General Discussion

August 18, 1985

Then there is another form of meditation where it goes directly to the back side of the mirror and it has nothing to do with the mind.

Most meditations are very similar. You stare into a candle, you repeat a mantra, or you focus on your breath. You put your attention directly on it. These meditations are designed to focus your attention on one place, they are trying to stop you from thinking. This is the problem with our thinking process, it is going on all of the time. So these meditations are meant to help you attain an absence of thought to a certain extent.

These are all exterior meditations; they are all exterior to the soul. And then there are meditations that can be found in the writings of ancient philosophers and masters. Pantajali talks about these meditations, as does Osho, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and many more ancient masters.

These meditations move through you as you master one, you get fulfilled with it, and you move on to the next method. You can look at it as different segments of meditations, such as the candle, then the mantra, and then further. The candle is out here, it is removed from us. It is an object that we can concentrate on, our eyes analyze it and bring it back into our mind, and reflect it on the mirror of our soul and we feel it because our soul is the presence of our self. Then we move from that method to the next with a mantra. We take this mantra inside of us and it is within a more conscious mind. It is no longer exterior, it does not come into our mind from our eyes, we close our eyes and we close our ears off, and we repeat this mantra. We are generating it within our mind, and we are saying this mantra over and over, but it also works to stop us from the thinking process. Because by saying this mantra we are keeping our conscious attention focused on the mantra and it is impossible to think if you do that.

Then there is another form of meditation where it goes directly to the back side of the mirror and it has nothing to do with the mind. You have to work your way in there, because our normal operation in life is to look around and see what is around us. We are operating on sight, sound, smell, touch and taste and as we sit down and start to meditate, we begin in those senses and then slowly move inwards. You work your way into using a word, and then you go from there into beyond a word. It is beyond words because it is not a word, it is a thing. You go on the other side of things to the soul itself, and it resides there, within the soul.

It is similar to the space shuttle that sits on a launch-pad readying itself for take off. You take off from the ground, the exterior thing, you get into the air, which is the interior, and you break loose of the gravitational pull of the planet, and then you are free. You are not going away from yourself, and you are not being pulled back into the planet. You are in orbit. You are within yourself, contained within yourself. In that state of meditation, there is no object to it. It is completely self sustaining. Once you are there, there is no where else to go, you are not going to a different world. You have arrived at a point that is effortless; it does not take a source of strength to be there. Those that begin the meditation we teach find that they have to work at repeating the mantra when they find themselves distracted from the mantra, but once you obtain orbit there is no effort. It is effortless.

It seems as though nature tells us very easily what has to happen for anything to take place within us. It seems like we have to have something dramatic happen to us to make a transformation. If we are going to be born, we have to drop dead first. It is not easy to die — because most people are holding on to their life with every breath of air that they have. For us to make some kind of change inside of ourselves, our ego has to die. People go around believing their egos are dying, but nothing is happening. They are doing a lot of different exercises, eating the right foods, standing on the right toes, saying the right words, and yet it seems like nothing is dying and nothing is being born. Everything is going on the same way that it was, nothing is changing.

For example there are starving people in Africa today. They were starving there back in 1974, and they are starving over there still. In ten more years they will continue to starve, because nothing is changing over there. There is no consciousness coming about to make a change within people. Nothing new is being born. It has been that way for hundreds of years, and it will be hundreds of years more, unless some kind of mental death takes place and allows something else to be born. It is very hard to give something up. It is really hard to let go of something we believe that we have, something that we are holding on to. It is like standing in the middle of the street, and allowing a car to drive up and hit you, without moving out of the way. It is a very traumatic thing that takes place when a consciousness dies and a new one is born. For anything new to come out of something the old has to go away, you cannot have them in the same bed. The old keeps on smothering the new, destroying it.

If you look at nature, you can see it everywhere. A forest fire comes through and burns all of the old trees, and then the little new ones come through and see the sun. The old gave way to allow something new to come in. If we spend a whole lifetime establishing something that is old, it is sometimes really difficult to cut it loose and allow something new to come in. It is very painful.

So many people like to be in turmoil. People like chaos. They like to see people around them in chaos. It becomes a habit that perpetuates itself. It is a very destructive state. It destroys your ability to have unity. It destroys your ability to have peace. When you only see chaos, it destroys your ability to see creation. Find your resting place. It is a paradox. You can not take anything in to hear it and understand it, when you are seeking chaos.

