The fact that somebody has lots of followers
doesn’ t mean a single thing whatsoever . Plus, some teachers start out
integrous, reach  a high place, and then fall. That is another innocence that
the innocent person doesn’ t realize; that he was calibrated 570, but he’ s now
at 190. I always teach students that sooner or later, you’re going to become a
teacher . And each of the levels of consciousness has its downside and its
traps. Once you become a teacher , there’ s this seduction  of being
glamorized; of being idolized; of people saying that they love you; of
sexual seduction ; and of the attraction of money , fame, and power over
many people. Therefore, many are the gurus who began to ascend the path
and then crashed. Half a dozen or more on TV or the Internet. They were at
a high place at one point. I believe  a teacher should teach students that when you reach a certain
level of consciousness, these are the temptations that you will be presented
with. Don’t forget the Buddha was beset by demons. And peopl e think, Oh,
they’r e going to come in the form of evil demons . Except they’re not going
to come  in the form of evil demons; they’re going to come in the form of
seductions, sweet adoringness: Oh, master! So that’s the dramatization. I’m not saying that there isn’t a lot to it. Scripture says it doesn’ t invalidate the paranormal; it just says, “Don’ t go
there.” You can have a couple of readings and become entranced. And then
suddenly their readings go off, and some of the readings suddenly go
wrong. So all those things, they’re only tentative. And they’re only
transitory spiritual fiction, because then the reality seems mundane and
pedestrian as compared to the magical wonderment or the tarot card reading
or whatever . I think it’s the wrong direction. And here the error is to fall for
the seduction; that it is a quality  or a power of your personal self, which it isnot. The phenom ena happen of their own accord. There is no personal self
calling them. We have  witness ed miracles many times. And the trap is to think that you
are the one who brought about the miracle. There is no person  doing any
miracles. The potentiation occurs when a certain energy field arises. It only
happens when all the conditions are appropriate, including karmic
conditions. Whe n the apple is ready , it falls from the tree. Now the apple
doesn’ t cause itself to fall from  the tree. There’ s the field of gravity . So
within the spirit ual aura of an advanced teacher , phenomena that are due to
occur karmically and for many reasons may be facilitated, but there’ s no
personal self “doing” a cause-and-ef fect miraculous cure. You witnessed
phenomena happen. You are the witness of them. And one is aware that yes,
the energy field could exhilarate a propensity , but that karmic propensity is
within the person himself. And all one did was facilitate it. For exam ple, a person who is very sick and disabled will sit down next to
you, and then you can feel this energy move over in their doma in, and then
they’ll get up and walk away . Well, you’re aware it wasn’ t you that removed
the illness, it was the energy, the Kundalini energy. Because of previous
spiritual work that brought abou t an inner honesty and awareness, you just
witnessed the phenomenon. It was the unfolding of potentiality emer ging as
a consequence of the energy fields surrounding it, which potentialized it. The Kundalini energy, by virtue of its own nature, is what is transformative
and accomplishes the miraculous, not the personal you. Everybody needs a teacher to warn them of this. Miracle workers are a
dime a dozen. When the miracle came on, it was a phenomenon. Then the
personal self took credit for that. Then the ego got exaggerated. Now they
don’t have that miraculous power anymore, but they don’t want the world
to know that, so they’ve learned how to fake it. And for one of the most
famous gurus of recent times in India, the phenomena occurred
spontaneously in the beginning . Then he claimed credit for it. Then he
brought great throngs. They brought great money . Then he began to learn
how to fake that which had before been autonomous. That’ s a very subtle
thing. It’ s happened to more than one guru. SPIRITUAL TRUTHNow we’re going to talk about spiritual truth. There are many false
teachers in the world, and I was quite amazed when I discovered  how many
there were. I mean, lots who are world famous. Since you’re putting your
eternal soul in the hands of a teacher , you better know who that teacher is. I
wouldn’ t be so careless. You’re talking about your eternal  soul, the karmic
perpetuation throughout all of time, and you’re going to put this in some
flashy ad, go and get your aura read by Mr. So-and-So on the other side? Of
course, you have to turn over all your property to him as well. You get a
reading from master so-and-so through him, and it only costs you $5,000
for your granddaughter , except you don’ t have a granddaughter! These gurus fell because their instructors did not instruct them of the
downside. So in my lectures, we constantly go over: What is the downside
of each level of consciousness? Where is the trap? People say, “I’m beyond
that.” You’re not beyond that at all. From 850 and up, it’s very difficult. And the Buddha acknowledged that; he said, “I felt like my bones are being
broken,” becaus e the demons are looking for any weakness in your psyche. There are charac teristics of spiritual truth that will carry you through if you
know of them; you don’t need a list of what they calibrate (though that’s
very handy). But if you know certain basics, it’s more important to
understand the basics. Truth is true at all times and places, independent of
the culture, personalities, or circumstances. Truth is always true, no matter what. So if we calibrate the Chartres
cathedral, the calibration is the same no matter what. Truth is true at all
times and places. It is not exclusionary; it’s all inclusive, non-se cretive, and
non-sectarian. Nobody owns  truth. One of the biggest traps is provisional
love. There’ s energy of love—y ou become quite attractive to other people,
and they will interpret it as love. People will fall in love with you all over
the place. There was a period of time when I got propositioned a couple of
times a day. And I didn’ t have a teacher to warn me. I knew the integrity of
it was being tested. Many fall for that one. And then glamor— we weren’ t
allowed to use the word guru  in my book. Every time we would ask, it said,
“No.” The word has come to mean something different than what it
originally meant, because it was being exploited. Wealth, fame, having lots
of follow ers . . . all those things are temptations to the spiritual ego to
consider yoursel f important. And you see how those spiritual egos throw it
right back into a personal self, right away . The minute you think it’s you,
you just lost it.Truth is true everywhere; it excludes no one, is available and open to all. There are no secrets to be revea led, hidden, or sold—no magical formulas
or mysteries. That is the truth. When we see an ancient secret being
peddled, it’s always for a price, and you know that you’re being held up by
a spiritual conman. Truth to be truth is truth all the time: foreverness. And how could it be
the exclusive property of someone? It’s available and open to all. It has an
integrity of purpose—there’ s nothing to gain or lose. It’s nonsectarian;
Truth is not the exposition of a limitation. Independent of opinion, truth is
nonlinear . There fore, it is not subject to the limitations of intellect or form. Truth is independent of opinion . Devoid of positionality , truth is not anti-
anything. Why is that? Because truth has no opposite. You might say the
opposite of truth is absence. Falsehood has no reality . There’ s truth and then
there’ s the absence of truth, and we call the absence of truth, falsehood. It’s just like light and darkness. Light is either present or not present. There are no requirements or demands, no memberships, dues, fees,
regulations, oaths, rules, or conditions. And it doesn’ t circularize
everybody , askin g for donations. It is non-controlling. Spiritual purity has
no intere st in the personal lives  of the aspirants, in their clothing or dress,
their style, their sex life, their economics, their family patterns, their
lifestyle, or their dietary habits . It is free of force or intimida tion. When
people are threa tened in their spiritual groups, or belong to the sect, there
are recriminations if they try to get out of it. Sometimes punishment is quite
severe. When there’ s truth, there’ s no force or intimidation, no
brainwashing or adulation of the leaders, no training rituals. Watch out for
training rituals—that’ s the call of brainwash by which you’re indoctrinated. If you know the truth, what do you need to be trained? Do not take any
oaths. Do not pledge anything. “And if I fail to break these oaths, may such
and such happen to me . . .” Never take such a vow. Truth is freedom; being
free to come and go without persuasion, coercion, intimidation, or
consequences. There is no hierarchy , and instead there is voluntary
fulfillment of practical necessities and duties. Everyone I work with does
what they do because that’ s what needs to be done. If you do have a leader or peop le whom you honor , it’s because of what
one has become, rather than as a result of some title or trapping. You
recognize truth when you see it. I respect all that exists because of the
essence of that which they are, which I sense right away . Therefore, yougive respect to the little beetle walking along, give respect to the animals,
give respect to the polar bear. You give respect to all that exists by virtue of
that which it is. The essence of the thing is that which it is. And what does a thing mean? What a thing means is what it is. What it is, is what it means. That’ s hard to
see. But then you get the essence of it. What this thing means is what it is. You don’t have to add adjective s, adverbs, languaging; it speaks for itself
by virtue of its existence. So, a teacher should speak for himsel f because of
the reality of that which it is. That which it is, not that which is spoken
about. It’s not materialistic, not the neediness of worldly wealth  and all the
stuff that goes with it. Inspirational truth avoids glamorization, seduction, and theat rics. I’ve
been to so-called spiritual even ts that were like a Broadway production:
videos and orchestras and flashing lights. There’ s no need for worldly
wealth, you see. Wealth is the difference between your desires and that
which you have. If you want to transcend spiritually , let go of wantingness. Let go of wanting admiration, wanting possessions, wanting control. When
you finally let go of all wantingness, you’ve got more than what you need. When I first came to Sedona, I rented a place. I didn’ t even have a bed,
so I went and bought a cot at the dollar store. I bought some blankets at the
Goodwill. I got a nice wooden box and put a candlestick next to it. I put an
apple in the refrigerator and saved that for dinner . What more do you need? I was complete. God will provide for you if you need it, so I tested that out
too. I walked out with no money  or no food and wandered around Sedona. I
got invited for breakfast. I got invited for lunch and invited for dinner . I’d
say, “I haven’ t got any money .” And they’d tell me it’s on the house. What
you need is provided. Therefore, if you need nothing, you already have
abundance. INTEGRITY OF THE TEACHER
The integrity of the teacher speaks for itself. Some people can intuit it,
and other people, of course, cannot. With everything I say, I am constantly
aware all the time, in an unspok en constant awareness, that I’m responsible
and answerable to almighty God for everything that I say every second. And as a teacher , that responsibility is heightened. I’m extremely aware of
everything I say. Therefore, very often, like when I give a lectur e, I will sortof intuit  a thing as being so, but I want to make sure it’s so. I’ll do muscle
testing and say, “Let’ s check this out and see if it’s so, because I do not
want to teach any error .”
I still get wild, crazy e-mails. Every author gets crazy mail, you know ,
where they accuse you of being a fraud in some way. And I’ll say, “Having
taught the whole world how to discern truth from falsehood in a matter of
seconds, I’m very unlikely to try to present falsehood.” Having already told
them how to discern the difference between truth and falseho od, I’m not
very likely going to present falsehood with tens of thousands of people out
there doing that. So spiritual reality is educational, it’s self-supporting. We
don’t ask anything of anybody except the cost of the event. God is void of induced unnatural states of consciousness,  such as
parapsychological states, or the abnormal breathing patterns, positions,
postures, and other ways to try and force the Kundalini energy. When the
Kundalini is ready to rise, it does so automatically because of its own truth. As you become loving, the Kundalini energy rises; it’s not going to rise
because you cross your legs and sit in front of a picture of the Buddha and
burn incense and do all kinds of mystical incantation stuff. Just try to be
kindly and loving and step over the beetle, and you can save yourself all
that stuff. You can save all kinds of money on incense and mystical music
and gongs. You start to see the theatricalization of it all. You get these
spiritual magazines and on the cover, there’ s always a beautiful blonde with
flowing hair. Are we supposed to believe that sexual allure is a pathway to
God? After all, you never get an unattractive person on the front cover of
these magazines. I thought for a while, you weren’ t going to get to heaven
without long blond hair. They always do a mystical yoga posture too. That’ s
the glam orization of it, the theatrics. Avoid unnatural things and especially
trainings that are going to teach  you mystical powers; trainings that teach
you mystical powers, all of them calibrate about 205. Look at this seduction to the spiritual ego. “Oh, I’m going to be special. And I’m going to have superpowers.” If they had superpowers, they
wouldn’ t be selling them to you, would they? If you’ve got superpowers,
and are so rich and powerful and complete within yourself, what would you
be selling it for? You’d be selling it because you’re needy . Needy of what ? More power and wealth? Give me break. I would receive so many e-mails
about some weird guru somewhere, Tasmania or someplace. And the guru
would calibrate at about 180.INNER CALLING AND INNER GENUINENESS
When one is growing and seeking, there may be others in one’s life that
may not understand their pursuit to grow even further spiritually . Dr.
