The Movie of Life: Food and Awakening

July 5, 1986

"Life is a theater."

I wanted to briefly throw out a couple of ideas out here about the Summum philosophy on food and what we eat and how nature works with it. There are a couple of things I want to cover before we go into a discussion. Nature is very interesting. We were talking this morning about the pyramid having mice in it once in awhile, and whether or not we should put a cat in the pyramid and let nature takes its course. Where if a mouse and a cat interact, they have a karmic relationship together, and the cat can take care of the mice and solve our problem of having mice, and we would also get to have a cat around. We did not have mice in the pyramid when Oscar was around. Because he would come in here and spend a day in the pyramid, and everything would be cleaned up very well. That is what nature does. It cleans itself up naturally.

Let us take a raindrop for instance. We see the identity of the raindrop as it sits in a rain cloud. It forms itself from the humidity in the cloud, and it comes out of the cloud in the form of a raindrop. As it falls from the sky with its own identity, it has taken its own form. It has taken on a state or form of consciousness, whatever that level of consciousness is, and it falls through the air and it drops into the ocean and is consumed or eaten by the ocean and becomes a part of the ocean, part of a larger whole. It is a cycle. It is then picked back up from the ocean and turned back into humidity and then it turns back into a drop and falls back down again. It is a cycle. There are many different phases or transitions that it goes through during this cycle.

The planet has an interesting transition. The sun comes up and it is light on one side of the planet while the other side is dark. Then the sun goes down and it is dark on that side of the planet, and light on the other. The moon comes up and shines, but there are phases of the moon that it also goes through. These are the same phases that a water drop goes through. While in its humidity state and then when it forms itself into a raindrop or forms itself into a full moon. Then as it forms into a new moon it drops and joins itself back into the depths of darkness or the whole. These are all symbols before our eyes within nature showing us how everything in nature is working in this harmonious manner and everything is very similar in its action within cause and effect. It is a chain of events of how everything goes about from one state of transformation to the next state and on again to the next state. It continually evolves along.

The raindrop will sometimes drop onto the land, and gets absorbed into the dirt. It then becomes part of the humidity within the soil and is drawn up into a tree and perhaps it lives there for a very long time within the tree. Then it moves up into a leaf and gets evaporated out of the leaf back into the atmosphere as humidity. This is where it will go on to a different destination with a different experience there. It is exactly the same thing with us. We go through the same experience of moving through many different states in our many incarnations. It is called our movies of life.

It is very natural for the raindrop to fall into the ocean and surrender itself to the larger pool and be consumed in order to satisfy the need of the ocean to be full. It is very easy for the water to be attracted to the root stem of the tree or the plant, and be soaked into the plant and in the process become part of the living force of that plants existence. It is a natural thing. The plant does not have to chase the water droplet around under the ground to get to it. The water naturally migrates to it. Through a process of osmosis the water is drawn to or attracted to the plant. It is very natural within nature for a cat and a mouse to strike a balance. The mouse is escaping for its life, and the cat is after it. It is what nature created. It is an interchange that takes place.

In certain levels of existence it is very natural for the cave man to run through the bushes chasing animals and killing those animals so they can eat them for survival. It is a very high intensity type of existence. The hunter is always wired because of the adrenaline from the meat he is eating. He is always on edge out there trying to survive within existence. As he moves on and evolves to higher consciousness, becomes a more evolved species, he reaches a level of maybe it is not necessary to run through the bushes after an animal and catch it and kill it and eat it. So that species then decides grow those animals instead and take them to the slaughter house, and then they are sent to the super market where you are able to purchase them, take them home and eat them. As consciousness evolves on higher and higher and higher, it may not be necessary to purchase the meat from the supermarket and eat it and have a high intensity type life. You can nourish your body just as well through a very balanced diet, allowing those things in your diet to be those things that are naturally provided in nature that naturally flow to you like osmosis.

I would say the easiest and the most natural of those things would be fruits, as spoken of in the Garden of Eden. Where they reach a ripe state and they fall off of the tree into your hand, like a peach tree. In the season thereof, when it has reached its season the fruit just falls off of the tree. It gives up its state of being attached to the tree and like a raindrop and it falls into your hand. You would then eat that peach and it becomes something larger, it becomes a part of you. Just as the raindrop becomes part of the ocean. It is making a transition. It surrenders automatically to do this.