People will use memories as an excuse. Memories are an excuse to stay where you are at. It is a vengeance. It is a vengeance that allows you to blame your life on someone else. It is a karmic thing. Life is full of karma that we create ourselves, and memory allows us to blame it on society, parents, or somebody else. It becomes an excuse used to stay stuck where we are at, rather than going deep within ourselves and realizing our nature. By walking up to it face to face, and looking the living demons in the eye within us, and saying "hello, how are you? Let's introduce ourselves and say goodbye." We blame all the circumstances in life on someone else. It is karma. It does not happen to you unless it is your karma. It is so easy to blame it on your parents, or society, teachers, neighbors, friends, instead of letting go of it by walking up and facing it which is a real crisis. Realizing who you are is a crisis. Until you find out who you are there is no where you can go. Before you go anywhere, you have to determine where you are to begin with. To blame it on parents, society, country, anything other than yourself is just a cop out. You will never go anywhere, because that way it is always outside of you, never within you. But it is within you. You are the one who continues to generate it, by looking back on it and creating it as a memory to repeat itself as another karmic experience in another life. Our purpose here is to take you directly to the confrontation of that. This is never comfortable. Summum helps you take a very close look at it, perhaps crawl in bed with it for a little while and decide that you never want to see it again. Allow it to starve to death. Let go of it. It is not an easy thing to do. It does not happen over night it is a process that takes place over time. That's why people that come here get very angry. When those things inside of them get confronted and brought to the surface it is a nightmare. It is very cathartic. Very illuminating.

But always remember there is nothing that anybody can do for anyone else. Everybody has to work their own evolution.

It is just like all the philosophers say that you have to learn to meditate to find your head. You will find your head in the chaos. It is a very chaotic world. You all walk around believing that all the things you are running after are the important things. Christ said to put your treasures in your soul, or in heaven rather than in earth. But everybody is running around doing just the opposite. They are trying to accumulate some of those, gather some of that, learn this, do some of that. Rather than doing something just personally within themselves, all alone within inside. As soon as you learn to meditate you find your head. And once you have found your head you can go beyond that and go to the other side and find your soul. Once you have found your soul you can make some kind of change. You have to enlighten your soul with energy. All enlightenment means is that instead of giving all of your life-force energy to your ego, and your eyeballs, ears, tongue, toes, nose, that you give your life force energy to your soul. It awakes inside of you. When it awakes inside it looks out and becomes a witness to all the things you are involved in, the things you are trying to gather and have happen. They are all mundane things. It is meaningless to Creation; it is meaningless to your soul. So the soul says I want to unload some of this junk. So the soul in a semi-enlightened state, it looks at some of the garbage inside. It is frightening sometimes. It pulls the stuff to the surface, in stages, and the very scary things come to the surface and the person says "I do not know if I want to go through this! This is too intense!" You look at it for a moment and it gets very scary. So you stuff it back down into yourself, and you put your makeup on, and all your masks and fancy clothes, and you go about your life as though nothing has changed.

You bring it up, and it gets into a fight with you and your soul, and it asserts itself, screams and yells, and tries to get into it with your soul. The soul responds "I am aware of what I am, and I do not have to be you!" and the ego does not like to hear those kinds of things, and it goes away, but it inevitably comes back because it doesn't have another home. So you push it away and cut it off, and slowly starve it off, revoking your life energy from it. It lives on your life force energy. It has to have life force from creation to live, which if you don't give it your life force energy within you, it will gradually die. By giving it your attention your whole life you have formed a very strong character. But if you draw back the life force energy it gradually becomes smaller and withers up into existence and it will not bother you again. You do this by refusing to allow it to be within you. The only way to do this is by using the strength within. These obstacles that are inside of you, are a part of you, they are living. They are more difficult to get rid of or dispose of than you imagine. It is like purging a cancer from your body. If you have arrived at a point where you have an attitude that says "It does not make a difference if I die," that is the only way you can get through this. To the extent that you do die. Your ego dies, the image of yourself as you know yourself dies. What we do at Summum is assist in that process, by grabbing a hold of these things and dragging it right up to the surface. Once it is up there, there is a little dance that goes on within you between the soul and the ego, and you take it home and deal with it yourselves. Nobody else can do it for you. If you find your own enlightenment, you won't fall back into where you came from. It is the Will within you that causes it to happen. I just help bring those up for you. I am here to introduce you to yourself. The words keep your mind busy while your soul gets worked over.

What is it that you do not want to look at? Are you threatened when looking at these demons? All philosophers, all religions talk about a day when we finally confront ourselves, do you feel it would be easier to go through it a little bit at a time, or all at once?

People carry grudges against something that happened in life. Something a parent did or didn't do for them. All those things are karmic. As long as we allow ourselves to blame the reason we are the way that we are, on somebody else and let it be someone else's problem, it will always be with us. If you blame it on your parents you will never get well. It is not within your parents, it is within you. It is sort of like breaking your leg. Of course you can blame your broken leg on the rock that you fell on, but it does not make your leg better. Or you can turn your attention to your leg, and reset it and put it back in place. Take care of it and allow it to heal and forget about the rock

Some people like to say that we should love ourselves just the way we are, that there are no problems with us. That sounds nice, but, first of all in order to make some kind of change we have to realize who we are instead of acting as though there is nothing out of harmony with us. Acting as though we are in perfect harmony with creation, but we continue to feel out of harmony. There are these things inside of us that antagonize us, and we don't realize what they are. When someone touches them, even very softly it frightens us. Your fear of them draws you into these demons. If you can confront them, be with them, understand them and just leave them behind, then they are gone.

Everything that happens to you is your own responsibility. It belongs to no one else. It is yours personally. Everything is a blessing. It is all part of creation, find ourselves first and then come back into union with creation. Until we find ourselves, there is no place to go.