August 2, 1986

At each stage of progression, the initiate reaches the natural forces or the deities that lure the initiate with celestial nymphs...

Have you ever noticed that as soon as you are ready to move from one stage of evolution in your spirituality and consciousness to another, that the forces of creation try to put something there as an obstacle? These forces try to lure you with something, to take away the gifts you just received from creation. They try to lure you away from the clearness of consciousness, the liberation from your incarceration here within the planet. These forces are those deities which are guardians of the pathways of evolution. The reason that these guardians do that is to allow passage to only those toads that are able to hop far enough to make it past the precipice, the abyss. The rest of the toads just fall down into the ditch and then they crawl back up, they just cannot make it that far. Nothing bad happens to the ones that fall. They just get delayed on their path for awhile because they have not developed the strength in their legs through evolution to jump across the distance that is necessary to make it.

We go through life and we always hear about all these gifts from god and we wonder about all these gifts from god. When are all of these wonderful things going to happen to us? This is a sign to let you know that you are getting ready to get something from god, but you may not get what you expect. You may be given something else instead. Just before you are given a lot of responsibility, it seems in nature that you have to go through a really intense time. This is so you can be able to qualify to get it. For example, before you get the medal at the track conference for running the mile, do you lay in bed and smoke dope? No. You have to run around the track to get ready. You have to run around that track every day for a very long time to get ready. Then you get the medal at the end of it, or the reward. It is the gift of attaining that level of physical ability to be the fastest in that conference.

It is the same thing with everything in life. It is like this in nature, the survival of the fittest is the example there. The alligator that swims fastest through the water gets to eat the most fish and then becomes the biggest alligator. It is an achievement thing. I am not saying that you need to be in a competition with the things around us. You are only in competition with yourself, your higher and lower selves. The side of yourself that says "No, I want you to drop out of life and just drop dead" or the side of yourself that says "I want to get up and dance in life! I want to go on and create, make new things, dream an impossible dream, and make miracles happen in life." Rather than just drop out of life. It is the argument with ourselves, not necessarily a competition with society around us, that make us evolve along spiritually and physically. That is what this is all about here.

How do you know you are going to get a gift? I wanted to share a passage from the Patanjali Sutras to talk about here. "There are many stages of consciousness, and at each stage the initiate is given gifts from creation that allow the initiate to understand rich states of enlightenment, gain self control, receive gifts of power to control the elements, and transcend all ignorance. At each stage of progression, the initiate reaches the natural forces or the deities that lure the initiate with celestial nymphs, ambrosia drugs and things similar, as a natural filtering out of those that cannot hold the goal to be released from ignorance and incarnation by the forces of nature. The initiate should be constantly aware of the extreme comforts, of the extreme pleasures, and wonderment with the voice of the nymphs and avoid those forces which will steal away the initiates years of dedicated work towards freedom from ignorance."

What do you think about all of that? Do you think by chance that it has any relationship to when you are getting ready to make a leap in consciousness, one of these lures come along? These lures come in many different packages. One way you can really recognize it in certain people, it says they have "the wonderment with the voice of the nymphs." Sometimes the voice of someone has a special resonation to it, they have an intellectual ability and you get caught up in it rather than on the goal you were on. What we are trying to say here is that there is a middle path. It does not say that you do not eat. It never says that you do not have sex. It does not say that you do not live a normal life. What it is saying is that you do not get caught up in the extreme of these things that are there to draw your total attention and take you away from your spiritual path. That is what these nymphs are doing, and they do not normally know what they are doing. They are just people like you guys are, and they are there prepared by the deities and guardians. The deities in charge of evolution, it is like a council and they are called the Neters. The Neters say "Well, so and so here has been going along meditating and getting really clear, getting ready to pop through the barrier of ignorance and that is going to bring him to another stage of enlightenment. He is going to discover that he does not need to think that he is worthless anymore. He is going to discover his self worth and when he discovers his self worth as an automatic result of that discovery it will open up new fronteirs to him and he will be very successful in the business field of life. Now, are we going to let that happen to him and allow him to break through that barrier, or are we going to see how strong he is going to be with success on the other side and if he is going to abuse it, let us give him something that will give him a boil for a little while. Let us see if it will slow him down a little, to work his way through it and get himself clean of it. So the boil comes along in this movie of life, it swings on by and he starts swinging with it. Then he lost his direction and did not break through and gain a new gift.

