Misery Likes Company

January 25, 1986

There will always be storms.

Most people do a very interesting thing in life and I like to call it a habit of society. The way that I see it, is that it is a type of selfishness, an immaturity. It is a form of disrespect for everyone else around us, and a forum of unconsciousness. Let us just say that someone approaches me and he says, "I just heard on the news that these grasshoppers are coming around and they are biting all people with bald heads. There is a special invasion of grasshoppers biting people with bald heads!" So this guy is worried and he is very bummed out about it. He goes on to say "I saw a guy on TV that had one thousand grasshoppers all over his bald head, biting his face and everything. They were everywhere. As soon as I saw that, I jumped on my bicycle and ran immediately over here to talk to every bald person I knew. So I could tell you that the grasshoppers are after you!" So he goes on, spreading the disease of the grasshoppers going after all of the bald people. Now, why would someone want to do this?

The title of this class is "Misery Likes Company." It is a very common disease. You create a comfort zone by having company, with the grasshoppers biting on you. That way you are not alone. You are not the only bald person, and you are not the only one that has grasshoppers biting on them. Because if everyone else had hair and you were the only bald person, and there were only bald-headed-grasshopper-biters then you would really be having a bad time with it. Everyone would be pointing at you and saying, "Look at that guy! He has a bald head and all these grasshoppers biting on him!. You would be ultra-picked on. And so you spread your misery to other people. Instead of standing there and taking your own life and your own existence and your own fate, you try to pass it on to somebody else. You take some of the grasshoppers and put them off on to somebody else.

This is a big motivation behind misery loving company, it is fear. When people are really miserable, there is usually the companion of fear standing there in the middle of the misery. The person does not really know what is going on, so it is the unknown and there is fear there. How does that go along with the story that Christ says "Thou shall not fear?" That is a broad overview of this habit that people have.

What would be a good way to tell people about mummification without getting them involved in this syndrome? The reason they want to ask you about it, is because they want to tell you how they plan to be taken care of, to get it off of their chest. It is the unknown to them. You have to let them do it, let them get that out right off the bat. As soon as they tell you what they want to have done to them when they die, then they can be ready to listen. If you begin to talk to them before they've shared with you, they have their finger on the button while your lips are flapping, and they cannot wait to push the pause button. They are holding that button, so that they can tell you about their fear. So they can tell you about the whole thing to get it over with. You could say the most meaningful things in the world to them and it does not mean anything to them, because they are still stuck with their finger on the button of fear. They are holding their thought so that they do not forget to tell you about it. Let them tell you, let them get it off their chest.

So, getting back to the story of the grasshoppers biting the bald guy; I think it is very interesting. People do it everywhere. They spread their disease around everywhere. People do it at work. Have you ever been at work and someone has a really big misery on, and they try to spread it around the whole place? So, what is happening here is an inability of the person to take responsibility for themselves. They say, "I am not going to get responsible! I am going to play the baby here and get everybody else involved in it and make a nightmare for everybody else so that I do not have to get responsible." That is the bottom line of the whole thing. Not being strong enough to weather the storm. On this planet, everyone has to overcome sooner or later in order to get their wings. In order to get your pilot wings.

You are doing a great injustice to the people around you, and to yourself. It is not fair to yourself, or to the people around you when you put the license plate on your car that says "I am a good driver," and then while driving on the freeway when the traffic gets really tough, letting go of the wheel, covering your eyes, and screaming until you crash off the side of the freeway at 100 miles per hour. It is sort of like the criminal that says "I am going to take a whole bunch of people with me, if I have got to go. I am not going down alone, somebody has got to go with me." This is the same story.

I was talking about the pilot story. What I mean by those pilot wings is here at Summum you learn different initiations, and we give you little stripes to put on the side of your uniform. Then you move on to different levels, and you eventually earn your pilot's wings. That is when you get to be the captain of the aircraft. You are sitting up there in the right hand seat. You get in this jet, and you have a whole load of passengers back there. The passengers are the society around you. Everybody who sees you as a member of Summum, everybody who sees you meditating in your life while your life becomes better, everybody who you work around who knows that you have a different name, or belong to this Summum organization, is a passenger in your airplane. You are the pilot in this aircraft.