Hawkins tells us how to r espond in these kinds of situations. I believe people should use discretion. You don’t have to tell people what
you’re doing and why you’re doing it. When I left the East, I didn’ t explain
it to anybody; there’s nothing they’re going to understand about  that. There
are probably very few people who you’re going to be able to confide in
about what you’re really up to and what’ s really going on with your life. Everybody has a certain compr ehension of an inner calling, and I find the
best way you can describe it, is “I reached a satisfaction with a certain point
in my life and a very strong inner calling said to me, ‘Here’ s a whole
different other area you need develop and grow .’ And I had to follow that
calling.”
You can usually  get by with saying you have an inner calling. Of course,
people will try to argue with you, because you’re challenging their world
view . You’re negating to some degree the value of their world view . And so
they may expect you to defend it. And I would not defend that. I would just
say, “Look, that’s my calling. And that’s the way it is.” “Well, what about
the wife and the kids? What about the business . . .” and blah, blah, blah. I
respond, “Well, God will have to look after that. God is the creator of the
universe. He’s the savior of mankind. God can just worry about it, because
I’m going to be busy doing something else.” “He’ s lost his mind,” they’ll
say. Well, when your mind goes silent, you have  lost your mind. And I realized it’s a compliment. I’ve been at it for 30 years; I finally did
lose my mind. And they’re saying, “I think he’s lost his mind.” Look at the
life I had before. I had the life and I can’t tell you how ultima te it was. It
was ultimate in ways that the world doesn’ t even know about. The most
ultimate people don’t even reveal to the world what they really are about a
good deal of the time. Organizations they belong to don’t even appear on
the map. So you walk away from that world and you walk into a different
world where genuineness, intrinsic inner genuineness, is what counts. When
you say thank you to a waitress or to a clerk in the store, it has to be from a
genuine appreciation. You see their beingness and there is-ness. And what
you’re saying is the truth.If you’re just doing it as a superficial manipulation, it doesn’ t have the
same effect. When you see how hurried the person is and how hard they’re
trying to keep up with it all, you appreciate the humanness in people. When
you reflect back the genuine value of their humanness, what you’re really
reflecting back is the sacredness of their existence. You see, when you
acknowledge people, you are reflecting back to them their inner worth—
and their inner worth is infinite. The inner worth of every human being is
infinite. Its potential is infinite. That which is created by God . . . You can’t say that one creation of God
is better than another . All are equally creatures of God. So, this is the
transformation you go through. Let’s say you walk down the street, and you
see a little black beetle on his back, flailing his legs around, and you see
others walk past it. You can tell you’re making spiritual progr ess when it
bothers you, you turn the little beetle on his feet, and then you walk away
happy . At that point, you realiz e you’re loving life and you’re discerning
the sacredness of it, because his little life is just as sacred to him. And so
you’re sent by God to turn him over and say, “Well, God, I’m turning over
this little beetle because I know you want me to.” (You know , you can joke
around with God; I do that all the time.) There is a point where you can’t walk by the beetle without helping it. Then there is an even higher space, a different level of consc iousness, in
which the beetle’ s karma is the beetle’ s karma, and yours is yours. So you
become a servant of God when  you see the intrinsic holiness of all of life
and you try to preserve it as best you can, because that’s how God reflects
through you. OceanofPDF .comChapter 5
SURRENDER
In this chapter , we move beyon d specific spiritual obstacles to perhaps
the greatest challenge that faces any spiritual seeker: the willingness to
surrender everything, including the payoffs to the ego, to God. This sounds like it would be easy. After all, to surrender means to let go
and not have to do anything. What could be easier? In truth, the process of
surrendering is one of the most difficult steps along the path to
enlightenment because the tentacles of the ego, even among the most
spiritually inclined, are deep and firmly entrenched. However , after reading
this chapter , you’ll see why a commitment to this surrendering process is
more than commensurate with the demands. The willingness  to surrender the payof f of the ego allows you to let
everything go experientially as it arises. This includes the payoff of grief,
anger , resentment, or hatred. With surrender , you have to choo se. What do
you surrender to God in the way of surrender? What does devotion mean? I
love thee, oh Lord, greater than. I love the glee I get out of my hatreds, my
wickedness, my shame, my guilt, my revenge. Either you love God or you
love revenge. You can’t have them both. Either you love God or you love
self-pity . It’s always really a choice. Am I willing to surrender this for the
love of God, or not? To become enlightened, that power has to be strong. You have to be willing to give up everything  for God. And I mean
everything. This is because at the last moment before that ultimateexperience revea ls itself (or condition takes over, rather), you will be asked
to surrender your life. The core of what you think is your life—the core of the ego, the self, the
real you—you lay that down for God. It’s scary because you need to let go
of all this payof f, and you look at all this stuff. Now suddenly , there’ s an
infinite presence that is like yourself, what you think is yourself. And this
one, too, lies down, and there’ s a moment of terror and you experience
death. There’ s only one death. You never experience it again. But there is
one death you’l l live through. You don’t know that you’re going to live
through it. The ego has the notion that it’s going to be the same, only enlightened. “I’ll still be me, but I’ll be the enlightened  me.” No, you aren’t going to be
you. It’s my responsibility to prepare you for the last moment, because
everybody here is going to be headed for the last moment. Unle ss you hear
the truth , you won’ t know what to do. Therefore, karmically I am laying
down that I have spoken the truth. At that last moment you will get, “Walk
straight ahead no matter what.” Die for God. And as you lay down your life,
the agony of death arises (and it is agonizing and you do die). And then,
before you stands the splendor . That what you thought was life was not life
anyway . But because it is so real, you see why you’ve guarded  it all these
lifetimes. It’ s so convincingly real, that it is your life . That it is the source to
your life. The ego is very, very strong or it wouldn’ t have surviv ed all these
lifetimes. At this last moment, it tells you, or you feel that it’s the very
source of your life that you’re laying down. At that point, I’m telling you, it
is safe to surren der. It is safe, but you have to have a knowingn ess that it’s
safe. You have to have heard it, you have to know it. You have to have it in
your aura. And then out of nowhere, it comes to you, and you walk right
through. The Zen saying to walk into fear no matter what got me through it. “No matter what” means without limitation, even to death itself, no matter
what. I repeat the words of the master , who I followed at that moment: no
matter what . • • •
As you surrende r, as you’re willing to let go, you’ll see the ego hangs on
because it’s getting something out of it. Now , everybody’ s ego is going to
resist this. Expe ct it to. The old ego says, “This hatred is justified.” To giveup self-pity, to give up anger , to give up resentment, to surrender them
through forgiveness. The power  of A Course in Miracles  is the willingness
to for give all and get out of the lower fields of consciousness. In the beginning, the ego identifies with form. How does the ego know
that? Because it registers form through recognition. You’ll notice that there
isn’t any me that’s thinking anyway . There is a watcher -experiencer . In
meditation or in contemplation, if you focus on the field, you’ll notice that
witnessing is happening of its own accord. The first thing you notice about consciousness is it’s automatic. The light
of consciousness is automatic. It expresses as the watcher or the experiencer
through awareness, the observer; you get to the source of that faculty , and
you’ll see that’s an impersonal faculty . There isn’t any personal you that
decided to be consciously aware. Witnessing is happening of its own
accord. In meditation you pull back from identifying with the content of
meditation. I am this, I did that, and all that. That’ s all fallacious story . You
realize that, that which I am is the witness of all those though ts, feelings,
and that panorama. I call it a phantasmagoria. My great-aunt used to have something that was really special for my
birthday . She called it a monster polypheme. I said, “What’ s that under
there?” She said, “That’ s a monster polypheme.” It would be something like
a whole  croquet set or somet hing: a monster polypheme. This whole
phantasmagoria that goes throug h the mind, everybody who has meditated
knows that. Memories, thoughts, fantasies, imaginations. You realize that
what you are is the involuntary witness. You don’t voluntee r to be the
witness; you are the witness. No point to take credit for it, no point to feel
ashamed about it because it’s automatic. Consciousness automatically is
conscious becau se that’s its nature, and it’s impersonal. That’ s part of your
karmic inheritance, to be conscious. One begins to identify with the witness, the observer , then with
consciousness. Then one stops identifying that consciousness is personal,
and one even goes beyond the manifest and realizes the ultimate is beyond
all form, beyond manifest . . . out of which consciousness arises and that
makes you a buddha. • • •The willingness  to surrender positionality out of humility to God means
that one is then ready to accep t the possibility that intrinsically , men are
innocent and that they’re suffering from a profound ignorance and that the
only way out of suffering, then, is to transcend that ignorance to your
spiritual truth. Then one beco mes a student of spiritual truth in their
personal life, or even eventually in their professional life. The relief for
human suffering  then is what medicine is about, psychiatry is about—it’ s
why I went into psychoanalysis . Each of those things was to sharpen the
capacity to assist in the relief of human suffering and all of its forms,
whether it’s psychopharmacology or understanding unconscious conflicts. If you’re dedicated to that ende avor, one eventually ends up with spiritual
truth and spiritual programs, because to many human dilemmas, there is no
other answer. Just like there’ s no other answer to the death of a loved one,
except to surren der to God and the will of God in the knowingness that
eventually spiritual truth will heal all pain. The way we transcend all of that
again goes back to humility , and the willingness to let go of the way we see
things, and allow a spiritual truth which comes in of its own. People don’t
realize that when one becomes  silent, out of that silence, all of a sudden
arises a realization. We try to force  an answer , or force God to give us an answer with a
demand. Many prayers are nothing but demands. We try to force God to
respond to our demand, which is disguised as a prayer . “I prayed to such
and such.” No, you were trying to force God to give you a new Ford. When
we actually surrender to God’ s will, suddenly , we see it differently . And
when we see it differently , we realize there is no loss. The source of the
pain disappears. And when the source of the pain disappears, the source
came out of ignorance and came out of the way you were seeing it. By
constant surrender to God, all things resolve themselves—even very
advanced and complicated, spiritually difficult issues. The best way to
handle a prayer for a Ford is to surrender your desire for a Ford. Why did
you want the Ford? Because you think that happiness is something outside
of yourself. If I have the new Ford, then I will feel successful and then I will
feel happy . All desires then have associa ted with them the unconscious
belief system that they will bring us happiness, but that makes us very
dependent on the external world. And so, our happiness is always
vulnerable and we live in fear all the time, because if the source ofhappiness is outside yourself, you’re always in a weakened, possibly victim,
position. If the source of happiness is self-fulfillment within  oneself, then nobody
can take it away  from you. You reach a point when whether you physically
live or die is really irrelevant. Many times you’re looking death  in the face,
and if you leave, you leave, and if you don’t, you don’t, and it’s no big deal. When we get beset by a desire, we’ve set ourselves up for suffering. And
therefore, if we’re willing to surrender everything to God, we’re willing to
surrender everything and anything no matter what, even life itself. Then, it’ s
resolved and something replaces it, but it’s better than the new Ford would
have been. • • •
It’s the future that’s creating your present. You think it’s your past that’s
propelling you from the past, that you’re being pushed by your past. No,
you’re being sucked into your future. You’re being pulled by destiny
because by an act of the will, you’ve already chosen your destiny , and now
this is the unfol ding of what is required to reach it. Therefore, there’ s no
point to compla in about it, unless you want to. (Do not feel guilty about
complaining.) How does one transcend the ego? First of all, there is no such thing as the
ego. There’s only the tendency of these energies to form a structure. There’ s
only a tendency . They can be easily undone. There’ s two ways: meditation
and contemplation, with prayer and devotion. Be one with the field. If you
are aware primarily of the field, see if your obsessive compulsive side gets
so caught up in this thing here, that it drives you crazy . He’s got to know
