Commitment

May 4, 1986

It is your will and your word.

There is a very interesting situation here. What happens around here is we talk behind everyone's back who doesn't come to class, to encourage them to come, so that we can't say anything about them while they are here. That has been a tradition around here. It is traditional history. For everybody who is here, that is what we do. And then we talk to their face about it when they come here again.

What does everybody think about commitments and honesty? It is very interesting isn't it? What are they? What is commitment and honesty all about? We look at all these religions and philosophies and every one of them has those aspects within them. At a certain level, there is an aspect in there of commitment. For instance the Christians say you cannot serve god and mammon too. They ask you to commit to god and to serve god. It does not matter what religion you are in, they ask you for that commitment. This is off the side a little — but I have seen the orthodox rabbis stand in front of the Wailing Wall and they stand there rocking back and forth. To someone from the West that would look very funny. That is their form of prayer. It seems to me to be a form of meditation. A meditative state is created by that rocking back and forth, a one pointed-ness happens. So the orthodox people, it seems to me, that they have made a commitment to something. To everyone else looking at them rocking back and forth in front of that wall it looks kind of funny. But they have made some kind of commitment and they are still doing it. They commit to it when they are really young, and they are still doing it when they get really old and drop dead.

The Muslims face Mecca every day, numerous times don't they? They do their prayers and it is a very orthodox thing that they do. It seems they have that dedication in there. When they are really young they start to do these prayers, and they do it their whole life. They hold to it and then they pass on and go on to the next state.

The Mormons, that is the thing I know a little bit about because there are a lot of them here in Salt Lake City. They say there was an ancient civilization on the American continent called the Ammonites. The people of Ammon. They decided they were not going to kill anyone anymore. Because god made them a promise that if they would not kill or take life anymore, animals or other people, that when they died they would go to heaven, if they laid down their life rather than attack. So they laid down their weapons and this army came in and attacked them. They laid their swords down on the ground, and this army started chopping off all of their heads. After awhile the people in the army got tired of killing them, and said, "this is no fun any more. There is no battle going on anymore, they are not even fighting back. These people are just lying down and dying here."

The way the story goes is that it converted all the people that were killing them into people that gave up fighting also and everybody lived in peace for about a thousand years after that, all because one group of people refused to fight. But thousands of them had to die first. Thousands of them had to die first, they had to lay there and have their heads cut off, as this invading army came trampling in. You see, they had made a commitment and they kept it with their life. It is interesting isn't it? It is unbelievable that they kept their commitment with their life.

What is a commitment? It is your word. It is your will and your word. What is a written contract all about then, someone who cannot keep their word? Maybe they change their mind a lot.

This thing, this commitment and this word is really interesting. People go through unbelievable situations in life when they make commitments with other people. One of the problems is that you make a commitment to each other, and someone usually breaks that commitment and that causes you great pain. Usually when someone is in that much pain they begin to feel very strongly that commitments are very important to keep. Because you saw what breaking that commitment did to you and you do not want to ever do that to anyone else. Isn't it amazing that we have to be destroyed by a commitment that someone has made to us for us to realize how important a commitment is? That you said I'll be there at 10:00, and you are not there. It does not make any difference. It just means I was late, or I had something better to do, or something more important came up, or my word doesn't mean crap.

Commitments are really interesting things. It seems as if all philosophical religion evolves around it. If you look into the heart of all the philosophies of religion, in the seed of those religions or philosophies, there is some kind of commitment going on there. Or there is some kind of lesson about commitment to your word and to your will. A commitment to what comes out of your lips, and what your will said inside yourself and how strong it is in order to keep your word. Keeping your word is doing what you said you were going to do at the time you said you were going to do it. That is it.

