s a doorway, a turnstile that leads us into different dimensions and as the Kundalini rises, either in an individual meditation session or just the general level in your life, those dimension will be open to you and the knowledge and powers of those dimensions will begin to come to you. There is an immediate rise and a general level. The general level is where the Kundalini abides most of the time. So in most people, the Kundalini is in the first chakra, maybe in the second. That is to say, if we were to measure their Kundalini, if we could look at it, we would see that it’s in the first or somewhere between the first and second chakra for most people on earth. Usually the first. It’s pretty locked up. And for average people, who don’t practice Buddhism and Yoga, the Kundalini only becomes active maybe a few times in their life. At times of extreme intensity the Kundalini can become active. Very unusual circumstances, a car accident, emotional trauma, sometimes in warfare in a battle situation. Something can cause the Kundalini to suddenly come out and when it does, it gives the person incredible power. Suddenly they can overcome all fear and attack the enemy because one of their friends was wounded. Be very successful -- suddenly a 70 year old lady who can’t lift a bag of prunes will suddenly lift up an automobile several inches because her grandchild got stuck under it. The Kundalini can do physical things, but it can do mental things, it can make you understand something that we wouldn’t understand. Someone we love dies and normally the experience might be horrifying or create misery for the rest of your life, but the Kundalini can be released and it brings us to a higher level of knowledge and understanding and we see that there is no death, the person is just gone, like we all must, on a journey. We will be following them soon, we’ve all been on it before, we will all be on it again. So it can provide mental awareness, a scientific discovery, a musical creation, all kinds of things. People who tap the Kundalini and are able to release it are more successful in their fields of endeavor, great painters, musicians, architects, scientists, engineers, philosophers, martial artists, whatever it may be, athletes. Anyone who is really on top has some access to the Kundalini. They may not practice what they would call meditation every day and sit down formally and meditate and focus on the chakras, but they have learned somewhere along the line, in this life or other lives, ways of releasing power and then they can use that power in a variety of ways, depending upon how wise they are and how balanced they are.
Whenever you see someone who’s reached the apogee of their profession, if you’re dealing with someone who is a corporate head of a good, very substantial corporation, if you see someone who’s a very fine musician, a great writer, what we would call someone eminently successful with one or more fields is someone who has what I call a weird power. That is to say, they have learned how to unlock the Kundalini. There are things that they do, there are foods they eat and don’t eat, places they go or don’t go, thoughts they think or don’t think, emotions they experience or don’t experience, just the way they hold their mind in other words. They’ve learned, although they wouldn’t call it meditation or Yoga, how to meditate. And they consciously release the Kundalini, or unconsciously. Obviously, if you learn to consciously release the Kundalini, you can be more successful than those people are. Because they’ve come across something that they know works. They can’t tell you how in most cases. They know there’s just something they do that keeps them on the top of their profession, makes them happier, makes them more successful. But they wouldn’t, they don’t know where they can go from there, you might say. They’ve taken it as far as they can and they just keep doing it over and over. But in Yoga, in Buddhism, you study how to release and unlock the Kundalini and take it up to the levels that would certainly afford career success, personal happiness, physical health, and mental balance. But we move further into planes of knowledge and wisdom that enable the practitioner to do just about anything. In other words, there are ranges of experience and ecstasy, just plain fun, that people don’t even know are there to get to, so consequently they don’t. Or if they did, of course, they wouldn’t know how to do it or be able to do it unless you practice Yoga, Buddhism, or something similar in which there’s an actual study of the structures of awareness, how to transmute them properly and intelligently with wisdom and balance. That’s the study of power. Power is something that is abused, something that is used. I suppose use and abuse are in the eye of the beholder. But I would say, essentially my template for viewing use and abuse is happiness. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is an immediate experience, very transient in nature, that’s enjoyable. And if we experience a great deal of it, there is a sense of satiation. After you have too much pleasure, you actually don’t feel good. On the other hand, happiness is something the more you have of it, the better off you are. There is no such thing as too much happiness, it doesn’t satiate. So, I would define the proper use of power as something that creates happiness, for yourself and for others. And the abuse of power takes happiness away, it’s the enemy of happiness. So everything that I teach, as a Buddhist teacher, as an Enlightened Buddhist teacher, is toward directing an individual to happiness. Not just a pleasurable experience or the avoidance of a painful experience, but towards happiness, a balanced wisdom and knowledge that sometimes is just bubbly and euphoric or just very deep, very quiet, very still, very profound. The less we define it, the better. Power, however, doesn’t create happiness or unhappiness, it just is. It depends how