every little detail, which is totally irrelevant. Was your lunch $1.32 or
$1.37? I don’ t know—who cares? The I, the sense of the self: this is the vision of the totality . You live in the
infinite space in which everything is happening. To be focus ed on, you
might say, peripheral vision rather than central vision is to be aware of the
totality of the situation. The entirety of all that’s being here, and the energy
of us being here, and what that means for what should be said here, and
what should be heard for, speaks of its own. It’s about the totality of the
energy and the totality of beings here and their collective drive.If you move around in the peripheral world, you’re always focused on the
totality of the situation, and unfortunately , you miss a lot of the details. It’s
best to be married if you do this. Who tells you that you put the shirt on
with the hole in the sleeve? Oh geez. I though t, She’ll never see that. It’s my
favorite shirt. In my spouse’ s world, you cannot wear a shirt if it has a hole
in it. In my world, nobody notices it. Why? Because I pay attention to the
field all the time. You can do the same thing in meditation, where you’re
constantly aware of consciousn ess itself. The opposite way is to focus on
the content. There is another form of meditation or contemplati on in which
there is an absol ute fixity of focus on the immediate present as it arises with
no selection. Intensely focused  on the head of a pin constan tly. You’re
staying intensely  focused in the intense now. Peripheral and central vision,
the retina is sort of set up that way too, with your focus on the macula or the
field. Devotional non-duality means that the love for God is enough that you’re
willing to surrender everything that stands in the way of the realization of
the presence of divinity , which turns out not to be an other , but the Self. You thought it was going to be out there later. It’s a source of one’s
existence to come to the realization, the radical reality of subjectivity . We
take subjectivity for granted. We take the field for grante d. We take
consciousness for granted. This is what we take for granted. This is what we
think is important. This is what’ s trivial and irrelevant, and this is what you
are. W e ignore what we are in return for focusing on that which we are not. At this very instant, 99 percent of your mind is silent. The reason you
don’t notice it is because you’re  focused on the 1 percent that’s noisy . It’s
like you have a vast amphitheater that seats 400,000 people. Nobody’s there
in the middle of the night, but over in the corner , there’ s one little tiny
transistor radio. That’ s what you’re focused on. The whole amphitheater is
empty , there’ s nobody in the seats, but you think this is where the action is. You’re focused on the tiny thing of the moment attracting your attention. Because your attention is focuse d here, you think that’s what your mind is. That’ s not what your mind is. The mind is the absolute silence. If your mind
wasn’ t silent, you wouldn’ t know what you were thinking about . If it wasn’ t
for the silence in the woods, you couldn’ t hear any noise. How could you hear a bird sing? It’s only against the background of
silence. It’s only against the background of the innate silence of the mind
that you can witness what the mind is thinking about. At that realizationyou call it it instead  of me. It’s not what my mind is thinking about, it’s
what it’s thinking about. That same realization comes about with the body . When you leave  your identification with the body , you see it doing what it’s
doing. You have  nothing to do with it. Never did you have anything to do
with it. It belongs to nature and is karmically propelled. It just does what
it’s going to do. It’s as entertaining to you as anybody else; it’s just a
novelty . What are the fields of realiza tion? As things arise, then, there’ s a
willingness to surrender them to God. There’ s a willingness to surrender
everything as it arises. When you hear a musical note, the note rises and
then it falls. As you hear the note, it has already crested and it is already
falling. Surrend er, then, is the willingness to let go all positionalities of
everything—that it arises as it arises. Not to label it anything, not to call it
anything, not to take a positio n about it. The willingness to surrender
everything as it arises. This allows you to go through major surgery without
anesthesia. The minute you call it pain, the minute you say, “You’re cutting
my thumb off,” the minute you start to resist the pain, the pain is
excruciating. The minute you get off your position, but you stay on the edge
of the knife, and let go of resisting, you can disappear any illness as it
arises. If you fall down and you feel you’ve just twisted your ankle, you
can’t call it pain, you can’t call it a twisted ankle. Let go of resisting the
sensations that come up. Don’ t label them anything. You’re not experiencing pain; nobody experiences pain. Pain is a label. You can’t experience diabetes, you can’t experience pneumoni a, you can’t
experience any of those things. Those are words, labels. You can cough,
you can’t experience  a cough . That’ s another word you put on it. There’ s a
sensation. You let go resisting  the sensation. Completely surrender it to
God, the willingness to surrender everything to God as it arises. As it arises,
the willingness to surrender , it brings you into a state of Always ness, of the
presence of reality as the source of existence. • • •
The ego tends to think in terms of cause and effect. It thinks of goals, of
achievement, of going there, and of becoming something greater . It never
dawns on the ego that you are being attracted. It isn’t that you’re being
propelled; it’s that you intuit somehow some kind of a destiny withinyourself, and you now find yourself attracted and interested. You’re not
being propelled by the past so much as attracted by the future. The whole concept of allowing  is foreign to our culture. Our culture
thinks in very yang terms—try harder , push yourself harder . The awareness
of the presence of God is really a consequence of a very yang type of
positioning yourself. Yang is like striving and getting and trying harder , and
it’s very causal on its ef fect. Spiritual awareness occurs by a revelation. It’s like you stand back and spread your arms to the sides and say, “To
thee, Oh Lord, do I surrende r my thinkingness, my opinionness, my
feelingness.” And you appeal to divinity , and you then create the opening in
a very yin inner psychic posture of allowing God to reveal. This is very well
known, of course, in the 12-Step program, which is worldwide. Through
studying medita tion, we become conscious and aware of God’ s will for us. That’ s a supplication; that’ s an acceptance. Spiritual ef fort is not wasted. When we talk about supplication, we talk about surrendering your life to
God. When we speak of prayer , we speak of devotion—acts of devotion
like pleading with God, asking to be led. There’ s a great deal of information
that is accumulated over the centuries on how to facilitate the emer gence of
this capacity to be with the presence of God. There’ s also the inner pathway
of knowledge. Of course, what the books I’ve written have to do with is
sharing knowledge that would be propitious and help the person to unveil
the inner state, which stands waiting. The inner state stands waiting—all
you have to do is remove the blocks to the awareness. Therefore, the information I give tries to undo the blocks just through
knowledge. It’s really the pathway of self-knowledge. And of course,
specifically the thing that stands in our way is the ego. Consciousness
research has to do with discerning that exact nature of the ego through
comprehension of how it works and how it originated. You can begin to
relinquish it. The first awareness we try to make is to realize that there’ s a
difference between perception and essence. Of course, Descartes pointed
that out centurie s ago. There is the world the way you see it, and therefore,
how you perceive it and how you think about it is your opinio n. And then
there’ s the world the way it actually is, which is independent of what you
think about it or how you label it or what your opinion is. The spiritual work is to try to transcend perception and begin to
experience the essence of things. I think the calibrated scale of
consciousness speeds that up tremendously once you’ve learned  how to useit. Even if you look at a few lists of the calibrated levels of various things in
our world, you begin to intuit it. You go, “Aha!” Underneath the sheep’ s
clothing is what’ s really  there. Inside the Trojan horse you begin to stop
falling for the facile and foolish . And of course, we live in a media society
in which  perception eclipses everything—how a person looks on stage, et
cetera. People are very impressed by that rather than by the quality and the
substance of the speaker . • • •
When a major catastrophe comes about, I’m concerned with the
psychological and emotional suffering of people who are in that situation,
and I pray for the relief of their anxiety and fear , because even if the crisis is
always the same, depending on the circumstances, people think that it’s
different. Actua lly, an acute crisis is always the same no matter what the
occasion is. Shock and surprise,  disbelief, and in the middle of it, you really
don’t think, you don’t really get upset about it until it’s over. A crisis is so
fast in its onset,  unexpected, it’s over before you know it. Then very often
comes the fear—it’ s surprising  the fear doesn’ t come up until the whole
event is over. And then there’ s a quick rerun and the fear comes up at the
rerun; at the time of the accident, there wasn’ t any fear. You handle the
energy of the emotion. You handle the energy and not the quality , the
energy of it. All you have to do is surrender  to the emotion, to the energy itself, and
let go of resisting the energy—the energy will take care of itself. Don’ t
forget that you have also the wisdom of the collective unconscious. If you
don’t remember how to handle something, the collective does, because
mankind has lived through an innumerable number of crises. And in the
collective aware ness and consciousness of mankind are all the tools you’ll
need. You surre nder into your humanness, and we often do that when we
pray for God. That’ s all we do—we just suddenly come into the wisdom,
accept the wisdom of the collect ive consciousness of all of mankind, which,
of course, over the millennia has learned how to handle every crisis that’s
imaginable. Don’ t resist the emotion and instead say, “Of course you’re going to be
upset. Of course you’re going to be worried. Of course you’re going to say
to yours elf, ‘Oh, what are we going to do now?’ Of course, you’re going togo into a panic.” Let it be okay to have those emotions. Those are just
natural responses. They’re just part of humanness. You don’t have to label it
that you are responding that way. It’s humanness  that’s responding that way. The average human will go through a period of dismay , panic, fear, and
then, of course, they will start making plans and discussing in their own
mind what reparative steps they’re going to take to ensure survival now that
they’ve, say , lost their job. Otherwise, what happens is one of these phases becomes protracted. You
get stuck in grieving, or you get stuck in fear, or you get stuck in
resentment. That’ s not due to worry, fear, or anger . The problem  there is one
of stuckness: why are you unwilling to move on? I would point out to a patient, “Well, what are you getting out of this
constant resentment?”
The patient would say their wife has left them or their boss has fired
them or somethi ng, but they’re milking it. I wanted them to see that they’re
milking it. I would tell them, “Well, that was a couple of years ago. It’s time
to get over it.” That they’re milking it, feeding off of it, and they’re using it. They begin to see that they are indeed propagating the resentment
themselves. In our present society , the competition is for victimhood. It’s almost
hilarious how people want to rush onstage to tell you how they’re the
victim. And they’re almost in competition to see who’ s the most wronged. Who’ s the most wronged gender  or race or color? Who’ s a victim  of money ,
social position, politics? Every body’ s out there in the competition to see
who has been the most wronged. It’s like a moral competition. Who’s the most wronged here? Is it the old
people or the young people? The Republicans or the Democrats? Who’ s
getting the biggest part of the wrong? It’s almost comical when you see it. Everybody just loves to rush on television and say how they’ve been
wronged. That’ s narcissism—to milk everything for all you can get out of
it. And then when you finally see it for what it’s worth, and you see it
through the viewpoint of the self-feeding of narcissism, you only feel sorry
that people got stuck in it. It’s one thing to, as a passing phase, milk a crisis
for all it’s worth , but then there’ s a time to get over it. What you want to do
is help people get over it and move on in life.MOVING T O THE CONSCIOUSNESS LEVEL OF HOPE
Dr. Haw kins says that problems are not handled on the level at which
they seem to be occurring, but on the next higher consciousness level. Here,
he’ll tell us why . Grief can’t be handled on the level of grief. You look at the levels of
consciousness and you see where you’re at, and then you move up. From
grief or resentment or something like that, you can move up to acceptance
and stop personalizing it. It’s not you; it’s the nature of life. It’s the nature
of proto plasmic life. It’s the nature of human life. It’s the nature of life in
this country at this time. The employment rate has nothing to do with you
personally . These are all personal phenomena. You learn to sort of
generalize it, and not take it personally and move up to the next level of
consciousness, which is hope. When you lose one job, instead of dismay , anger , resentment, and
depression, you move up to neutral. You move into thinking, So I lost this
job—so what? You look at job listings, and there are lots of jobs. You walk
down the street, and there are a lot of jobs. The town I live in, you can walk
down any street in the business district and you’ll see help wanted signs. Right in the middle of the great unemployment crisis, there’ s help wanted
signs in practically half the stores. Everybody wants help. People don’t