So, you are standing there working and someone comes up to you and asks you "What is this Summum thing about?" You say, while taking the wheel, "Oh. It is just great. It is the greatest thing. The engine is doing fine right over here, the altitude looks just right, the sky is blue and I see the horizon. It is just fantastic passengers! I take a little nectar, and meditate twice a day. It is no problem. I have the world by the wing. I'll pull back here, do a little dive there, and show you how this plane drives around."

So you are flying along and everything is cool. A delivery boy comes in the shop and notices you, and turns to one of your co-workers and says, "Hey, that guy is really cool!" And your co-worker leans over and says, "He belongs to Summum. You know the people with the nectar, and the mummies." You continue with your passengers, "You need a little altitude. Let's go! Everyone can see really well. If you will take a look on the left of the plane, we are crossing over Palm Springs. We are cruising along beautifully. Everything is going just fine."

So suddenly, you find yourself with a whole load of passengers. Something is going on here. Wherever you go, people notice you. You have your hand on all the buttons. Everyone is loaded up in your plane. You have about six thousand passengers, in a great big jumbo jet. You put it on automatic pilot for awhile, and sit back and relax. Things are good.

You look out over the distance, and there is just this little white cloud in the distance. Just one little cloud. You zoom around it, and notice another one. All of the sudden there are clouds everywhere. You say to the passengers, "Everything is fine passengers, everything is fine. I have all the buttons and we will head for it, and I will go through it and fly right up there." Then, suddenly you hit this black wall. You are inside this mountain of storms. You cannot see beyond the inside surface of the glass. You can only see your face as a reflection. So you flip on all the radar, the front, the back and your radio transmissions.

A few lightening bolts come down and strike very close to your plane. Your plane begins to rock in the turbulence. So you begin to tell the passengers "Well, everybody we have run into a little bit of a situation here. We have run into some difficulty in the weather. Do not be alarmed, I will be able to fly you through. Then all of the sudden the co-pilot says to you "Hey, man, we are in some heavy stuff here! I am going to go check out the bathroom." So he splits. Then all of the sudden the navigator says "I do not think I want to be in the front of the plane anymore." So he goes back and hides under one of the seats. So you have passengers knocking on the door, asking "What's going on up there!?"

That is when the pilot forgets that he has the instruments and the ability of the meditations to take him through the storm and come out calmly on the other side. The pilot has forgotten that to weather the storm you need to fall back on the instruments that you have been given. You have what you need to take you through the storm and out the other side because you have been through storms before. Take yourself with the one key instrument, the guiding beam of Creation, through and outside the other side of the storm into the light again. There will always be storms.

This is when the pilot gets back on the intercom and says "Hey man, I do not know where we are, who I am or anything. Bye!" And he throws down the controls, runs to the back of the plane and starts screaming along side all the other passengers. He screams and pretends that Mr. Bill did it. So the plane crashes with all the passengers on board.

Now on this plane, everybody survives. They brush themselves off, and stand up and say "What on earth was that? That is the last time I am getting on a plane with that guy! In fact that is the last time I'm ever getting on a plane. They had it under control but as soon as the weather got rough for them, they wanted me to go down with them!"

So, that is when we take away your pilot's wings. You only have to do it a couple of times before you'll never get them back. Because you cannot be trusted to have pilot wings and allow yourself to be around people whom you allow to assume you are a pilot. You are allowing them to assume that you are a representative of it, and that you have got it. And you do it on purpose, allowing them to assume. Then when it crashes you really let yourself down. It is a very interesting story isn't it?

So you have a real problem. When you have your pilot wings, you have to live up to it. You cannot decide that because you feel bad today, or that you have a little bit of bad weather, or pressure that you are under, that you are going to gather a whole crowd of people and take them down with you. But that is what people do.