That is different than chasing an animal through the forest and killing it to eat it. It is a different level of consciousness. There is a surrender of this fruit when it falls off of this tree into your hand. The surrender for you would be, instead of you buying airplane ticket to the jungle where the fruit is hanging from the tree and waiting for it to fall off of the tree into your hand, instead you work a little bit in society, save your money and go over to the supermarket. There are people who have taken the fruit off of the tree as it falls off, and then brought it to the supermarket to surrender the fruit over to you. It is there.

So, in the complex society that we live in and where we happen to not have resources for all of us to move to the jungle right now where the fruit is falling off the trees, instead we must go down to the supermarket.

The next level would be the vegetables. Where they are growing in the ground and they reach maturity. In this maturity stage, they make a transformation where they produce their seeds, and they give up their life as a vegetable and begin die off after their seeds are finished. When they reach their maturity, when they just start to die off is when they are harvested and brought to the supermarket to purchase. The same thing happens with legumes, and beans, or the grains in the field or all of the things we can eat in nature, that allow for a more passive or center-path diet.

It has been said by a lot of people around here, and historically in scriptures and religious texts. They say that what you eat does not determine whether or not you are going to go to heaven or not. It does not determine your spirituality. Really, it is just the other way around. Your spirituality determines what you eat. It is just the opposite. The level of your consciousness is the tuner or the definer that tells you what to eat. If you are still a jungle man and you are out there chasing animals through the forest that is perfectly okay! There is nothing wrong with jungle man. We have all been jungle man at one time or another, at a particular state of evolution. If we say there is something wrong with jungle man then we are saying there is something wrong with us too, because we have all been at that exact stage. There is nothing wrong with that.

Everybody finds their level of consciousness and they eat those things that are most appropriate to them. That is fine, that is what they do. So the suggestion around Summum is to let everyone eat what they want to eat. It is fine what you decide to eat. Find your own pattern of eating. Find the things that are best for you and your consciousness that will allow you to stay closest to the center path. If that means you eat ten animals a day that is fine if that is what works for you. If it causes you to eat food all day long that is fine too. Wherever you happen to be as long as you become closer and closer to the ease of being in harmony with the flow of evolution and nature. As long as it brings you closer to being within the center point of it so you can view the totalness of it, rather than the isolation of it. That is what we suggest you do.

What we are trying to say is a person should have a very balanced life. They should not spend too much of their concentration in the world of material things, and totally give up the spiritual things and forget that they have a soul. They need to balance the world of the physical manifest state, with the subjective inner state of having a soul. What happens to us today in our society, from this perspective of Summum, is the majority of people are worried constantly about staying alive physically. All of their attention is placed on the well being of their body, the financial condition of their bank account, everything that is taking place out in the world. You cannot abandon that, we are not saying that you should abandon those things. Pay attention to those things. But people pay so much attention to those things that they forget about their spirituality. And then they are faced with that reality at death if there really is such a thing, because they are really questioning inside, if they have a spirit or not, because they do not have a knowledge of it.

What I am saying is that nature is in balance. Man's consciousness is out of balance, if he does not have just as much reality of a spiritual side, as he does reality of a physical side. If you do not know that when you die that you will continue on and move on in evolution, if there is doubt in your mind, you ought to be doubting there very fact that you are alive in the flesh. You should doubt your existence in the physical life just as much as you doubt your existence is going to go on when you die. Then there is some kind of balance. If you are saying to yourself, I really do not know if there is a spiritual experience because I have not experienced it. I really do not know if there is a life force, or essence of me that is going to go on after I die, because I have not experienced it. When the lights go out in this body that is it, and there will be no more consciousness even in the least amount of this identity. If that is a doubt within you then you should doubt just as much that you are alive in the physical state, in order to have something in balance.