That is what it is talking about right here. That is what is designed in nature these things to keep you off of the middle path. I want to stress again that I am not saying you should avoid clothing, or avoid food and cars, and sex. These things are normal. I am talking about the extremes of them where it becomes your whole life. I am talking about where you are so involved in it that it has become an obsession with you. If you pay attention, you can feel yourself slipping dramatically into one of these, they are the strongest magnetism you have ever felt. It is a big rush, like the greatest thing in the world you can think of at the time.

Anyway, it is really interesting around here where people meditate and are working on their spiritual paths it seems as if they get hit more with these things than they would in other places. There are a lot of them that always come around. One will land on you and try to get you to go shopping, or drive them all over Southern California, or do something that has nothing to do at all with your path. But it has a fringe element to it. The fringe element says "What we need to do here, is to make sure what color wrappings we are going to have for the mummification. That means what we need to do is go for a three week vacation. Traveling around so that when we get back we will know what color the cloth will be for the mummification." So, there is a fringe element there, it seems to have some relationship.

But then you are deceived and you go on the trip believing that you will find that fringe element. The whole trip ends up just as a trip. Now, there is nothing wrong with taking trips, I am not saying that at all. Lots of vacations are good, people need to take vacations. What I am saying is that they need to go honestly. Go for it. Take a trip to Yellowstone, California, the Arches, where ever, it is called a vacation. But be honest about it. Do not say that Summum's destiny depends on your vacation trip. There are a lot of these lures out there and they will always be around, they will always come around, and always try to lure you away. People get caught in it easily. Pay attention.

I am speaking generally here about the extreme lures. Such as getting involved in doing drugs on a daily basis,or drinking two fifths of whisky daily. Those things get a little intense. Or getting so involved in something that it completely engrosses your life's essence and you run off of the path and forget the gift of who you were, what you were and what was going on.

That same thing happens with cults or religions, people get so involved in them that they lose themselves. Some people around here would call us extreme, but I don't know anybody here that has been selling flowers on the corner for twelve hours a day and that is their total existence. I don't know anybody here that stands in the airport for fourteen hours a day, giving away books and demanding donations for them, then going home to their commune and that is all you do in life. You all seem to have fairly balanced lives to me. If we get you over here for three hours a week it is a miracle. There is extremeness in religion or spirituality too. The balance between physical life and spirituality or the middle path is what is important. Pay attention to the balance between the two, rather than the extremism of it.

What about nuns, and priests? They wear beads around their necks, chant the rosary multiple times a day. They live in communes, and they take care of sick people 18 hours a day. They don't even have sex. That is really extreme isn't it? Isn't that really radical? Why is that okay? But in our society if anybody does something different than that, then it is not okay right?

Would your dad be upset if you became a nun? Probably not, even though it is pretty radical. Is it any more extreme than what we do at Summum. It just doesn't make any sense to me that one extreme is okay, and our lack of extreme is not okay. If you decide to devote that much of your life to your spirituality if you are a nun, then that is okay, but if you decide to do that with Summum then people think that it is weird.

Do you think that it is possible that the safest place to live is in the middle? If there is a big thing going on over here, and another over there, and you stay in the middle out of the fight, then you are pretty safe. You have a little bit of spirituality, and a little bit of materialism in life. You have a little bit of sex and you have some more spirituality. Sex can then be spiritual too if you tie them in together. It seems much safer to stay in the middle.

Do you remember the story of Moses? He was a male Hebrew child and they were going to kill all male Hebrew children because there was supposed to be a big leader that was coming. Someone found him in a basket on the river and took him into Pharaoh's kingdom and raised him. This was in the later dynasties, not the first dynasties where the Egyptians had their consciousness, this was after Egypt became corrupt. So as an adult Moses went to Pharaoh and said, "Hey, you are exploiting us, paying us minimum wage, and we are working so hard building bricks and buildings, and you are living fat on the hillside here. We put our time in on the dock. When we get old you promise us benefits and then you find a way to fire us or find some reason to get rid of us. You guys keep having us build bigger and bigger houses on the hill and we are stuck down here, so we want to split and start our own thing."

Pharaoh said to him "Nope, you are not going anywhere. You guys are sticking around because you are good labor and we have made all the laws and the supreme justice says so. We made the laws and you guys are going to abide by them."