Let us say that Al and Ron decided to become lovers, and stay together for the awhile. So Al says to Ron "I do Ron, give you my commitment," and Ron says to Al "I do Al, give you my commitment." Now it would not be fair when all of the sudden if one of them changes their mind, to hold the other one to their commitment. Ron might feel bad about it, but Al changed his mind. The other partner is automatically released from it. One person can not stay committed if the other one breaks the commitment. They can, but all it does is cause a lot of pain so it is sort of ridiculous. So it is not fair, or it is not necessary to hold that bond together if one breaks that commitment.

The other one can ask them about it; "Do you want to recommit to this? Did you slip up temporarily? Did you get lost and confused? I thought we were headed to St. George but we ended up in Wendover. We made a deal to head to St. George, and all of the sudden I woke up in the back of the van and found we were in Wendover. What is going on here? Did we really make a commitment to go to Wendover? Help me understand what has happened, I am confused with the issue. What was the commitment here?"

It comes back to this swell to have a lot of words, and how we can twist the story to make it fit into our situation. We can say the bottle of water got filled all the way to the top, and then it all leaked out because the hamster ran around too fast in the cage. Now, I know I made a commitment to not let the hamster die of dehydration but there were always extenuating circumstances. The hamster did push ups on the wall and jiggled all the water out. We have got all these extenuating circumstances. Sometimes those are mitigating in there and they do have an affect on life, but we can still come back to our commitment. We can say in the middle of the thing "Wow I am really tired of this commitment and I do not want to do it anymore, and we can break it." By acknowledging that to the person you have a commitment to, it helps you to at least stay honest. What do you think about all of that?

What happens now is both people can agree with terms up front to modify it a little. The question that I am asking is when two people go into an agreement in the beginning, I am asking about your will and your word. For instance, you say to Ron "I will meet you in St. George sometime between 12 and 1:00 PM." And Ron says, "I will do everything that I can do to be there." So you head for St. George, and Ron heads for Wendover instead, because he just got a call from a hot pants chick over there. And then he justifies it by saying "Well, this other thing came up. It is okay, the person I was to meet in St. George will get over it." Now, you did not agree to those kinds of mitigating circumstances up front did you? If you would have said to Ron, "If you get a call from some hot pants in Wendover and decide to go there instead, that is okay with me." But that is not what happened. You guys did not come up with that agreement. Would you be affected by Ron's lack of integrity and his will and his word?

Answer: "It would depend on what level of consciousness I was existing at. If I existed in a level of consciousness where I felt that all commitment was the absolute priority then I would be terribly upset. If I was on a level of consciousness where I could rise above and not judge what new roads lead into a situation then it probably would not bother me."

Corky: Okay so now you are talking about the difference between organization and chaos. What you are saying to me is that it does not make any difference to me what anybody does, or what they say or where they go or how they do it, as long as it is in chaos then I can rise above it, then it is okay. Where are you going to rise to? Out of chaos into what? Exactness and where is the exactness?

You are telling us that it does not make any difference if there is no organization and no word. You said that it is not the situations that happen to you but how you deal with those situations, and that is correct. But there are a lot of nice excuses, and a lot of nice fairy tales. What about the chaos that you just left behind in your wake of unconsciousness? Does the chaos exist just because you do not pay attention to it? If you believe that it does not exist for you but it exists for the other person experiencing it, then you are under an illusion. It is a finite universe and an infinite universe. It is a paradox. If you are on the planet, and you are physically here, which you are, then you cannot escape it unless you drop dead. But what you are telling me is that you are going to escape it mentally or emotionally. Let us just say that I could cause enough chaos to prevent you from escaping it unless you died in the chaos, like dropping nuclear bombs all around you in the chaos. I am magnifying it for you because you just told me that the chaos does not exist for you. I want you to see that if you are going to stay here on this planet then you have to deal with the chaos on one level or another. Sooner or later it does come down on us.

What happens in our society is it has become so mobile, that it has allowed for a greater paradox, a balancing. When we were very small, people were held to their word but they were imprisoned with it even if they did not want to do it and they were tortured by it. Now as we have grown up and gotten larger it has given some excuse to not keep to our will and not keep to our word. It is a paradox, you are doing a lot of destruction to yourself if you are not keeping your word and keeping your will strong. But you do not even know that.