So, meditation is a process of speeding up the vibration. When you meditate, you increase your own energy level. With that increased energy level, through the stoppage of thought and a variety of other things, you can succeed, or you can cause someone else not to succeed. I personally don’t feel that the answer is to cause others not to succeed, in order that you can succeed. It’s better to take the increased energy of mediation and just put into your own success and not try and use it to cause others to fail. Because if you put it into your own success, you will be happy whether you succeed or not. Chances are you will succeed. And this is what I suggested to this actor, movie star student of mine, that he simply not be concerned about this, know what’s going on, it’s good to know the street, and that he utilize his full energy from his practice of Buddhism and Yoga to simply do the best that he could, be at the highest energy level, the best level of performance that he could. But needless to say, to be conscious that there are people who do what we call, I don’t know, black magic, lower sorcery. There are people who use power to interfere with the success of others, not to be concerned about them, they’re not happy people. And they can’t necessarily be any problem to you as long as you’re aware of what they’re doing. You just step around them. So when he was waiting to go on and be successful and to get the film part, I would suggest to him that simply he avoid those people. Just look around the room, and if you see that this is what people are doing, using most of their time and energy causing each other not to succeed. Rather than do that, take a book with him. To sit and read something that would raise his energy level, to ignore everybody, keep his energy gained from his life and his hard work and his meditation and the practice of his craft in his body and then simply to go in there and do a great audition. To get involved with some ridiculous battle of power with someone else will use up his energy and then he would go in and not have much energy to succeed. In other words, the trick is simply to avoid jerks, in my opinion, in life. There’s lots of them out there, most people are unhappy intrinsically, it seems, and there are people who go their own way and then there people who just want to trouble you. And so, intelligent martial arts is not getting in battles and winning them. Intelligent martial is avoiding battles because battles use up energy and you can get hurt, no matter how good you are. And that wasn’t what you had on your agenda today. Simply because you were going some place today, you’re going to have a great picnic and you didn’t intend to get into a battle with somebody. If you get in a battle and even win, you never get to have your nice picnic. That was someone’s else’s idea. So the intelligent use of power is to apprehend those that would trip you up, to slide around them, and do what you want to do. Naturally if there is no way out and confrontation and battle is inevitable, one can use power and strategy, balance, and wisdom and Enlightenment to win, of course. But the best battle is the battle that’s never fought, the best war is the one that is won without battle. But it is important to know that power can be used to interfere with things. Being afraid of that, however, is absurd. In other words, I’ve seen people who practice Yoga and Buddhism who were scared to death of the sorcery power of others and this is absurd. If you are afraid of someone, you immediately give them an advantage over you, and you give them an entrée to your awareness field. People can’t do much to one another with power in my opinion, by and large. Most people don’t, they’re not far enough along, they don’t have enough of it or how to use it properly. I wouldn’t be very concerned about this. It’s paranoia. What you can do though is allow someone to upset you. And if you become afraid of someone, they do gain a power over your life. I think a lot of people profess to have power and it’s very minor astral power. And they get people very upset and then they do get power over you. Not because they had any intrinsic power, but just because your fear immobilizes you and makes you do a bad job. People can drain your energy a little, or maybe they can make you feel a little uncomfortable, by and large, that’s about it. That’s what you’re going to find around here, particularly here in the West. And you know, the most you’re going to get is a headache. But if you become afraid, well then anyone can overwhelm you and totally dominate your life. So the intelligent use of power is never to interfere with anyone else’s success, but to use the greater power you get to be more successful yourself. Use power intelligently around people who might mean harm to you and use that power to not be afraid, to simply step around them. And that’s the end of the discussion. Use power to vibrate more quickly. There is enough room in this world for lots of people to succeed. Your success does not depend upon the failure of others. The way to win the race is not to trip somebody else in the race, but its to train hard, to feel great about yourself. And to simply have more energy than other people because you practice better at Yoga and Buddhism. That’s my opinion. Because you will not only have a greater chance of winning, but whether you win or loose, you’re happy. Where, what is the great joy in winning