Some time went on, and Moses went and communed with god. He went up to Mount Sinai and when he came back down, he said "Hey Pharaoh, god told me that our people have to go." Pharaoh said "Hey, we are the established religion. We have made all the laws here, we have the right guys counting the right beads wearing the right clothes. We have big cathedrals built here and we are not going to listen to anybody that comes in here getting paid minimum wage. I mean, you were found in a basket on the river as an abandoned child! You guys are nuts. You have no rights. We are not listening to you."

So then, Moses said "There will be a plague that comes upon Egypt, and if you do not start listening then boils are going to start popping up all over everybody." Moses went away and sure enough boils started popping up all over the place. This was over a period of years, not within a really short period of time. So everyone on the high council went downtown to the big white building, and said "Hey, there is not much we can do with this. It is just a natural phenomenon. This Moses guy is pulling our legs. Our astrologers have told us and scientists say that these boils are these natural things that everybody catches. They have worked their way to our society through prostitutes and got started among the laypeople and has worked its way around. We will take care of it and develop a vaccine." Moses came back and said "Hey, you are going to get grasshoppers next if you do not let us go." So this went on over a period of twelve years or so. He kept telling them that he wanted to take the Israelites and get out of there. They wanted to get out of Egypt. Eventually they left Egypt. They finally got out because the Egyptians got sick of them bitching about everything that was going on. They were trying to change the laws and trying to get things made the way they wanted it. They tried to practice their own religion and the local authorities decided that they were going to regulate them, place taxes on them and make sure that they got all the control over what was going on with these Israelites.

So, after leaving Egypt, Moses went up to the mountain again and brought down the Ten Commandments and told the people that these are the basic things that you all should learn to live by out in the wilderness we now happen to be living in. You know this same story has been told millions and millions of times. It happens millions and millions of times in the evolutionary process it is just different situations. So they were not doing really well and here came the Egyptians pursuing them to bring them back to Egypt. When Moses was in the temple of the Egyptians, he used to perform what they would call magic. He turned a stick into a snake, and the Egyptians were able to do that same thing right back. They were both able to control forces. It was not a trick, they really did do those things. Then, when they got to the Red Sea, what did Moses do? Have you ever seen how wide the Red Sea is. It is around 27 miles wide. The water is several hundred feet deep. Here was this large group of people and Moses parted the waters into dry land and they all walked through there. This is what the bible says. Once they were on the other side, the water came back down. Do you believe that it happened? That is a lot of water. How did he do it? Moses was a little abandoned kid in a basket sent down the river. He was raised like a normal person on the block. How do you think he did that? So, he got them out of there and they went over to Israel and established the land and lived there.

Then in the Bible, there was a man named Daniel. After Israel got established, the Romans came about and the Romans came down swift on the people for the things that were happening in the Old Testament. They used to take these guys that were religious and they would experiment with them. They would throw them in places to see if they could survive it. For example they took Daniel and threw him into a lions den. When he was in there with the lions, they didn't bite him. These lions lived on people for food. They would be starving and the Romans would throw some religious person in there and they would get to chow down on them. These lions ate everyone else but not Daniel. This guy kept on saying that "I believe in my god and I have to live a religious life, and I am not going to live my life non religious like you want me to. I am going to live my religious life, and a normal life on a middle path." So then, because he survived the lions den, they threw him into a furnace. They said "If these lions won't eat him then we'll burn him up!" They had these blast furnaces where they used to melt iron and copper in the old days. Anything that went in there did not come out in the same condition. They were looking in there laughing about watching this guy cook in there. They were really going to have a joke on this one, because this guy believed that his god would protect him." So they bound his legs and arms and threw him in there. After a while when the furnace cooled back down when they went in there, the ropes they had used to bind him had burned off of his hands and legs. He was in there and he did not burn up. They looked in there and saw him talking to three angels in there instead of being consumed in the fire. Do you guys believe that it really happened? Is it possible?

Anyway, there may be some stories in the Bible that are not true. But there are a lot of incidences in the Bible that talk about supra-normal things happening, that are really unnatural to normal people. They defy the laws of physics, and everything that we understand as really happening in the world.

What about walking on white hot coals, do you believe the people can walk on coals? You can do it, right? They teach people how to do it, and even though it is very hot you can learn how to do it. So with the ability of mind over matter you are able to walk across the coals. You get burned when you stop having the concentration that it takes to control the elements of your body between the heat and being burned.