want to work those hours, or for that kind of money , or under those
conditions. But if you let all that go, you’d be happy to walk down the street
and make good money every single day washing windows. You just see that
it’s not really a financial problem, but it’s one of choice that you really
don’t want to move to the level of window washer . You want  to do what
you want to do—play piano, dance, paint beautiful pictures—and still get
rich. Instead, you can move up to hope that this is the opening  for a new,
exciting adventu re. You don’t know what the adventure is going to be, and
you don’ t know what kind of a job you’re going to come up with. I find every job has things that are interesting about it. No matter what
kind of a job you have or where , there are always new people to meet. One
of the exciting things about any new job is meeting all these new people
with whom you’re going to be working and getting acquainted  with them. There’ s new friendships to be made, new associations to be made, new
people who are interesting or entertaining. Some people you meet are goingto be funny , and some people are going to be awful. You know that, and it’s
just a new adve nture. Life goes from one adventure to anothe r adventure. It’s always a new adventure, living one day at a time. THE POWER OF THE MIND IN CRISIS
A woma n received a letter that her son was missing in action and she
went into a depression. She stopped talking, she stopped eating, and she just
rocked back and forth in her rocker . Nothing you did or said could persuade
her. She wouldn ’t eat; she wouldn’t talk. A week later, there was another
letter from the war department that there had been an error . It wasn’ t her
son who had been killed. It was somebody with the same name, with just
one letter off. Her son was Phillip with two L’s, and the other guy was
Philip with one L. Due to a misspelling, she was misinformed. After being
told that her son had not died, she showed no visible reaction at all. Everybody said to her, “Gran ny, granny , he’s not dead. It was all a
mistake.” And she went on rocking, looking of f into space. It took therapy to get her out of that state. When the state took over, you
might say it released all the grief of many lifetimes, which hit her all at
once. Once a state comes on strongly , it then has a life of its own. It gains
dominance, and it’s almost like you’re possessed by another spirit. Some
latent spirit in your unconscious takes over and begins to dominate the field. You see that with people with resentments too. They’re resentful and
angry , and when  you ask them how long ago that was, they tell you, “It was
20 years ago.” Twenty years ago! It’s time to get off it. You’ve been juicing
it for 20 years. What you do is you make the person conscious  of the gain
that they’re getting out of clinging to it, and you get them to move off of it. But peop le will cling to injustice; they’re great about injustice. They get so
much gain out of being wronged  that the competition is really to see who’ s
the most wronged. CRISIS PRA YER
“Please be with me and show me how to surrender and handle this
experience.”That’ s a very good prayer . Any prayer in which you are calling forth the
will of God, calling upon God for help, is useful. If you calibrate the energy
of the event before and after you do this prayer , you see that the prayer is
uplifting: it does bring forth a great deal of healing energy, and you’ll come
out of something that you would not have come out of before. It helps to live in the present. Many people are living in a fearful state of
expectation, and they’re gettin g a payof f from that. Then they find out
where in life they picked up this habit of fearfulness, and see all these
things reflect an unawareness of the presence and the availability of God
and divine help. If you think you’re all alone against the impossibilities of
this world, you tend to be fearfu l. Once you discover that you’r e not alone,
that the presence of God is a source of help, that fearfulness disappears
because you begin depending on God instead of your ego. What you’re really seeing is that your ego in and of itself is incapable of
handling this whole deal. God is the source of life, and God is the source of
strength, hope, and awareness. You pray to God, you surrender to God, and
you say, “Well, God, I’ve done all I can do about it.” In the meantime, you
keep digging in the garden and settling back, expecting that magically the
radishes are going to suddenly sprout out of the ground. It takes  your effort. Divine help is available at all times, but you don’t discover it until you
surrender to it. Then you find that the energy of God handles the thing you
prayed about for you. You don’t have to handle it yourself. When you let it
go, you realize it gets handled without your help at all. God didn’ t really need you at all. You were just a witness to what was
happening. And if karmically , you’re destined to leave the world at this
time, you gracefully leave the world at this time. What’ s the point of crying
about it and struggling and doing an infantile kick with your little tiny toes
up in the air? If it’s your time to leave, leave already . If not now, later. That
does take a rather profound spiritual experience: the experiential awareness
of that which you really are, the Self with a capital S, is beyond life, and
that death has no beginning, has no ending, and is not made of the same
dimension of that which begins and ends. It’s a different dimension, and
knowing that your reality is not the personal self, but some essence within
you that is beyond  the personal self, out of which  the sense of a personal
self arises, but independent of the personal self. If we put you to sleep with hypnosis or anesthesia or something, would
you cease to exist? No, it’s just your conscious awareness of yourself as aself with a small s. Once you experience the Self with a capital S, the fear
of dying  disappe ars forever . That which you are is not subject to either birth
or death. It alwa ys is, always has been, always will be, and is eternal. And
that which we call divinity is the essence of God within you. The source of
life is the essence of divinity within you. Imagine if I said, “You’re going to die within five minutes,” and you
said, “Well, what do you know? I thought  today was going to be an
interesting day.” If you completely surrender to it, the fear disappears. Fear
is not a necessit y. Fear is an accoutrement that we add onto it. It’s what the
narcissistic ego adds on. What could be more awful to an egocentric,
narcissistic ego than the thought that it won’ t exist or it isn’ t very important. LETTING GO OF FEAR
There is a habit of the mind that believes that if it hangs onto the fear, it
will derive something that will aid its survival—and that there’ s some gain
to the emotionality . There is the gain to the emotionality; the best thing to
do is to surrender to the emotion  itself. If you do that, it’ll dissip ate itself. If
you allow fear to just completely overwhelm you, and you surrender to the
fear, within surprisingly short order , the fear disappears and it becomes a
“so what?” It’s an awareness you really only reach through meditation, in a
way. That every emotion, no matter what it is—fear , anger , resentment,
contentment, love, et cetera—arises. Then you become aware of what it is
that it’s arising from, what it is that it’s reflecting. It’s because you’re trying
to go through the self with a small s—the egocentric, narcissistic ego—and
get to the real Self. That’ s a little more sophisticated. Very often it takes
years of meditation to do that. And then suddenly in one insta nt, that which you consider your reality
functions spont aneously , auton omously without you. That which you
consider the you is not even involved. At that point very often, you leave
the body or you no longer expe rience yourself as the body or in a body or
having a body , and you become  the witness of the body . And then at that
point, not only do you not value your body , it doesn’ t seem interesting. The
first time you leave the body , you’re amazed. There’ s the body lying there. And you think, Gee, I’d be concerned about that. But you aren’ t. It’s just
the dumb thing lying there. It’s a body, but it’s not my body , it’s not me. It’s
not particularly interesting.• • •
We feel fear as an emotion. Obviously , we are the ones who are creating
it. However , the mind does this out of habit. You’re supposed to be afraid of
this, you’re supposed to be afraid of that. A lot of our fears are really
programmed. Sickness, old age, suffering, death, and poverty are universal
human fears. The ones that are reality based are based on the temporality of
human life and the vulnerability of the physical body , so they’re not
completely irrational. We’re not talking about eliminating normal survival
caution, but caution is different than fear. When you’re walking down
certain streets in New York City, if you don’t use caution, you won’ t be
around too long. Caution is a part of wisdom. But caution is different than
fear; caution has a rationality to it. Fear can arise, as everyone who has ever
had a nightmare knows, out of nowhere, with a sudden panic. We’re not talking about eliminating normal self-preservation; we’re just
talking about irrational fears. A lot of them you get over by facing them. I
always tell people who have a fear of public speaking that I had a fear of
public speaking for many years. I couldn’ t speak. One time I was forced
into having to speak in front of an audience. I was really quite anxious. Then suddenly I said something funny , and the minute the audience started
to laugh, my fear disappeared. So, I made the magic discovery , and I have
spoken hundred s of times since  then. That was because I discovered that
humor relieves all anxiety . Putting something funny in what you’re saying,
if it can be accomplished, will relieve your fear. The minute the audience
laughs, you feel okay . That’ s a magical moment, that discovery . I
discovered it by accident. If there’s sufficient danger in the environment, as we said, exercising
caution is a rational, survival technique. What we’re talking about are fears
that have no basis in reality . Overcoming them takes a certain degree of
courage and a willingness to plunge into them. I think the average person
doesn’ t have any trouble differentiating the two. With any feeling, if you
stop avoiding it and plunge into it and say, “I want more of it,” and let it run
its course, you will eventually run it out. And sometimes you can do this
with imagination. You imagine what it is you’re afraid of, and you let the
fear come up and you let go resisting the fear. Well, there is a limitation to
the amount of any emotion. And if you keep coming up with what you’re
afraid of, eventually you’ll run out of fear, and you’ll find it’s almostimpossible to make yourself afraid of the next thing that you bring up to be
afraid of. You can run out an emotion by letting go of resist ing it—you
decompress it. Then you ask yourself, What else am I afraid of? What  else
am I afraid of? until finally you run out of things that you can imagine
yourself being afraid of. One thing you can control is focus . For example, you can think about
your toes. I might tell someone who is afraid of public speaking, “When
you go up on that stage and are standing behind the podium, I want you to
think about your toes while you’re there.” Well, if you try that, you’ll find
you can’t be afraid because you’re too busy thinking about your toes. And
eventually that makes you laugh, and the minute you laugh, your fear
disappears. Thin k about your toes. Once in a while when I want to give a
lecture, there’ s some authors’ names I always forget. I picture those names
as being written on my toes. When I can’t think of them during  a lecture, I
look down at my toes, and suddenly I remember . I’ve done this many times with people who have public speaking
phobias, and I have them practice at home and practice with me. Public
speaking is probably the most common phobia I’ve gotten requests for. I
take people through the whole experience—to keep imagining and letting
go until finally , they run out of fears. You’ll run out of fear. There’s always
so much fear that’ s compressed, but you can run it out. AND THEN WHA T? If you have a fear of something, use a technique I call, “And Then
What?” When you do this, you keep surrendering at each level. For example, you say , “If I lose this job, then I won’ t have enough money
to live on.”
Then you say , “And then what?”
“If I don’ t have enough money to live on, then I’ll lose my house.”
And you say , “And then what?”
“Well, if I lose my house, then I’ve got to rent an apartment somewhere.”
“And then what?”
“And then if I don’t have any money at all, I’ll have to move out of the
apartment too.”
“And then what?”
“I won’ t have enough money to buy food.”“And then what?”
“And then I’ll starve to death.”
You think to yourself, How are you going to do that? Are you going to sit
on the sidewalk and starve to death? “And then what?”
“And then I’ll get a tin cup and hold it up and beg for money .”
“And then what?”
“And then people will laugh at me as an idiot, sitting out there with a tin
cup.”
“And then what?”
“And then the cops will come and take me away .”
“And then what?”
“They’ll decide I’m crazy .”
“And then what?”
“And then they’ll put me in a mental hospital.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll have a psychiatrist.”
You keep doing the “And Then  What?” technique, and as you surrender
to the “and then what” scenarios, you disappear into absurdity and get to the
bottom of the fears. I’ll be poor and ugly, and nobody will like me and
nobody will hir e me. And you keep going with “and then what” until you hit
the botto m of it. You’ll eventually run out of “and then what ” scenarios. There’ s a stack, so work through the stack. I had an unexpected experience  while riding in a hot air ballo on across
the Gran d Canyon. I thought I was going to be terrified the whole time. What happened  was, as I looked over the side, I just let the fear keep
coming up. And I ran it out. I ran out of fear. I didn’ t know you could run it
out. I thought that it would be a permanent thing that I would  always be
afraid of a certain experience, but I discovered that you can run it out. People are amazed—they think it’s going to be there permanently . It won’ t.