Have you ever felt in your romantic relationships a real stability of honesty and felt real comfortable there, with no chaos? Are there other times that there is a lot of chaos? There is a difference, a fluctuation in your relationship. Some disturbances and unsettlement. Don't we all experience those fluctuations in life and in every relationship?

Do you ever find your priorities are going in different directions, and if so does it cause you anxiety? It is smoother when you are both going in the same direction? Have you made a commitment to somebody and something happens and the whole setting changes and you start going down a different road than them?

It is an interesting thing. Does anyone remember when you married, were joined with Summum? What did you say in the song? There is a commitment in it to become a generator. Was there any kind of commitment in preparing for that joining? There is a purpose in that preparation. There is a purpose in that joining. I am getting married to this thing, and to these people, what is the purpose? Was the purpose to make it 2% of your existence and drop in once in awhile and see how it is going, or was the purpose to make it your life? We tell people up front that it is a big commitment, but most of them think that it is little and that we are just kidding. After they did it, they say "Uh-oh! I didn't realize it was real!" They started asking about my stuff, and I said "oh boy, I don't know if I want to share my stuff!" They run away and hide because it scares them.

We actually tell people not to join. We say specifically "Do not do this! You do not want to do this. This is a heavy duty commitment." They say "No, I have to do it. I have to do it right now. I will do it and I will gladly show my stuff." We say "No. No. You just think that you want to show your stuff, and as soon as you start showing your stuff then you get all depressed and your stuff comes out and you take a good look at it, and you thought it was something different but now you are faced with the reality, and everybody looks at their stuff and everybody else's stuff and they laugh at it because we are looking at everyone's stuff. Then everybody goes, "Oh no! I did not realize it was going to be that!"

Then they say "I am ready! I want to do this right now! I really want to do this and I must do this right now! You better let me do this right now you dirty bugger, or I am going to get really pissed off, burn your house down!" And we say "Okay, if you have got to do it. We will do it."

So we do it, and then what normally happens? People get mad. They get intensely mad. You yourselves have been mad. You have been ready to punch me a number of times. It got really intense and you thought that it would not. You are unaware of the commitment that it is to be here. What does it ask out of you? We do not ask it verbally in class, but it comes to you in the middle of the night and says "Hello!" And they say to you, "You thought Corky was making us up didn't you?" They keep saying "Here we are." They call you on your commitments. For the first six months I said "Bullshit! I quit!" And I quit for the first five years, but after a while you cannot quit.

Has anybody ever heard of the clear light, of clarity and honesty? There is no difference between them; they are the exact same thing. Sometimes people take off for a year or two, or ten years after joining Summum. But they come back eventually after making this commitment. There has been nobody that ever goes through this joining that does not take off either physically or mentally. If you go away mentally, you still hang out physically and just put in the time, everybody does it. I do it. Because it gets so intense, that it becomes too intense to deal with. So you take off mentally, you may be here physically walking around like some zombie, but your spirit and consciousness is some other place because you do not want to deal with what is happening here.

So there is no question about that, everybody has done that. Although, there is a really interesting thing that happens. Nobody is innocent of it, we all do this. People go through phases of "I am getting out of here because I would rather do something else." You know down deep inside, you don't know how you know, but you know that it is so real and it makes you so mad that you cannot get your fingers on it and figure it out somehow. So you get so mad that you take off with bitterness for it, a madness inside, a mad on about it. The mad on is because you are struggling inside about something.