Have you ever heard about the plug in phenomenon? It is when you open up to someone directly and experience what they are experiencing. Wherever they are, you get involved totally in where they happen to be. So the story was, when a person is very selfish thinking only of themselves, not caring about what is going on around them, they get lost in their own poop, and they want to poop in someone else's drawers too. Do you see it happening? People play the victim, and they look for victims at the same time. People seek a victim that they can drag down with them. What are we going to do about it? May I offer a suggestion?

You have to come up with a resolve. The only thing that beating yourself up will do is help you to avoid the real issue. Being angry at yourself, or feeling guilty, is just a ploy to avoid the real issue. That is all it is.

You have to come up with a resolve to do it. It is like saying you tried to climb over a wall, and you just did not have the strength in your arms to do it, so you go back down and kick the wall, and beat yourself into the ground. That does not do anything. What you need to do, is you do pushups, and pull-ups. This helps you to build a resolve, an energy to be able to do it. Then you go back and you crawl over that wall when you are strong enough to do it. But if you can't make it over the wall, you must work on getting strong enough to go over the wall rather than going back and crying about it, or beating yourself up about it. That does absolutely nothing for you. All it does is make you avoid getting over the wall.

People lament, "Feel sorry for me! I am going to cry about it, and I am going to go back to being a baby. Let us all cry about it together." May I suggest that instead, we could all do pushups together and get over the wall together?

Difficult times will always happen. A mistake that a lot of people make is that they think that once they have been doing this or that, or practicing this or that for six months or whatever, that they are going to go out in life and they will be perfect. That is impossible. That never happens.

There will always be new people to whatever path you are on. There will also always be people that have been there and are getting better and better all of the time. Those that continue to evolve are doing the pushups and the pull-ups, rather than feeling sorry for themselves and crying about it. They are doing the work. We need to recognize it, we cannot avoid it, and it must be brought to the forefront so we know what is going on. You cannot just pretend that it is not there.

So, to outline again what we covered, everybody gets their boy-scout stripes. Everybody learns through their mistakes but we will point them out. It is very critical that all of those things are pointed out, as time goes on. This is our goal together, to try to work through these things so that everybody can continue to go on and become a real pilot and not crash on anybody. People crash on other people around them all the time.

You have all had people crash on you. Instead of making a crashing airplane story, you could just ask someone what was that comment about. Let us talk about it. Let us bring it up in class. The crashing airplane story is what causes panic. We don't have to have a panic to do things.

So, when you are a pilot, and you are experiencing something that you are not calm about inside, how can you create a calmness about it? You do that with the practice of meditation. It takes you through the storm. You are not supposed to forget that is why you are here, and that is your bond with creation. It will never go away if you don't forget it. It will always be there if you practice it. It works. It works if you use it.

First you come and learn the meditation here. Then you join with Summum, and go through the marriage ceremony. Then after you have joined, there is one after that, and then the next one after that is where you change your name.

To learn it, we ask people to try to go through the marriage ceremony for six months, and live up to all the things they said they would do when they joined. Then we want them to be dedicated to the cause and the purpose of what Summum is about, and have it be a major part of their life. That does not mean they stop their regular life, they do it too, but they allow the philosophy to mold into their life, and make it the main purpose of their life. Then they go through the next initiation, where they learn the meditation to weather the storm. After they practice that for awhile they can change their name when they decide to take a vow of poverty. This is when you don't own anything. It is a vow of moving with the consciousness of the whole of Summum when you change your name. That is what it is about. But, people drop out at every stage.

These meditations that we teach, they really do work, and they really are important. There is a big responsibility when you learn them, to the extent that there really is a spiritual continuation, where you go from one incarnation to another incarnation. Once you have learned that type of meditation it is sort of like the story in the bible, "Don't cast your pearls before swine." If you don't use it you will lose it and you won't get it back. It is like when your parents gave you something that was very, very, very valuable and they tried to explain what it is and you abused it by not using it. This is called the sin of omission. By not doing it, it is taken away for many thousands of incarnations until you get it back again. You have to earn it. It is very important and yet these initiations that people go through, sometimes they don't do them because they don't have to pay for them and they think they are of no value.