Keep running it, and sometimes by introducing music you can change the
emotional color ation of a mem ory. To review that memory in the face of
some kind of music that has the opposite effect; it can have quite a dramatic
impact that changes the entire field. The thing that raises it the most , of course, is turning a situation over to
God. Prayer and turning a thing over to God is the strongest. I rememberwhen I was facin g a rattlesnake. There I was all alone, and I suddenly came
upon this rattlesnake, and he was all coiled up and ready to go. I
surrendered to God at great depth. I just let go and surrendered into the
knowingness of the presence of God, and a profound peace overcame both
the rattlesnake and me. It was like we were suspended in time, in a state of
peaceful tranquility , sort of a Shangri-La magicalness. The snake was calm and peacef ul, and I was calm and peaceful. Both of
us relinquished our fear of each other , because the snake was afraid of me
too. But both of us were suspended, and there was a feeling of profound
stillness, calm, peace, and timelessness. W e managed to escape into a divine
state, and that divine state, the power of it, also tranquilized the rattlesnake. Neither one of us moved; we were both absolutely just poised. It was a
great moment. It lasted on temporal time, a matter of seconds probably . But
in experiential time, it was timeless. Invoking divinit y, of course, is the most powerful way to transform it. On
the other hand, you can’t dictate to God how you want divinity to occur . That’ s what I think is tradition ally called outlining : telling God how you
want it done, when, and with whom. When you surrender , that means you
surrender the outcome and say, “Whether I get this job or not, I surrender it
to God.” Well, then, you can’t turn around and complain that you didn’ t get
the job. It would be okay if you got it, and it’d be okay if you didn’ t. If you
don’t get the job it’s because God wants you to work elsewhere. You win
either way . OceanofPDF .comChapter 6
TRUTH
The next chapter serves to answ er one of life’s most profound  spiritual
questions: What  is truth? After all, in this age of the Internet we are living
in, you can find many , many blogs and websites from so-called  authorities
or gurus claiming to speak the truth on any number of subjects . And often,
these claims conflict or outright contradict one another . So again, what is
truth? In the text that follows, taken from Dr. Hawkins’ s Truth vs. Falsehood
program, Dr. Hawkins discusses the “38 Characteristics Inher ent in
Spiritual Truth.”  After reading about these characteristics, we hope you
have a deeper understanding and insight into this pr ofound inquiry . #1: T ruth Is Always T rue
Universality means that truth has always been revealed in exactly the same
way throughout all of history , over thousands of years, different parts of the
globe, different cultures, different ethnic settings. The realized mystic has
spoken the same truth throughout all of time. In fact, it is this characteristic
that has brought up doubt in the minds of some skeptics. And the skeptic
who is scientific says, “On the other hand, it still troubles me that in diverse
cultures, many centuries remov ed from each other , the same declaration is
made over and over again. There must be some universality .” So truth is
always true at all times, in all places, to all people. It may not bediscoverable, but the eventual truth that emer ges is always the same truth. The truth by its nature has to be the same, no matter what, because it’s not
subject to personal opinion or views. #2: T ruth Is Non-Exclusionary
Truth is all inclusive. There’ s no secret about it. Nobody owns it. It’s
open for anyone to discover who wishes to do so and wishes to go through
the inner discipline to discover it for themselves. It’s not limited. It’s
available to everyone. Just like seeing the sky is available to everyone. It’s
not exclusive. That means that it’s all inclusive. There are no secrets, it’s
not limited, it’s not sectarian. It means that nobody owns the truth
exclusively , despite the fact that many such groups peddle that claim, that
they are the sole owners of truth. Nobody has any exclusive ownership of
the truth any more than they have exclusive ownership of sunlight or the
sky. #3: T ruth Is A vailable
It’s available, because like the sky, it’s open to everyone. It’s not
exclusive. There are no secrets to be revealed, nothing to be sold, no
magical formulas or mysteries. The sky has no mysteries. It stands open,
honest, revealed. #4: Spiritual Organization Has Integrity of Purpose
There’ s nothing to gain or lose. In other words, there is no profit if you
go along with the organization and nothing to lose if you leave it. Why? Because truth is self-suf ficient; it’s self-fulfilling in and of itself. Like the
state of what the world calls enlightenment or self-realization. It’s complete
and total; it need s nothing from anyone. It doesn’ t need people’ s agreement. It’s complete and total unto itself. The truth has no needs. #5: T ruth Is Non-SectarianThis is sort of a development of the first quality , of universality . Truth is
not an expositio n of a limitation . People want to claim exclusive ownership
of truth. Here’ s this select little group that nobody has ever even heard of. They’ve got this great revelatio n from Master Baba on the other side. I
mean, the whole thing’ s idiotic, and then they claim that this is the
exclusive truth the whole world must abide by. So truth is non-se ctarian; it’s
not limited to favorite groups. #6: T ruth Is Independent of Opinion
Truth is not subject to the intellect. Whether a thing makes sense
intellectually , whether it makes sense within the linear world of form or not,
is irrelevant. Theology tries to make spiritual truth fit within the explicable,
the definable, and the logical, and to put it in an intellectual context. You
can say something about truth, but what you say about it is not what it is
because you’re only talking  about it. T o really know truth, you have to be it. #7: T ruth Is Devoid of Positionality
As we mentioned, truth is not anti-anything. There is no opposite to truth;
there’ s only its absence. Ignorance is just the absence of truth, and
therefore, truth doesn’ t really have any enemies. Whether people believe it
or not is their problem. It neither wins nor loses by af firmation. #8: T ruth Has No Requirements or Demands
In other  words, truth, being self-fulfilling and integrous, has nothing to
peddle. There’ s no required mem berships; you don’t have to pay any dues;
and there are no regulations, oaths, rules, or threats if you want to leave or
not participate. Freedom, therefore, is intrinsic, which we’ll get to later .
_OceanofPDF.com_The_Wisdom_of_Dr_David_Hawkins_-_David_R_Hawkins.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The fact that somebody has lots of followers
doesn’ t mean a single thing whatsoever. Plus, some teachers start out
integrous, reach  a high place, and then fall. That is another innocence that
the innocent person doesn’ t realize; that he was calibrated 570, but he’ s now
at 190. I always teach students that sooner or later, you’re going to become a
teacher. And each of the levels of consciousness has its downside and its
traps. Once you become a teacher, there’ s this seduction  of being
glamorized; of being idolized; of people saying that they love you; of
sexual seduction ; and of the attraction of money, fame, and power over
many people. Therefore, many are the gurus who began to ascend the path
and then crashed. Half a dozen or more on TV or the Internet. They were at
a high place at one point. I believe  a teacher should teach students that when you reach a certain
level of consciousness, these are the temptations that you will be presented
with. Don’t forget the Buddha was beset by demons. And peopl e think, Oh,
they’r e going to come in the form of evil demons. Except they’re not going
to come  in the form of evil demons; they’re going to come in the form of
seductions, sweet adoringness: Oh, master. So that’s the dramatization. I’m not saying that there isn’t a lot to it. Scripture says it doesn’ t invalidate the paranormal; it just says, “Don’ t go
there. ” You can have a couple of readings and become entranced. And then
suddenly their readings go off, and some of the readings suddenly go
wrong. So all those things, they’re only tentative. And they’re only
transitory spiritual fiction, because then the reality seems mundane and
pedestrian as compared to the magical wonderment or the tarot card reading
or whatever. I think it’s the wrong direction. And here the error is to fall for
the seduction; that it is a quality  or a power of your personal self, which it isnot. The phenom ena happen of their own accord. There is no personal self
calling them. We have  witness ed miracles many times. And the trap is to think that you
are the one who brought about the miracle. There is no person  doing any
miracles. The potentiation occurs when a certain energy field arises. It only
happens when all the conditions are appropriate, including karmic
conditions. Whe n the apple is ready, it falls from the tree. Now the apple
doesn’ t cause itself to fall from  the tree. There’ s the field of gravity. So
within the spirit ual aura of an advanced teacher, phenomena that are due to
occur karmically and for many reasons may be facilitated, but there’ s no
personal self “doing” a cause-and-ef fect miraculous cure. You witnessed
phenomena happen. You are the witness of them. And one is aware that yes,
the energy field could exhilarate a propensity, but that karmic propensity is
within the person himself. And all one did was facilitate it. For exam ple, a person who is very sick and disabled will sit down next to
you, and then you can feel this energy move over in their doma in, and then
they’ll get up and walk away. Well, you’re aware it wasn’ t you that removed
the illness, it was the energy, the Kundalini energy. Because of previous
spiritual work that brought abou t an inner honesty and awareness, you just
witnessed the phenomenon. It was the unfolding of potentiality emer ging as
a consequence of the energy fields surrounding it, which potentialized it. The Kundalini energy, by virtue of its own nature, is what is transformative
and accomplishes the miraculous, not the personal you. Everybody needs a teacher to warn them of this. Miracle workers are a
dime a dozen. When the miracle came on, it was a phenomenon. Then the
personal self took credit for that. Then the ego got exaggerated. Now they
don’t have that miraculous power anymore, but they don’t want the world
to know that, so they’ve learned how to fake it. And for one of the most
famous gurus of recent times in India, the phenomena occurred
spontaneously in the beginning. Then he claimed credit for it. Then he
brought great throngs. They brought great money. Then he began to learn
how to fake that which had before been autonomous. That’ s a very subtle
thing. It’ s happened to more than one guru. SPIRITUAL TRUTHNow we’re going to talk about spiritual truth. There are many false
teachers in the world, and I was quite amazed when I discovered  how many
there were. I mean, lots who are world famous. Since you’re putting your
eternal soul in the hands of a teacher, you better know who that teacher is. I
wouldn’ t be so careless. You’re talking about your eternal  soul, the karmic
perpetuation throughout all of time, and you’re going to put this in some
flashy ad, go and get your aura read by Mr. So-and-So on the other side. Of
course, you have to turn over all your property to him as well. You get a
reading from master so-and-so through him, and it only costs you $5,000
for your granddaughter, except you don’ t have a granddaughter. These gurus fell because their instructors did not instruct them of the
downside. So in my lectures, we constantly go over: What is the downside
of each level of consciousness. Where is the trap. People say, “I’m beyond
that. ” You’re not beyond that at all. From 850 and up, it’s very difficult. And the Buddha acknowledged that; he said, “I felt like my bones are being
broken,” becaus e the demons are looking for any weakness in your psyche. There are charac teristics of spiritual truth that will carry you through if you
know of them; you don’t need a list of what they calibrate (though that’s
very handy). But if you know certain basics, it’s more important to
understand the basics. Truth is true at all times and places, independent of
the culture, personalities, or circumstances. Truth is always true, no matter what. So if we calibrate the Chartres
cathedral, the calibration is the same no matter what. Truth is true at all
times and places. It is not exclusionary; it’s all inclusive, non-se cretive, and
non-sectarian. Nobody owns  truth. One of the biggest traps is provisional
love. There’ s energy of love—y ou become quite attractive to other people,
and they will interpret it as love. People will fall in love with you all over
the place. There was a period of time when I got propositioned a couple of
times a day. And I didn’ t have a teacher to warn me. I knew the integrity of
it was being tested. Many fall for that one. And then glamor— we weren’ t
allowed to use the word guru  in my book. Every time we would ask, it said,
“No. ” The word has come to mean something different than what it
originally meant, because it was being exploited. Wealth, fame, having lots
of follow ers. all those things are temptations to the spiritual ego to
consider yoursel f important. And you see how those spiritual egos throw it
right back into a personal self, right away. The minute you think it’s you,
you just lost it. Truth is true everywhere; it excludes no one, is available and open to all. There are no secrets to be revea led, hidden, or sold—no magical formulas
or mysteries. That is the truth. When we see an ancient secret being
peddled, it’s always for a price, and you know that you’re being held up by
a spiritual conman. Truth to be truth is truth all the time: foreverness. And how could it be
the exclusive property of someone. It’s available and open to all. It has an
integrity of purpose—there’ s nothing to gain or lose. It’s nonsectarian;
Truth is not the exposition of a limitation. Independent of opinion, truth is
nonlinear. There fore, it is not subject to the limitations of intellect or form. Truth is independent of opinion. Devoid of positionality, truth is not anti-
anything. Why is that. Because truth has no opposite. You might say the
opposite of truth is absence. Falsehood has no reality. There’ s truth and then
there’ s the absence of truth, and we call the absence of truth, falsehood. It’s just like light and darkness. Light is either present or not present. There are no requirements or demands, no memberships, dues, fees,
regulations, oaths, rules, or conditions. And it doesn’ t circularize
everybody, askin g for donations. It is non-controlling. Spiritual purity has
no intere st in the personal lives  of the aspirants, in their clothing or dress,
their style, their sex life, their economics, their family patterns, their
lifestyle, or their dietary habits. It is free of force or intimida tion. When
people are threa tened in their spiritual groups, or belong to the sect, there
are recriminations if they try to get out of it. Sometimes punishment is quite
severe. When there’ s truth, there’ s no force or intimidation, no
brainwashing or adulation of the leaders, no training rituals. Watch out for
training rituals—that’ s the call of brainwash by which you’re indoctrinated. If you know the truth, what do you need to be trained. Do not take any
oaths. Do not pledge anything. “And if I fail to break these oaths, may such
and such happen to me. ” Never take such a vow. Truth is freedom; being
free to come and go without persuasion, coercion, intimidation, or
consequences. There is no hierarchy, and instead there is voluntary
fulfillment of practical necessities and duties. Everyone I work with does