What is normally taking place within this era, or this consciousness of the human species is they are very well tuned into the physical existence of life experiences out there, but there is a lot of doubt whether there is really a spirit on the other side. They are doing a lot of dances around it and avoiding it dramatically. They are not really sure about it and they espouse it with their lips, but their hearts are not really close to it. Does that sound fair? Or am I reading the whole story wrong?

So, for the people that would say to me, we need to put more attention on the health of the body and staying alive than worrying about the spirit. I would say of course we do! We need to put an immense amount of attention on keeping the body healthy and keeping it alive and in very good condition, so that the healthy body can discover the spirit. If the body is sick all the time, it cannot find the spirit or the soul. There is no question about that. But by putting all of our attention on our healthy body, in this society we live in today, we create a façade of not allowing ourselves to experience our spirituality and gain a true knowledge of our spirit. Where we gain knowledge so strong, that we are willing to die for our spiritual experience, just as much as we are willing to live for our physical experience. Then, it would be in balance. Just as strong as we hold onto life, we must also hold on to giving up the body to go into the spirit. It would be a balance, a consciousness in balance like that. A consciousness that would say I will not kill. I would give up my life first before I would take another persons life. I would not want it to affect my spiritual evolution by harming another individual. What a commitment that is! How many souls within a spiritual realm could you get to do that today within the philosophies on this planet? I will not take another life. I will give up this physical life first, before taking someone else's life, or some animal's life, so that I would not affect my spiritual existence. To have a knowledge so strong and so real that your spirit is going to go on, or your essence in some form will move on after physical death, to know that it would be affected by the abuse of some one else's physical state. To be able to have that, to be able to make that decision that you value the life of your spirit just as much as you value the life of your body.

But everybody is running around on the planet just worrying about their body, and they are just talking about their spirit. In this context I am not saying that anybody should give up their physical body, or give up their life. Everything is under a time schedule. Everything has a season to it. It is all foreordained how long you will be here. The flip side of that foreordination is in the spiritual consciousness of what you allow it to do and the decisions you make as those foreordinations come about, how you perceive them and their happenings.

We find ourselves so caught up in maintaining this physical body. The paradox is at the same time that you must take care of the physical body, you have to pay just as much attention to the spirit to balance the two out. In order to make it really a whole person. To make it a whole creature. To make it a whole identity that is evolving on through existence, rather than just one sided and just speaking about the other side and not really doing much about it.

This takes me to the point of trying to explain what an incarnation in the physical body is about and relating things in nature, showing things to ourselves of how everything is so similar. In nature, everything has its opposite. There is light and dark, love and hate, up and down, hot and cold, high and low; everything has its opposite side to it. Everything has a correspondence between the spiritual side, and the manifest physical side here. This correspondence is spoken of in the Summum book: "As above, so below." As in the physical so also in the spiritual is what it is saying.

So we look into our society today, and we say, "Back when they started telling stories and writing them down you could read these stories and you could get the information and it sort of became alive." For instance, Shakespeare wrote beautiful plays, and you could see these episodes and these movies in your mind taking place when you watched those plays. Then society moved on and the industrial age came about and they invented the camera, and soon they had still movies. Still movies were where people would jump around and you would see a scene being played out and beneath it they put sub titles so you could read and an entire communication between you and the movie took place. An understanding between the observer and the movie happened. So the craving of the observers said, "Can we not make this more profound? Can we make it so that we can experience it even further?!"

So technology increases because of the wish and the will of the observer that created the movie in the first place. So then they developed words that are within the movies. The people on the movie screen are talking and running around, and they have really clear sound that comes from the actors on the screen. The whole experience for the observer of the movie then becomes more real. You come out of the theater and you sit as the observer and say, "How can we make this even more real?" So then, they go back and they add color to it, and make another movie and this time is has sound and color. The picture is so vibrant.

They play it with the color and sound, and all the observers say, "Oh this is fabulous! It is so real! I could almost feel like I was a part of it! I could almost get lost in it!" Then the observers go out of the theater, and they ask again how they can make it even more real. Then they invent quadraphonic sound, and they put it up on the wide cinema scope screen and go back in and the sound is all around them, it is so real that the sound rattles the chairs they are sitting in. All the observers are blown away and then they say, "Oh wow! This is just so real! It is unbelievable! I feel like I am almost in the movie." Time goes on and the observers ask how they can again make it more real.