We encourage you to turn into a modern evolutionary being, but at the same time hold on to your caution. Have respect for it, use it appropriately and it will work. Do not abuse it, do not burn your house down with it, and do not hurt anybody else with it. Use it appropriately. Do not leave it burning on the stove so it creates a cloud of smoke in your house.

The most important thing that I can say to everybody about all of this is you need to make a resolve in one of your incarnations. Everybody finds their proper time to do this, where they devote their whole existence to a cause. A cause of evolution and then they find it. This idea goes along with many of the teachings in all of the philosophies; "If you are luke-warm god with spew you out." The idea is that you have to be hot in the pursuit of enlightenment or of knowing god, or whatever it happens to be. If you do not lose yourself completely, you will never find it. You have got to give yourself totally to it, and when you do that it will become a living thing for you. But if you just make it where you are going to serve god a little bit and serve mammon a little bit, you can never serve both of them and find either one of them. You are never successful at either one of them that way. You have got to find a point where you are going to do one or the other and that is for each person to decide what they are going to do, and what is appropriate for them at each stage.

Most people always will serve the worldly thing that they are involved in, because that is where they belong, that is where it is appropriate for them. That is how creation was made. But for those who are involved in a form of transformation, involved in going from this state to another one, they must do something different. Like a caterpillar does which is an appropriate symbology. But it also is more than symbology. It is the finale of the play that you happen to be in. When your life's dedication is different than everybody else. We can observe many parents of today saying to their children, "Why can't you just be a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew, a Buddhist," or whatever it happens to be. If you look at what Christ did, he was not running around doing the social norm. He was a rebel. He was doing something very profound. His whole life was dedicated to it. We see people today in Christianity, they attend a few meetings and talk a lot of nice words, but their entire existence is not behind it.

It is the same thing with people of all religions today. They are out doing the world, making a lot of money, opening restaurants, but their dedication and devotion is not to their religion totally. I am not saying to become a weirdo and drop out of society. What I am saying is to do an integration. Make the foremost thing in your existence, finding a transformation. But at the same time don't bum out your family, do not alienate your family. Allow them to see the divinity in it and the beauty in it, bring them closer to it. Participate in the things that they want to do at the same time but do not sacrifice your philosophy and your principles for the things of the world. Make your philosophy and your principles and your religion number one. But do not ever go back on your family and abandon them. It is your responsibility to take care of them, support them in whatever is happening with them. Do not turn your back on your family. But that does not mean that you have to do their thing.

To be able to transform, to go from a caterpillar to a butterfly, you cannot continue to act like a caterpillar. You cannot be a caterpillar forever. You have to make some kind of change to make the transformation. But you do not need to say that other caterpillars are bad, you need to support them because they are the ones that helped you become what you are.

So when you find yourself within these conflicts with your family, parents, brothers and sisters or whoever it happens to be, you must support their position. But you still need to go beyond where they are at. Do not reject what they have to offer, but realize that you do not have to participate in it either. If one of my family members was an atheist and talking to me about my belief system, I would say something like this: "I think it is wonderful that you are atheist. I support you 100% in being so. Since you are an atheist, it is very likely that at the point of your passing, you will go out of existence because of your atheism, which is what you have chosen to do. I support you 100% in this as long as it makes you happy. I can tell that you are happy because you feel well. You have a sense of well being, and you are motivated in the present existence because of your belief system. I think that is wonderful. Would you allow me to feel good also? Would you allow me to have the same feeling of well being that you have by allowing me to believe that there is something beyond death? Will you allow me that motivation in my present existence because of my belief that my essence will continue on after death? It is my creation of life, because we all make our own creation. If you choose a creation that allows you to cease at the end of this life, that is perfectly wonderful for you. I am glad you are happy with it. May I be happy also, by believing what I want to believe?"