what they do because that’ s what needs to be done. If you do have a leader or peop le whom you honor, it’s because of what
one has become, rather than as a result of some title or trapping. You
recognize truth when you see it. I respect all that exists because of the
essence of that which they are, which I sense right away. Therefore, yougive respect to the little beetle walking along, give respect to the animals,
give respect to the polar bear. You give respect to all that exists by virtue of
that which it is. The essence of the thing is that which it is. And what does a thing mean. What a thing means is what it is. What it is, is what it means. That’ s hard to
see. But then you get the essence of it. What this thing means is what it is. You don’t have to add adjective s, adverbs, languaging; it speaks for itself
by virtue of its existence. So, a teacher should speak for himsel f because of
the reality of that which it is. That which it is, not that which is spoken
about. It’s not materialistic, not the neediness of worldly wealth  and all the
stuff that goes with it. Inspirational truth avoids glamorization, seduction, and theat rics. I’ve
been to so-called spiritual even ts that were like a Broadway production:
videos and orchestras and flashing lights. There’ s no need for worldly
wealth, you see. Wealth is the difference between your desires and that
which you have. If you want to transcend spiritually, let go of wantingness. Let go of wanting admiration, wanting possessions, wanting control. When
you finally let go of all wantingness, you’ve got more than what you need. When I first came to Sedona, I rented a place. I didn’ t even have a bed,
so I went and bought a cot at the dollar store. I bought some blankets at the
Goodwill. I got a nice wooden box and put a candlestick next to it. I put an
apple in the refrigerator and saved that for dinner. What more do you need. I was complete. God will provide for you if you need it, so I tested that out
too. I walked out with no money  or no food and wandered around Sedona. I
got invited for breakfast. I got invited for lunch and invited for dinner. I’d
say, “I haven’ t got any money. ” And they’d tell me it’s on the house. What
you need is provided. Therefore, if you need nothing, you already have
abundance. INTEGRITY OF THE TEACHER
The integrity of the teacher speaks for itself. Some people can intuit it,
and other people, of course, cannot. With everything I say, I am constantly
aware all the time, in an unspok en constant awareness, that I’m responsible
and answerable to almighty God for everything that I say every second. And as a teacher, that responsibility is heightened. I’m extremely aware of
everything I say. Therefore, very often, like when I give a lectur e, I will sortof intuit  a thing as being so, but I want to make sure it’s so. I’ll do muscle
testing and say, “Let’ s check this out and see if it’s so, because I do not
want to teach any error. ”
I still get wild, crazy e-mails. Every author gets crazy mail, you know,
where they accuse you of being a fraud in some way. And I’ll say, “Having
taught the whole world how to discern truth from falsehood in a matter of
seconds, I’m very unlikely to try to present falsehood. ” Having already told
them how to discern the difference between truth and falseho od, I’m not
very likely going to present falsehood with tens of thousands of people out
there doing that. So spiritual reality is educational, it’s self-supporting. We
don’t ask anything of anybody except the cost of the event. God is void of induced unnatural states of consciousness,  such as
parapsychological states, or the abnormal breathing patterns, positions,
postures, and other ways to try and force the Kundalini energy. When the
Kundalini is ready to rise, it does so automatically because of its own truth. As you become loving, the Kundalini energy rises; it’s not going to rise
because you cross your legs and sit in front of a picture of the Buddha and
burn incense and do all kinds of mystical incantation stuff. Just try to be
kindly and loving and step over the beetle, and you can save yourself all
that stuff. You can save all kinds of money on incense and mystical music
and gongs. You start to see the theatricalization of it all. You get these
spiritual magazines and on the cover, there’ s always a beautiful blonde with
flowing hair. Are we supposed to believe that sexual allure is a pathway to
God. After all, you never get an unattractive person on the front cover of
these magazines. I thought for a while, you weren’ t going to get to heaven
without long blond hair. They always do a mystical yoga posture too. That’ s
the glam orization of it, the theatrics. Avoid unnatural things and especially
trainings that are going to teach  you mystical powers; trainings that teach
you mystical powers, all of them calibrate about 205. Look at this seduction to the spiritual ego. “Oh, I’m going to be special. And I’m going to have superpowers. ” If they had superpowers, they
wouldn’ t be selling them to you, would they. If you’ve got superpowers,
and are so rich and powerful and complete within yourself, what would you
be selling it for. You’d be selling it because you’re needy. Needy of what. More power and wealth. Give me break. I would receive so many e-mails
about some weird guru somewhere, Tasmania or someplace. And the guru
would calibrate at about 180. INNER CALLING AND INNER GENUINENESS
When one is growing and seeking, there may be others in one’s life that
may not understand their pursuit to grow even further spiritually. Dr. Hawkins tells us how to r espond in these kinds of situations. I believe people should use discretion. You don’t have to tell people what
you’re doing and why you’re doing it. When I left the East, I didn’ t explain
it to anybody; there’s nothing they’re going to understand about  that. There
are probably very few people who you’re going to be able to confide in
about what you’re really up to and what’ s really going on with your life. Everybody has a certain compr ehension of an inner calling, and I find the
best way you can describe it, is “I reached a satisfaction with a certain point
in my life and a very strong inner calling said to me, ‘Here’ s a whole
different other area you need develop and grow. ’ And I had to follow that
calling. ”
You can usually  get by with saying you have an inner calling. Of course,
people will try to argue with you, because you’re challenging their world
view. You’re negating to some degree the value of their world view. And so
they may expect you to defend it. And I would not defend that. I would just
say, “Look, that’s my calling. And that’s the way it is. ” “Well, what about
the wife and the kids. What about the business. ” and blah, blah, blah. I
respond, “Well, God will have to look after that. God is the creator of the
universe. He’s the savior of mankind. God can just worry about it, because
I’m going to be busy doing something else. ” “He’ s lost his mind,” they’ll
say. Well, when your mind goes silent, you have  lost your mind. And I realized it’s a compliment. I’ve been at it for 30 years; I finally did
lose my mind. And they’re saying, “I think he’s lost his mind. ” Look at the
life I had before. I had the life and I can’t tell you how ultima te it was. It
was ultimate in ways that the world doesn’ t even know about. The most
ultimate people don’t even reveal to the world what they really are about a
good deal of the time. Organizations they belong to don’t even appear on
the map. So you walk away from that world and you walk into a different
world where genuineness, intrinsic inner genuineness, is what counts. When
you say thank you to a waitress or to a clerk in the store, it has to be from a
genuine appreciation. You see their beingness and there is-ness. And what
you’re saying is the truth. If you’re just doing it as a superficial manipulation, it doesn’ t have the
same effect. When you see how hurried the person is and how hard they’re
trying to keep up with it all, you appreciate the humanness in people. When
you reflect back the genuine value of their humanness, what you’re really
reflecting back is the sacredness of their existence. You see, when you
acknowledge people, you are reflecting back to them their inner worth—
and their inner worth is infinite. The inner worth of every human being is
infinite. Its potential is infinite. That which is created by God. You can’t say that one creation of God
is better than another. All are equally creatures of God. So, this is the
transformation you go through. Let’s say you walk down the street, and you
see a little black beetle on his back, flailing his legs around, and you see
others walk past it. You can tell you’re making spiritual progr ess when it
bothers you, you turn the little beetle on his feet, and then you walk away
happy. At that point, you realiz e you’re loving life and you’re discerning
the sacredness of it, because his little life is just as sacred to him. And so
you’re sent by God to turn him over and say, “Well, God, I’m turning over
this little beetle because I know you want me to. ” (You know, you can joke
around with God; I do that all the time. ) There is a point where you can’t walk by the beetle without helping it. Then there is an even higher space, a different level of consc iousness, in
which the beetle’ s karma is the beetle’ s karma, and yours is yours. So you
become a servant of God when  you see the intrinsic holiness of all of life
and you try to preserve it as best you can, because that’s how God reflects
through you. OceanofPDF. comChapter 5
SURRENDER
In this chapter, we move beyon d specific spiritual obstacles to perhaps
the greatest challenge that faces any spiritual seeker: the willingness to
surrender everything, including the payoffs to the ego, to God. This sounds like it would be easy. After all, to surrender means to let go
and not have to do anything. What could be easier. In truth, the process of
surrendering is one of the most difficult steps along the path to
enlightenment because the tentacles of the ego, even among the most
spiritually inclined, are deep and firmly entrenched. However, after reading
this chapter, you’ll see why a commitment to this surrendering process is
more than commensurate with the demands. The willingness  to surrender the payof f of the ego allows you to let
everything go experientially as it arises. This includes the payoff of grief,
anger, resentment, or hatred. With surrender, you have to choo se. What do
you surrender to God in the way of surrender. What does devotion mean. I
love thee, oh Lord, greater than. I love the glee I get out of my hatreds, my
wickedness, my shame, my guilt, my revenge. Either you love God or you
love revenge. You can’t have them both. Either you love God or you love
self-pity. It’s always really a choice. Am I willing to surrender this for the
love of God, or not. To become enlightened, that power has to be strong. You have to be willing to give up everything  for God. And I mean
everything. This is because at the last moment before that ultimateexperience revea ls itself (or condition takes over, rather), you will be asked
to surrender your life. The core of what you think is your life—the core of the ego, the self, the
real you—you lay that down for God. It’s scary because you need to let go
of all this payof f, and you look at all this stuff. Now suddenly, there’ s an
infinite presence that is like yourself, what you think is yourself. And this
one, too, lies down, and there’ s a moment of terror and you experience
death. There’ s only one death. You never experience it again. But there is
one death you’l l live through. You don’t know that you’re going to live
through it. The ego has the notion that it’s going to be the same, only enlightened. “I’ll still be me, but I’ll be the enlightened  me. ” No, you aren’t going to be
you. It’s my responsibility to prepare you for the last moment, because
everybody here is going to be headed for the last moment. Unle ss you hear
the truth, you won’ t know what to do. Therefore, karmically I am laying
down that I have spoken the truth. At that last moment you will get, “Walk
straight ahead no matter what. ” Die for God. And as you lay down your life,
the agony of death arises (and it is agonizing and you do die). And then,
before you stands the splendor. That what you thought was life was not life
anyway. But because it is so real, you see why you’ve guarded  it all these
lifetimes. It’ s so convincingly real, that it is your life. That it is the source to
your life. The ego is very, very strong or it wouldn’ t have surviv ed all these
lifetimes. At this last moment, it tells you, or you feel that it’s the very
source of your life that you’re laying down. At that point, I’m telling you, it
is safe to surren der. It is safe, but you have to have a knowingn ess that it’s
safe. You have to have heard it, you have to know it. You have to have it in
your aura. And then out of nowhere, it comes to you, and you walk right
through. The Zen saying to walk into fear no matter what got me through it. “No matter what” means without limitation, even to death itself, no matter
what. I repeat the words of the master, who I followed at that moment: no
matter what. • • •
As you surrende r, as you’re willing to let go, you’ll see the ego hangs on
because it’s getting something out of it. Now, everybody’ s ego is going to
resist this. Expe ct it to. The old ego says, “This hatred is justified. ” To giveup self-pity, to give up anger, to give up resentment, to surrender them
through forgiveness. The power  of A Course in Miracles  is the willingness
to for give all and get out of the lower fields of consciousness. In the beginning, the ego identifies with form. How does the ego know
that. Because it registers form through recognition. You’ll notice that there
isn’t any me that’s thinking anyway. There is a watcher -experiencer. In
meditation or in contemplation, if you focus on the field, you’ll notice that
witnessing is happening of its own accord. The first thing you notice about consciousness is it’s automatic. The light
of consciousness is automatic. It expresses as the watcher or the experiencer
through awareness, the observer; you get to the source of that faculty, and
you’ll see that’s an impersonal faculty. There isn’t any personal you that
decided to be consciously aware. Witnessing is happening of its own
accord. In meditation you pull back from identifying with the content of
meditation. I am this, I did that, and all that. That’ s all fallacious story. You
realize that, that which I am is the witness of all those though ts, feelings,
and that panorama. I call it a phantasmagoria. My great-aunt used to have something that was really special for my
birthday. She called it a monster polypheme. I said, “What’ s that under
there. ” She said, “That’ s a monster polypheme. ” It would be something like
a whole  croquet set or somet hing: a monster polypheme. This whole
phantasmagoria that goes throug h the mind, everybody who has meditated
knows that. Memories, thoughts, fantasies, imaginations. You realize that
what you are is the involuntary witness. You don’t voluntee r to be the
witness; you are the witness. No point to take credit for it, no point to feel
ashamed about it because it’s automatic. Consciousness automatically is
conscious becau se that’s its nature, and it’s impersonal. That’ s part of your
karmic inheritance, to be conscious. One begins to identify with the witness, the observer, then with
consciousness. Then one stops identifying that consciousness is personal,
and one even goes beyond the manifest and realizes the ultimate is beyond
all form, beyond manifest. out of which consciousness arises and that
makes you a buddha. • • •The willingness  to surrender positionality out of humility to God means
that one is then ready to accep t the possibility that intrinsically, men are
innocent and that they’re suffering from a profound ignorance and that the
only way out of suffering, then, is to transcend that ignorance to your
spiritual truth. Then one beco mes a student of spiritual truth in their