What is the story in the Bible that says if you have the faith the size of a mustard seed that you can move mountains? Does that have any relationship to what we are talking about? That if you concentrate on not being burned going across those white hot coals then you won't if you have the faith that you won't, but if you don't then you will get burned. Isn't that interesting that people can walk on white hot coals? It is possible to do all of those things. They are done all of the time. What do you think about what the Bible says about things that Christ did, such as walking on water, making a lot of bread out of one loaf of bread, making water turn to wine? Do you believe those things happened? Is it possible to do that? Do you think that all of those things stopped two thousand years ago? Do you think they happened today and that it is possible to do them today? If they did them before, couldn't it be done today?

I want to read some of the Patanjali Sutras to all of you. This book puts it into a very scientific approach. It says here, "That by practicing meditation, one can gain a knowledge of past and future events, and from rendering restraint or concentration about the modification of past and future." Does anybody believe that it is possible that people can see the future? Do you believe that it is possible for people to be able to understand speech of all living things, animals, and all kinds of people? How about experiencing former births that we call past life regressions? It says in here that you can do that too. And it says it is possible for you to know when your death is going to come as well. You can have the ability to read the mind of other people. It tells you how to do that in these sutras. It says one of the prerequisites for having supra human facilities, is that you have to perform benevolence. That means kindness. That you can see minute things such as atoms, and subatomic structures with your naked eye. Do you think that is possible?

You will be able to see the seven heaven worlds. Have the knowledge of the motion of stars, that you can control hunger and thirst. You will be able to have concentration of your mind. You will be able to see divine spirits or gods and communicate with them. It says that you will be able to enter into the body of other people. Be able to walk on water, above mud, or on thorns. It gives instructions on how to do it in here, to have the power of walking through the air, with the likeness of a piece of cotton. To gain super human strength. You will be able to control the elements such as the wind, rain, lightening, and earthquakes. Interestingly enough, in these sutras it says that in order to do things of this nature, it says you have to drink special somas. It says it will change you into another class of nature by doing so.

That red sea trick is a pretty intense one don't you think? That is a lot of water. Anyway, that is generally what it says in the Patanjali Sutras and was the point I am trying to make.

After Christ was nailed to the cross and the Romans stabbed him in the side, the local authorities came around and said to Peter, "Do you know that guy? We are trying to round everybody up who did know him and give them a bad time." What did Peter say to them? He said he did not even know him. They asked him further, "Have you ever been around and see anything happen that this guy ever did. People have been saying that he performed miracles. We heard that he made lepers well again." Peter told them that he never saw anything like that. Why do you think that he did that? Because he was afraid. What was he afraid of? Of the way he would be accepted in society. Do you think that our fear of how we are accepted in society would cause people to do that?

What do you all think about that story? Peter denied that he even knew Christ. He did not have the fortitude to stand up for what he knew. He was being called on to be responsible and he bowed out. Do you think there was family pressure he was under? That maybe his family was asking why are you hanging out with those weirdos. There are only twelve of them. Everybody else left. They were not really followers, the only followers were the twelve. Everyone else would just show up for the shows. They would come and eat the free fish and drink down on the wine. There were only twelve guys that hung out there with that whole experience that was Christ. There must have been several hundred thousand people in the city. Isn't that an amazing story? There were only twelve people that got involved in the whole thing. The rest just came for the show and the free food. It has been that way throughout history with every little group that comes along, it seems like to me.

When Krishna was in India, there was not a big following. What did Buddha do? There were only about five followers of Buddha and they made him a god after he died. Because the Indian government was pissed off at him because he said do not worship gods, find a state of meditation that you can do and do not get caught up in all this religious stuff where you show up on Sunday and shake some peoples hands and then go back out to your regular life. Meditate and find god that way. The government after he died thought they could destroy his philosophy so they made him into a national god. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Isn't that a funny story? All those stories are really funny.

Sometimes people have what they call an accidental awakening of consciousness. These accidental awakenings are never accidental. They are set up and designed. Do you think that it might be possible that the world is full of people that will try to make you feel like Peter, when you have experienced something great? It is loaded with them. Are you worried about if people like you or not? All you have to do is have the faith of a mustard seed, just a tiny little bit, that is all it takes and the whole world changes. But first of all, you have to have the perseverance and the strength within yourself to move beyond one state of consciousness to another. It builds character. The world is not going to be full of good events all of the time, there will always be bad ones too. When you are driving down the road in life traffic will be smooth and go your way, until someone tries to run you off the road and traffic goes to crap. Just because it goes to crap you cannot allow it to control your whole life. It stretches you, and you come back stronger because of it. It lures you off into getting confused out there and making you a failure, and do away with the possibilities of the Creation.