Then you can take off with a mad-on and not let the mad go away and struggle within yourself about it and then become an enemy of it. And that is what you do not want to let happen. You do not want to become an enemy of your own clarity. Because that is the problem. It is like when you get too close to the clarity you can sometimes get frustrated with it, get pissed off with it and you want to confuse yourself. This is the chaos I spoke of before. It is the confusion that you can bring on mass personal hysteria and confusion, or an illusion. A lot of people do it, and they remove themselves far from their own personal clarity. They call it something else, they call it a clarity enlightenment, or happiness, or personal joy. But they are really actually far from the only thing that is their clarity, by separating themselves from it. It is not a secret; the clarity is just 100% honesty. It is not hidden under a bush. You do not have to go thousands of miles to get to it. It is just inside of your self. Nobody has a patent on it. No group has a license for it. No guru passes it out on a plate or with the touch of a finger or a hand. Everybody does it themselves.

Now people can be temporarily touched with clarity by somebody else. Although that does not do anything, it just gives you an experience of it, and you do not become anything unless you do it yourself. It is sort of like pushing weights. Someone can give you super powerful energy temporarily, and help you push the weight up and down for a half an hour. But when that person goes away you are left there with the weight. Unless you built the muscles, unless you built the soul and the will within to stay clear, it will never be yours. You have to earn it. You have to work your way through existence getting it. And then, you do not get it, it comes as a gift from creation. You can work your ass off for billions of incarnations and you do not earn it. It comes as a gift in the end. But you have got to do the work at the same time. But it cannot be bought. It still is given to you by yourself, when you allow yourself to receive it after working out all of the stuff that prevents you from having it. It comes as a gift that you give to yourself. You decide in your own will "I will do it." And that is your personal gift to yourself. It is that tiny little switch that you just turn over, it is that simple. Just "switch" and it is done. You can work for a billion incarnations, and beat the living shit out of yourselves. And it is just that switch and it is done. Sometimes it takes all that work to get you so beat down that you will finally hit that switch and let yourself out of it. And that is how it comes.

It is okay to go away. It is okay to hide out. Although do not become an enemy of your own personal honesty. To the extent that all it does it delay the inevitable. In the Bible they call it kicking against the pricks. You are frustrated, you are in chaos, you have got this frustration going on and you are going to kick the bushes about it. But it is with you. It still comes back into this honesty. Now, we still are in this finite existence. We are locked into this body as long as we are here until we leave the body. So we still have to deal with our existence. Now, let me give you a good example of this. I am saying that Rajneesh is a very enlightened individual, but there is no end to enlightenment. It just goes on and on and on, and we are at the very beginning of it. But when I saw him on television talking about Sheila, he said "She is a bitch!"

Now, in his Nirvanic enlightenment, he was able to find a bitch. Wasn't he? It is because he is in the physical plane. And you do not escape it unless you are on the back side of the coin. You still deal with it. Now, you can deal with it in a calmer manner depending on the degree of your honesty and clarity and clearness. Osho was really clear and calm but he was pissed at the same time, because she took off with all the money, he was not pleased with her. That is what he said, that he was not pleased. He was affected. Everyone, as long as they are in the body is affected. Until they get ready to leave, and then you are not affected by the circumstances when you are not there. It has a different effect on you. Because if you are eating the food on this planet, it is affecting you. If you are breathing the air, it is affecting you. If you have hay fever, it is affecting you. If you have cancer, it is affecting you. All these things happen within this world of chaos here, this prison planet. So these things do affect us.

So we try to get to the greatest state of clarity and stay there as long as possible by being strong within our will and holding to our word and our commitment within it, and build our will stronger and stronger and stronger until we can release the bond that keeps us incarnating here, and we can evolve on to a state where stronger wills incarnate. And then we begin it all again, in the cylinder of evolutionary absolute time, to build a stronger and stronger will until our will becomes so large, that it goes right back to the whole will which is Creation. It becomes it automatically by getting that large. It just becomes. We just let it. We go on letting it. But we have to work at letting it. It is a paradox, you work at it but the work does not get it for you, you let it happen after the work is over. It is just like an orgasm. You work at getting one, and then when you get there you just let it happen. The work did not give it to you, it was a gift from within. That is all.