Then they invent 3D technology. They say, "We will make it so that the movie plays out among us. It will jump out of the screen into our laps. Let us also add smells that come out from the chairs." So all the observers go back into the theater with this movie playing, and they say, "I feel like I am almost IN the movie, but I just know that in the back of my mind I am not there just yet." They go back on the other side saying, "Let's make a movie where we really get involved in it. Let's lose total consciousness while watching it! Let us be so absorbed in it because of the drama of it, and because of the happenings of it, that we lose ourselves entirely in this movie, and be caught up in the drama of life."

All the observers go back into the theater, and that is what is called life.

That is what life is. That is what an incarnation is. It is a theater. It has been said by every philosopher throughout time. Shakespeare said it: "Life is a theater." That is exactly what it is. It is a theater here and we are so caught up in the theater, it flopped over to the extreme side and we lost consciousness of the observer, or the soul. We have lost ourselves in the movie of life. We have forgotten who we were. We have forgotten that we really are. Rather than just being in this movie. That there is a duality to us, that we are in the theater of life, and we will come out of the theater and there will be another movie to experience. We get so caught up in this movie, it is unbelievable. There are small pockets in the movie for people who have awakened from the stupor and the hypnosis in the movie of life, but have come awake, and said, "Oh, I am in a movie! Something is going on here. Maybe there is something other that just me, other than this body in this movie. Maybe there is a me! Maybe there is a me! Maybe me is something larger than this movie. Maybe this me is a self, maybe this self is everything. Maybe I created this movie as an observer to be in it."

Then these possibilities start to awaken. But until the participant in the movie takes an activity of restraint and concentration, to allow themselves to break just temporarily with the movie that they are involved in and stand apart from it consciously, and observe it separately rather than being involved in it, they are lost in it. Because they are part of the movie, until they break away temporarily and observe it from the observer's state again. People talk about doing that, people write about doing that, people philosophize about doing it, they go to thousands of meetings and pay billions of dollars to do it, but they do not want to really do it, because they are lazy. Because somebody tells them they are going to have to do something, and that doing something may involve a little bit of a tiny bit of work. Nobody seems to like work. They want to pass out in the movie of life, and be entertained there in the drama of the nightmares and the fun and the pain and the elations, and all of the opposites in life. They want to pass out there, instead of being awakened in life, instead of knowing who they really are. All because it requires a minute amount of concentration, a minute amount of effort.

They won't get up and dance through life and work their body into health and their mind into health and discover their own soul. Because they won't take the effort to wake up temporarily and come out of their coma and stand back and look at life's movie for what it really is, they are lost in it. When a person wakes up, automatically they start eating a better diet. Automatically they stop eating things that are bad for them, automatically they start taking care of their bodies. It is a result of it. Automatically they start taking care of their soul because they can observe from that consciousness that if they do not take care of it, they will become one of the slime at the bottom of the cesspool of life.

So it may be expressed in different terms from a different perspective, it may be told in a different way, about what life is. But it is the same story. We the observers in the audience of existence have created a divine movie, and it is called life. We put ourselves in it and most people got lost there until this thing that they fear, death comes upon them at the end of the movie and they open the doors and go out of the theater and back into realization and say, "Oh god! Where was I all this time? I was lost in that darn movie! I thought that was so real! All the drama that was happening to me! I didn't have any idea that I was ever going to get out of that thing, until I dropped dead, and I really didn't know what was going to happen to me after that. Because I was so lost there I forgot that I existed! That I was. I forgot that I am."

It is easy to wake up. It is just like going to work. Before you go to work it is the worst thing in the whole world that you have to go to work. You know that feeling? Oh, you got to get out of bed! You have to put on your clothes and go out of your house to go to work. But once you get there it is the greatest thing you do with your day. You would not have missed it. It is wonderful. It feels good, it is alive.

We need to wake up out of the movie of life and go to work on finding our souls, and wake them up and bring ourselves into a consciousness of a wholeness of life. Not just the coma of manifestation of the physical. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.