personal life, or even eventually in their professional life. The relief for
human suffering  then is what medicine is about, psychiatry is about—it’ s
why I went into psychoanalysis. Each of those things was to sharpen the
capacity to assist in the relief of human suffering and all of its forms,
whether it’s psychopharmacology or understanding unconscious conflicts. If you’re dedicated to that ende avor, one eventually ends up with spiritual
truth and spiritual programs, because to many human dilemmas, there is no
other answer. Just like there’ s no other answer to the death of a loved one,
except to surren der to God and the will of God in the knowingness that
eventually spiritual truth will heal all pain. The way we transcend all of that
again goes back to humility, and the willingness to let go of the way we see
things, and allow a spiritual truth which comes in of its own. People don’t
realize that when one becomes  silent, out of that silence, all of a sudden
arises a realization. We try to force  an answer, or force God to give us an answer with a
demand. Many prayers are nothing but demands. We try to force God to
respond to our demand, which is disguised as a prayer. “I prayed to such
and such. ” No, you were trying to force God to give you a new Ford. When
we actually surrender to God’ s will, suddenly, we see it differently. And
when we see it differently, we realize there is no loss. The source of the
pain disappears. And when the source of the pain disappears, the source
came out of ignorance and came out of the way you were seeing it. By
constant surrender to God, all things resolve themselves—even very
advanced and complicated, spiritually difficult issues. The best way to
handle a prayer for a Ford is to surrender your desire for a Ford. Why did
you want the Ford. Because you think that happiness is something outside
of yourself. If I have the new Ford, then I will feel successful and then I will
feel happy. All desires then have associa ted with them the unconscious
belief system that they will bring us happiness, but that makes us very
dependent on the external world. And so, our happiness is always
vulnerable and we live in fear all the time, because if the source ofhappiness is outside yourself, you’re always in a weakened, possibly victim,
position. If the source of happiness is self-fulfillment within  oneself, then nobody
can take it away  from you. You reach a point when whether you physically
live or die is really irrelevant. Many times you’re looking death  in the face,
and if you leave, you leave, and if you don’t, you don’t, and it’s no big deal. When we get beset by a desire, we’ve set ourselves up for suffering. And
therefore, if we’re willing to surrender everything to God, we’re willing to
surrender everything and anything no matter what, even life itself. Then, it’ s
resolved and something replaces it, but it’s better than the new Ford would
have been. • • •
It’s the future that’s creating your present. You think it’s your past that’s
propelling you from the past, that you’re being pushed by your past. No,
you’re being sucked into your future. You’re being pulled by destiny
because by an act of the will, you’ve already chosen your destiny, and now
this is the unfol ding of what is required to reach it. Therefore, there’ s no
point to compla in about it, unless you want to. (Do not feel guilty about
complaining. ) How does one transcend the ego. First of all, there is no such thing as the
ego. There’s only the tendency of these energies to form a structure. There’ s
only a tendency. They can be easily undone. There’ s two ways: meditation
and contemplation, with prayer and devotion. Be one with the field. If you
are aware primarily of the field, see if your obsessive compulsive side gets
so caught up in this thing here, that it drives you crazy. He’s got to know
every little detail, which is totally irrelevant. Was your lunch $1. 32 or
$1. 37. I don’ t know—who cares. The I, the sense of the self: this is the vision of the totality. You live in the
infinite space in which everything is happening. To be focus ed on, you
might say, peripheral vision rather than central vision is to be aware of the
totality of the situation. The entirety of all that’s being here, and the energy
of us being here, and what that means for what should be said here, and
what should be heard for, speaks of its own. It’s about the totality of the
energy and the totality of beings here and their collective drive. If you move around in the peripheral world, you’re always focused on the
totality of the situation, and unfortunately, you miss a lot of the details. It’s
best to be married if you do this. Who tells you that you put the shirt on
with the hole in the sleeve. Oh geez. I though t, She’ll never see that. It’s my
favorite shirt. In my spouse’ s world, you cannot wear a shirt if it has a hole
in it. In my world, nobody notices it. Why. Because I pay attention to the
field all the time. You can do the same thing in meditation, where you’re
constantly aware of consciousn ess itself. The opposite way is to focus on
the content. There is another form of meditation or contemplati on in which
there is an absol ute fixity of focus on the immediate present as it arises with
no selection. Intensely focused  on the head of a pin constan tly. You’re
staying intensely  focused in the intense now. Peripheral and central vision,
the retina is sort of set up that way too, with your focus on the macula or the
field. Devotional non-duality means that the love for God is enough that you’re
willing to surrender everything that stands in the way of the realization of
the presence of divinity, which turns out not to be an other, but the Self. You thought it was going to be out there later. It’s a source of one’s
existence to come to the realization, the radical reality of subjectivity. We
take subjectivity for granted. We take the field for grante d. We take
consciousness for granted. This is what we take for granted. This is what we
think is important. This is what’ s trivial and irrelevant, and this is what you
are. W e ignore what we are in return for focusing on that which we are not. At this very instant, 99 percent of your mind is silent. The reason you
don’t notice it is because you’re  focused on the 1 percent that’s noisy. It’s
like you have a vast amphitheater that seats 400,000 people. Nobody’s there
in the middle of the night, but over in the corner, there’ s one little tiny
transistor radio. That’ s what you’re focused on. The whole amphitheater is
empty, there’ s nobody in the seats, but you think this is where the action is. You’re focused on the tiny thing of the moment attracting your attention. Because your attention is focuse d here, you think that’s what your mind is. That’ s not what your mind is. The mind is the absolute silence. If your mind
wasn’ t silent, you wouldn’ t know what you were thinking about. If it wasn’ t
for the silence in the woods, you couldn’ t hear any noise. How could you hear a bird sing. It’s only against the background of
silence. It’s only against the background of the innate silence of the mind
that you can witness what the mind is thinking about. At that realizationyou call it it instead  of me. It’s not what my mind is thinking about, it’s
what it’s thinking about. That same realization comes about with the body. When you leave  your identification with the body, you see it doing what it’s
doing. You have  nothing to do with it. Never did you have anything to do
with it. It belongs to nature and is karmically propelled. It just does what
it’s going to do. It’s as entertaining to you as anybody else; it’s just a
novelty. What are the fields of realiza tion. As things arise, then, there’ s a
willingness to surrender them to God. There’ s a willingness to surrender
everything as it arises. When you hear a musical note, the note rises and
then it falls. As you hear the note, it has already crested and it is already
falling. Surrend er, then, is the willingness to let go all positionalities of
everything—that it arises as it arises. Not to label it anything, not to call it
anything, not to take a positio n about it. The willingness to surrender
everything as it arises. This allows you to go through major surgery without
anesthesia. The minute you call it pain, the minute you say, “You’re cutting
my thumb off,” the minute you start to resist the pain, the pain is
excruciating. The minute you get off your position, but you stay on the edge
of the knife, and let go of resisting, you can disappear any illness as it
arises. If you fall down and you feel you’ve just twisted your ankle, you
can’t call it pain, you can’t call it a twisted ankle. Let go of resisting the
sensations that come up. Don’ t label them anything. You’re not experiencing pain; nobody experiences pain. Pain is a label. You can’t experience diabetes, you can’t experience pneumoni a, you can’t
experience any of those things. Those are words, labels. You can cough,
you can’t experience  a cough. That’ s another word you put on it. There’ s a
sensation. You let go resisting  the sensation. Completely surrender it to
God, the willingness to surrender everything to God as it arises. As it arises,
the willingness to surrender, it brings you into a state of Always ness, of the
presence of reality as the source of existence. • • •
The ego tends to think in terms of cause and effect. It thinks of goals, of
achievement, of going there, and of becoming something greater. It never
dawns on the ego that you are being attracted. It isn’t that you’re being
propelled; it’s that you intuit somehow some kind of a destiny withinyourself, and you now find yourself attracted and interested. You’re not
being propelled by the past so much as attracted by the future. The whole concept of allowing  is foreign to our culture. Our culture
thinks in very yang terms—try harder, push yourself harder. The awareness
of the presence of God is really a consequence of a very yang type of
positioning yourself. Yang is like striving and getting and trying harder, and
it’s very causal on its ef fect. Spiritual awareness occurs by a revelation. It’s like you stand back and spread your arms to the sides and say, “To
thee, Oh Lord, do I surrende r my thinkingness, my opinionness, my
feelingness. ” And you appeal to divinity, and you then create the opening in
a very yin inner psychic posture of allowing God to reveal. This is very well
known, of course, in the 12-Step program, which is worldwide. Through
studying medita tion, we become conscious and aware of God’ s will for us. That’ s a supplication; that’ s an acceptance. Spiritual ef fort is not wasted. When we talk about supplication, we talk about surrendering your life to
God. When we speak of prayer, we speak of devotion—acts of devotion
like pleading with God, asking to be led. There’ s a great deal of information
that is accumulated over the centuries on how to facilitate the emer gence of
this capacity to be with the presence of God. There’ s also the inner pathway
of knowledge. Of course, what the books I’ve written have to do with is
sharing knowledge that would be propitious and help the person to unveil
the inner state, which stands waiting. The inner state stands waiting—all
you have to do is remove the blocks to the awareness. Therefore, the information I give tries to undo the blocks just through
knowledge. It’s really the pathway of self-knowledge. And of course,
specifically the thing that stands in our way is the ego. Consciousness
research has to do with discerning that exact nature of the ego through
comprehension of how it works and how it originated. You can begin to
relinquish it. The first awareness we try to make is to realize that there’ s a
difference between perception and essence. Of course, Descartes pointed
that out centurie s ago. There is the world the way you see it, and therefore,
how you perceive it and how you think about it is your opinio n. And then
there’ s the world the way it actually is, which is independent of what you
think about it or how you label it or what your opinion is. The spiritual work is to try to transcend perception and begin to
experience the essence of things. I think the calibrated scale of
consciousness speeds that up tremendously once you’ve learned  how to useit. Even if you look at a few lists of the calibrated levels of various things in
our world, you begin to intuit it. You go, “Aha. ” Underneath the sheep’ s
clothing is what’ s really  there. Inside the Trojan horse you begin to stop
falling for the facile and foolish. And of course, we live in a media society
in which  perception eclipses everything—how a person looks on stage, et
cetera. People are very impressed by that rather than by the quality and the
substance of the speaker. • • •
When a major catastrophe comes about, I’m concerned with the
psychological and emotional suffering of people who are in that situation,
and I pray for the relief of their anxiety and fear, because even if the crisis is
always the same, depending on the circumstances, people think that it’s
different. Actua lly, an acute crisis is always the same no matter what the
occasion is. Shock and surprise,  disbelief, and in the middle of it, you really
don’t think, you don’t really get upset about it until it’s over. A crisis is so
fast in its onset,  unexpected, it’s over before you know it. Then very often
comes the fear—it’ s surprising  the fear doesn’ t come up until the whole
event is over. And then there’ s a quick rerun and the fear comes up at the
rerun; at the time of the accident, there wasn’ t any fear. You handle the
energy of the emotion. You handle the energy and not the quality, the
energy of it. All you have to do is surrender  to the emotion, to the energy itself, and
let go of resisting the energy—the energy will take care of itself. Don’ t
forget that you have also the wisdom of the collective unconscious. If you
don’t remember how to handle something, the collective does, because
mankind has lived through an innumerable number of crises. And in the
collective aware ness and consciousness of mankind are all the tools you’ll
need. You surre nder into your humanness, and we often do that when we
pray for God. That’ s all we do—we just suddenly come into the wisdom,
accept the wisdom of the collect ive consciousness of all of mankind, which,
of course, over the millennia has learned how to handle every crisis that’s
imaginable. Don’ t resist the emotion and instead say, “Of course you’re going to be
upset. Of course you’re going to be worried. Of course you’re going to say
to yours elf, ‘Oh, what are we going to do now. ’ Of course, you’re going togo into a panic. ” Let it be okay to have those emotions. Those are just
natural responses. They’re just part of humanness. You don’t have to label it
that you are responding that way. It’s humanness  that’s responding that way. The average human will go through a period of dismay, panic, fear, and
then, of course, they will start making plans and discussing in their own
mind what reparative steps they’re going to take to ensure survival now that
they’ve, say, lost their job. Otherwise, what happens is one of these phases becomes protracted. You
get stuck in grieving, or you get stuck in fear, or you get stuck in
resentment. That’ s not due to worry, fear, or anger. The problem  there is one
of stuckness: why are you unwilling to move on. I would point out to a patient, “Well, what are you getting out of this
constant resentment. ”
The patient would say their wife has left them or their boss has fired
them or somethi ng, but they’re milking it. I wanted them to see that they’re
milking it. I would tell them, “Well, that was a couple of years ago. It’s time
to get over it. ” That they’re milking it, feeding off of it, and they’re using it. They begin to see that they are indeed propagating the resentment
themselves. In our present society, the competition is for victimhood. It’s almost
hilarious how people want to rush onstage to tell you how they’re the
victim. And they’re almost in competition to see who’ s the most wronged. Who’ s the most wronged gender  or race or color. Who’ s a victim  of money,