some victory if it makes you miserable. It’s no victory, it’s a failure. So I don’t put much stock in powers people have to hurt others, in sorcery and all this nonsense. I think a lot of unhappy people trying to make other people unhappy and sure, people have oppressive natures, and sure, there are people who are horrible and who kill and hurt people physically. There are murderers, and there are dictators, people are out of control. Their desires are obsessive, or they’re just lost in illusion. That’s just part of life. But the intelligent use of power and Yoga can assist you in avoiding that side of life and that side of humanity. And if you have come into a battle, you can win it. But what Yoga does, is it makes you free. It makes you happy, and it gets you out of all the traps of human nature that create misery. So, power is best used then, the correct usage of power is, for one’s own personal success, and if you enjoy it, it’s not necessary, to make others succeed. You might find that makes you even happier. It adds to your power, it makes you vibrate faster. But the key line, the benchmark, is happiness. And in practice, that is to say to practice in meditation, Buddhism and Yoga, what is necessary or required is to simply extend your happiness to higher and deeper levels today than it’s been in any other day of your life. I would say if you are doing this, you‘re getting A’s in Buddhism. And if you’re not doing that, if you’re at the same level, you’re getting C’s. And if you’re not as happy as you use to be at any point of your life, then you’re definitely failing the course, which means you’re not practicing properly. There is a bug in the program. We have to read the code, look back and see what it is, it’s not by accident, there is no such thing. You are not doing something. And chances are, you’re not meditating properly, deeply, and fully. You may be trying to skip steps, and circumvent the process. You’re using power incorrectly. Your motives are not pure. You don’t vibrate quickly, so it’s simply a question of doing a systems analysis of your energy flow, spotting where the problem is and changing it without a sense of ego. Without a sense of right, wrong. I was good, I was bad. Guilt or remorse. These things are unnecessary. This is simply structural. Everything in Buddhism is structural. Emotions are there to enjoy life. But they’re not used in self reflection because they inhibit a proper reflection. They gunk us up. Feeling sorry for yourself is a total waste of time as is feeling sorry for others. Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself.

The best way to deal with lower beings is not to deal with them at all. Don't be afraid of them. If you meditate and you seek, they can't hurt you. They can scare you. And then you learn to laugh at them. If you see one sometime, if you're meditating or whenever, and you see some horrible form, just laugh at it. Say, "Oh, come on, can't you do a better one than that? I'm not impressed at all.” Then they go away. See, if they see they can't bother you or hurt you or affect you, they just go away. They get very frustrated. It's not going to work with you so they go pick on somebody else. But they do exist and we shouldn't pretend that they don't because sometimes if we underestimate our opponents we make a grave error, and also if we overestimate our opponents we make a grave error. So realize that they are powerful. They can be very harmful. But if you don't invoke them, you shouldn't be bothered by them. And if they do come around, if you meditate, if you think of light, if you invoke a spiritual teacher, a powerful person, a powerful being, they'll be chased away. But if you still have a subconscious draw to them, they'll keep coming back. So you have to be willing to go through your own being and find out if there are parts of yourself that are still interested in that sort of stuff. See that dealing in those levels and those worlds is antithetical to your own health. It isn't what you really want; there's no fun or light in there. The little powers that you'll get are nothing compared to the power of enlightenment, plus there's no happiness in it. When you realize that, you'll lose interest and then you'll evolve to a higher state. The higher beings, of course, are just the opposite. These are the gods, goddess

Swami Brahmananda, who was a student of a very famous enlightened teacher, Sri Ramakrishna, said that advanced practice begins with samadhi. Samadhi is meditation without any thought, any focus. To arrive at that point, of course, you begin with simple practice. Each day when you rise in the morning, you meditate because your mind is not filled with impressions. You sit in front of an object of concentration with the eyes open. You focus on a candle flame, on a yantra, on something precise -- a little dot, something small -- and you just look at it. You focus on it until there's nothing else in your mind. This develops willpower. After a while, after doing this for ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you close your eyes, then pick one of the chakras. There are seven primary chakras or energy centers that are located in the subtle physical body, the body of light and energy that is our awareness, and that surrounds the physical. There are seven primary chakras, thousands of lesser chakras. Chakras are doorways to other worlds. When you focus on them, you step through into something else.

Big Sur is a fascinating place. It's one of the true power places in America. And it seems a fit setting at about 12:30 at night, on the 17th of December, almost Christmas, to talk to you about the most important thing -- advanced meditation practices.