You cannot condemn their belief system. They are never going to change if you condemn them. You must allow them their space. Everybody makes their own change if they choose to change. You just have to let them be how they are but ask them to allow you to be the way you are also. In order for you to allow them to be the way they want to be, you must accept your wholeness. You must stand up and be a whole person and say "I am whole. I am complete in myself and I do not have to have you to be able to live and breath. Furthermore, now that I do not need you to live and breath, I am able to allow you to be happy and you may allow me to be happy so we can all go on our own paths back to the state of creation.. I wanted to discuss this for a minute because sometimes we wonder where our values are, and where our energies are being spent.

This is a transition that I went through with my family. I told them that I am doing something that really makes me happy. Happiness is one of the most important things in life and I feel fulfilled in what I am involved in. It fulfills all my needs. You probably know before hand if you have a touchy situation and you need to avoid certain things. You do not need to tell them everything that you are doing, or everything you believe in. You should use caution in discussing your belief system, you do not have to tell them everything. It seems that people become threatened when you are involved in a belief system that is different from their's. Sometimes they want you to tell them certain things so they can freak out on you. It is sort of like torturing people. I could torture people with stories around here whenever I wanted to, that is if I wanted to. I could think of a very torturous story to present to people about Summum and what we are about. Or I could lay it on them very gently. If you let them know from a mellow stand point, they will be more receptive to it. They will be calmer about it.

You know, it is funny. Sometimes we get pissed off when people ask us questions, and we want to poke them a little bit with our answers. This is especially the case when the person is a family member asking about our lives, and our belief systems. So instead of putting it out there really mellow and gently where they can deal with it, we give them a little dig in the side, and jump right in to the idea that we do mummification. You lay it on them just to agitate them. It is a hard rub. It becomes an ego statement that is flaunting what you are doing. You walk around like a peacock with your feathers spread out, showing them that your thing is so much more intense than their thing. It becomes a battle field.

You could make the story really nice and easy. You could always respond with what Summum is about. You can participate in Summum and help feed hungry people, and cause an evolution on the planet. Or you could go down and do it at the local Catholic Church. We are not doing anything different.

What you should do is start talking about things like the farm. Bring up the idea of the farm. We are out there working on the farm, by the sweat of our brow and we are growing food for hungry people in our community. When you present what our actions are and how those actions are bringing about positive changes in your life, then you are not just telling them why you are different from them. You are telling them what matters to you. It is called having peace on earth. It is like the variety of plants on this earth. One kind of plant likes nitrogen, one likes potassium, and one likes phosphorus. Do you put nitrogen on the one that likes phosphorus and phosphorus on the one that likes potassium? No, you do not. You give the plants what they want, and what they need in order to grow and become larger. You give them what they need. Then, as they grow they discover that you are their care taker. I am not saying to lie to anyone, or to deceive them. I am just saying to be very gentle and kind. Tell them what they want to hear. Because then they remain open.

What we say around here is that people need to become part of something larger. You can always find some reason not to become something larger, as you may want to continue doing your thing on the planet, in your way. I want to examine what happens when an incident occurs and then people around that incident blow it completely out of proportion.

The basic point is people will use anything as an excuse of why not to get involved. It has nothing to do with you. At the same time, people will blow things out of proportion and crash all over each other. People keep taking things and turning them into a nightmare and passing them around for everybody. I do not think it is fair. There is another thing that people can do when you have frustration, instead of sharing it with everyone around them. You can exercise. Run five miles a day or take an aerobics class. It relieves your frustrations, and you do not have to crash on everybody else.

Exercise gets rid of frustration. Everyone needs a good strenuous exercise routine. It seems to me when people are exercising regularly they are a lot mellower than when they are not exercising regularly. They do not have a package to unload on somebody in one form or another. They do not have the energy to take a situation and turn it into a nightmare. For example if someone likes to fight, if you take them out and run them for 20 miles they have to put that fighting energy somewhere else. They put it into something creative, rather than destructive. It is very important and everyone would benefit from it.