social position, politics. Every body’ s out there in the competition to see
who has been the most wronged. It’s like a moral competition. Who’s the most wronged here. Is it the old
people or the young people. The Republicans or the Democrats. Who’ s
getting the biggest part of the wrong. It’s almost comical when you see it. Everybody just loves to rush on television and say how they’ve been
wronged. That’ s narcissism—to milk everything for all you can get out of
it. And then when you finally see it for what it’s worth, and you see it
through the viewpoint of the self-feeding of narcissism, you only feel sorry
that people got stuck in it. It’s one thing to, as a passing phase, milk a crisis
for all it’s worth, but then there’ s a time to get over it. What you want to do
is help people get over it and move on in life. MOVING T O THE CONSCIOUSNESS LEVEL OF HOPE
Dr. Haw kins says that problems are not handled on the level at which
they seem to be occurring, but on the next higher consciousness level. Here,
he’ll tell us why. Grief can’t be handled on the level of grief. You look at the levels of
consciousness and you see where you’re at, and then you move up. From
grief or resentment or something like that, you can move up to acceptance
and stop personalizing it. It’s not you; it’s the nature of life. It’s the nature
of proto plasmic life. It’s the nature of human life. It’s the nature of life in
this country at this time. The employment rate has nothing to do with you
personally. These are all personal phenomena. You learn to sort of
generalize it, and not take it personally and move up to the next level of
consciousness, which is hope. When you lose one job, instead of dismay, anger, resentment, and
depression, you move up to neutral. You move into thinking, So I lost this
job—so what. You look at job listings, and there are lots of jobs. You walk
down the street, and there are a lot of jobs. The town I live in, you can walk
down any street in the business district and you’ll see help wanted signs. Right in the middle of the great unemployment crisis, there’ s help wanted
signs in practically half the stores. Everybody wants help. People don’t
want to work those hours, or for that kind of money, or under those
conditions. But if you let all that go, you’d be happy to walk down the street
and make good money every single day washing windows. You just see that
it’s not really a financial problem, but it’s one of choice that you really
don’t want to move to the level of window washer. You want  to do what
you want to do—play piano, dance, paint beautiful pictures—and still get
rich. Instead, you can move up to hope that this is the opening  for a new,
exciting adventu re. You don’t know what the adventure is going to be, and
you don’ t know what kind of a job you’re going to come up with. I find every job has things that are interesting about it. No matter what
kind of a job you have or where, there are always new people to meet. One
of the exciting things about any new job is meeting all these new people
with whom you’re going to be working and getting acquainted  with them. There’ s new friendships to be made, new associations to be made, new
people who are interesting or entertaining. Some people you meet are goingto be funny, and some people are going to be awful. You know that, and it’s
just a new adve nture. Life goes from one adventure to anothe r adventure. It’s always a new adventure, living one day at a time. THE POWER OF THE MIND IN CRISIS
A woma n received a letter that her son was missing in action and she
went into a depression. She stopped talking, she stopped eating, and she just
rocked back and forth in her rocker. Nothing you did or said could persuade
her. She wouldn ’t eat; she wouldn’t talk. A week later, there was another
letter from the war department that there had been an error. It wasn’ t her
son who had been killed. It was somebody with the same name, with just
one letter off. Her son was Phillip with two L’s, and the other guy was
Philip with one L. Due to a misspelling, she was misinformed. After being
told that her son had not died, she showed no visible reaction at all. Everybody said to her, “Gran ny, granny, he’s not dead. It was all a
mistake. ” And she went on rocking, looking of f into space. It took therapy to get her out of that state. When the state took over, you
might say it released all the grief of many lifetimes, which hit her all at
once. Once a state comes on strongly, it then has a life of its own. It gains
dominance, and it’s almost like you’re possessed by another spirit. Some
latent spirit in your unconscious takes over and begins to dominate the field. You see that with people with resentments too. They’re resentful and
angry, and when  you ask them how long ago that was, they tell you, “It was
20 years ago. ” Twenty years ago. It’s time to get off it. You’ve been juicing
it for 20 years. What you do is you make the person conscious  of the gain
that they’re getting out of clinging to it, and you get them to move off of it. But peop le will cling to injustice; they’re great about injustice. They get so
much gain out of being wronged  that the competition is really to see who’ s
the most wronged. CRISIS PRA YER
“Please be with me and show me how to surrender and handle this
experience. ”That’ s a very good prayer. Any prayer in which you are calling forth the
will of God, calling upon God for help, is useful. If you calibrate the energy
of the event before and after you do this prayer, you see that the prayer is
uplifting: it does bring forth a great deal of healing energy, and you’ll come
out of something that you would not have come out of before. It helps to live in the present. Many people are living in a fearful state of
expectation, and they’re gettin g a payof f from that. Then they find out
where in life they picked up this habit of fearfulness, and see all these
things reflect an unawareness of the presence and the availability of God
and divine help. If you think you’re all alone against the impossibilities of
this world, you tend to be fearfu l. Once you discover that you’r e not alone,
that the presence of God is a source of help, that fearfulness disappears
because you begin depending on God instead of your ego. What you’re really seeing is that your ego in and of itself is incapable of
handling this whole deal. God is the source of life, and God is the source of
strength, hope, and awareness. You pray to God, you surrender to God, and
you say, “Well, God, I’ve done all I can do about it. ” In the meantime, you
keep digging in the garden and settling back, expecting that magically the
radishes are going to suddenly sprout out of the ground. It takes  your effort. Divine help is available at all times, but you don’t discover it until you
surrender to it. Then you find that the energy of God handles the thing you
prayed about for you. You don’t have to handle it yourself. When you let it
go, you realize it gets handled without your help at all. God didn’ t really need you at all. You were just a witness to what was
happening. And if karmically, you’re destined to leave the world at this
time, you gracefully leave the world at this time. What’ s the point of crying
about it and struggling and doing an infantile kick with your little tiny toes
up in the air. If it’s your time to leave, leave already. If not now, later. That
does take a rather profound spiritual experience: the experiential awareness
of that which you really are, the Self with a capital S, is beyond life, and
that death has no beginning, has no ending, and is not made of the same
dimension of that which begins and ends. It’s a different dimension, and
knowing that your reality is not the personal self, but some essence within
you that is beyond  the personal self, out of which  the sense of a personal
self arises, but independent of the personal self. If we put you to sleep with hypnosis or anesthesia or something, would
you cease to exist. No, it’s just your conscious awareness of yourself as aself with a small s. Once you experience the Self with a capital S, the fear
of dying  disappe ars forever. That which you are is not subject to either birth
or death. It alwa ys is, always has been, always will be, and is eternal. And
that which we call divinity is the essence of God within you. The source of
life is the essence of divinity within you. Imagine if I said, “You’re going to die within five minutes,” and you
said, “Well, what do you know. I thought  today was going to be an
interesting day. ” If you completely surrender to it, the fear disappears. Fear
is not a necessit y. Fear is an accoutrement that we add onto it. It’s what the
narcissistic ego adds on. What could be more awful to an egocentric,
narcissistic ego than the thought that it won’ t exist or it isn’ t very important. LETTING GO OF FEAR
There is a habit of the mind that believes that if it hangs onto the fear, it
will derive something that will aid its survival—and that there’ s some gain
to the emotionality. There is the gain to the emotionality; the best thing to
do is to surrender to the emotion  itself. If you do that, it’ll dissip ate itself. If
you allow fear to just completely overwhelm you, and you surrender to the
fear, within surprisingly short order, the fear disappears and it becomes a
“so what. ” It’s an awareness you really only reach through meditation, in a
way. That every emotion, no matter what it is—fear, anger, resentment,
contentment, love, et cetera—arises. Then you become aware of what it is
that it’s arising from, what it is that it’s reflecting. It’s because you’re trying
to go through the self with a small s—the egocentric, narcissistic ego—and
get to the real Self. That’ s a little more sophisticated. Very often it takes
years of meditation to do that. And then suddenly in one insta nt, that which you consider your reality
functions spont aneously, auton omously without you. That which you
consider the you is not even involved. At that point very often, you leave
the body or you no longer expe rience yourself as the body or in a body or
having a body, and you become  the witness of the body. And then at that
point, not only do you not value your body, it doesn’ t seem interesting. The
first time you leave the body, you’re amazed. There’ s the body lying there. And you think, Gee, I’d be concerned about that. But you aren’ t. It’s just
the dumb thing lying there. It’s a body, but it’s not my body, it’s not me. It’s
not particularly interesting. • • •
We feel fear as an emotion. Obviously, we are the ones who are creating
it. However, the mind does this out of habit. You’re supposed to be afraid of
this, you’re supposed to be afraid of that. A lot of our fears are really
programmed. Sickness, old age, suffering, death, and poverty are universal
human fears. The ones that are reality based are based on the temporality of
human life and the vulnerability of the physical body, so they’re not
completely irrational. We’re not talking about eliminating normal survival
caution, but caution is different than fear. When you’re walking down
certain streets in New York City, if you don’t use caution, you won’ t be
around too long. Caution is a part of wisdom. But caution is different than
fear; caution has a rationality to it. Fear can arise, as everyone who has ever
had a nightmare knows, out of nowhere, with a sudden panic. We’re not talking about eliminating normal self-preservation; we’re just
talking about irrational fears. A lot of them you get over by facing them. I
always tell people who have a fear of public speaking that I had a fear of
public speaking for many years. I couldn’ t speak. One time I was forced
into having to speak in front of an audience. I was really quite anxious. Then suddenly I said something funny, and the minute the audience started
to laugh, my fear disappeared. So, I made the magic discovery, and I have
spoken hundred s of times since  then. That was because I discovered that
humor relieves all anxiety. Putting something funny in what you’re saying,
if it can be accomplished, will relieve your fear. The minute the audience
laughs, you feel okay. That’ s a magical moment, that discovery. I
discovered it by accident. If there’s sufficient danger in the environment, as we said, exercising
caution is a rational, survival technique. What we’re talking about are fears
that have no basis in reality. Overcoming them takes a certain degree of
courage and a willingness to plunge into them. I think the average person
doesn’ t have any trouble differentiating the two. With any feeling, if you
stop avoiding it and plunge into it and say, “I want more of it,” and let it run
its course, you will eventually run it out. And sometimes you can do this
with imagination. You imagine what it is you’re afraid of, and you let the
fear come up and you let go resisting the fear. Well, there is a limitation to
the amount of any emotion. And if you keep coming up with what you’re
afraid of, eventually you’ll run out of fear, and you’ll find it’s almostimpossible to make yourself afraid of the next thing that you bring up to be
afraid of. You can run out an emotion by letting go of resist ing it—you
decompress it. Then you ask yourself, What else am I afraid of. What  else
am I afraid of. until finally you run out of things that you can imagine
yourself being afraid of. One thing you can control is focus. For example, you can think about
your toes. I might tell someone who is afraid of public speaking, “When
you go up on that stage and are standing behind the podium, I want you to
think about your toes while you’re there. ” Well, if you try that, you’ll find
you can’t be afraid because you’re too busy thinking about your toes. And
eventually that makes you laugh, and the minute you laugh, your fear
disappears. Thin k about your toes. Once in a while when I want to give a
lecture, there’ s some authors’ names I always forget. I picture those names
as being written on my toes. When I can’t think of them during  a lecture, I
look down at my toes, and suddenly I remember. I’ve done this many times with people who have public speaking
phobias, and I have them practice at home and practice with me. Public
speaking is probably the most common phobia I’ve gotten requests for. I
take people through the whole experience—to keep imagining and letting
go until finally, they run out of fears. You’ll run out of fear. There’s always
so much fear that’ s compressed, but you can run it out. AND THEN WHA T. If you have a fear of something, use a technique I call, “And Then
What. ” When you do this, you keep surrendering at each level. For example, you say, “If I lose this job, then I won’ t have enough money
to live on. ”
Then you say, “And then what. ”
“If I don’ t have enough money to live on, then I’ll lose my house. ”
And you say, “And then what. ”
“Well, if I lose my house, then I’ve got to rent an apartment somewhere. ”
“And then what. ”
“And then if I don’t have any money at all, I’ll have to move out of the
apartment too.
The number of followers they have.
What does the author say is not a measure of a spiritual teacher's integrity?
He emphasizes the importance of surrender and letting go of resistance, and encourages people to focus on the present moment and not get caught up in their ego.
What is the author's approach to meditation and prayer?
He believes that the term has been exploited and that true spiritual growth comes from within, not from external validation or recognition.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of "guru"?
He emphasizes the importance of surrendering to the present moment and letting go of ego and resistance, and encourages people to focus on their inner worth and the presence of God.
What is the author's view on the concept of "surrender"?
He suggests using the "And Then What?" technique, where one imagines a series of scenarios and surrenders to the fear, and then eventually runs out of fears and becomes aware of the present moment.
What is the author's approach to overcoming fear and anxiety?