The Pendulum of Pleasure and Pain

January 4, 1987

You are the pawn.

Corky: Al, what do you think you would have done three years ago if your car broke down on your way home from California? Did you get mad about it at all?

Al: Oh yeah I got mad! I said a few choice words.

Corky: What did you say? What was going through your mind?

Al: Well, you have to understand the scenario. Every individual has their own scenario, we all have a different set of circumstances because we're all in a different set of activities. And in order to, for lack of words I have to use the word "test," to test the strength of your steadfastness, of where your attention is focused in life or something... the forces of the elements have to use what is available to use, in order to set up a condition. For an example, in my circumstance it's easy to use my car. In somebody else's circumstance, such as Chris, maybe his schooling is used more or something in that light. Everybody has a different circumstance. This is the way I see it, I don't know if I'm accurate or not.

Corky: Right. Everyone has a different set of circumstances that give them insight into themselves.

Al: Right, and those things are used as tools on you.

Corky: Right. So your tool, a lot of times is your car. And it allows you to do what with your will? You were getting back to your will... and all that kind of stuff.

Al: Well, okay it's like, this is drawn out, this ain't a five minute thing here. I'm trying to make it short, but I'm losing everything in between. Let me give you an example of what I'm trying to convey. When I jacked the car up, and was examining the problem after it broke down, I had a suspicion of when I talked to you on the phone before I left, and I said to myself, "I wish Corky would quit fucking with me." If he knows something or has a suspicion, I would rather have one of two options: A. I would rather not know about it and be surprised so I don't have to think about it, or B. I wish he would tell me. Now when I chose option A - I'd rather not know about it - I think sometimes I would not really choose that option, because if you know about something, you then have a choice of making an alteration to it. And B, - I wish he would tell me - that sounds kind of nice to have that done, but on the other hand, having given that a lot of thought, I came up with the decision that it would not be helpful or beneficial for a person to know what is going to take place because there is no learning from that. And then it creates a dependency that you always want to know the answer.

Corky: Wow, you really went through this one well didn't you?

Al: Well, you've got a lot of time when you're going down the road!

Corky: You analyzed this all on the way back after it happened? That's good! You did real well with that. Feel good about it now. The position of not being told what's going to happen because it takes away your opportunity, and then giving them just a hint half way between the two, so that you can look at the thing real clearly to see what you would do with it after you get it. The hint is the best way. Because it's going to happen anyway. You can't change cause and effect. You could have a hint though.

Al: I knew right away what the problem was!

Corky: It didn't take you long to find it huh? Does everybody understand what Al just said? Everybody got that, right? So a lot of times we run into circumstances that are just going to happen. Let's just say that there was going to be an earthquake in Southern California, and Rashneesh comes on television and tells everybody: "Hey, man there is going to be an earthquake at 5 minutes after 12:00 on January 17. Just after midnight." And everybody splits California, and the rest of the people that don't go, blame the earthquake on Rashneesh, right? That he told them it was going to happen. It is his fault. Haven't you ever seen that happen? It's his fault because he said it was going to happen, and it did. There is no way of winning with those circumstances.

Al: The way that I caught this whole scenario thing, is seeing myself as an individual like a child — when the kids were around, they had all this homework over the Christmas break that they had to do for school. Michael had this book report and he kept asking me questions. Finally, I said "Hey, get off your butt and go to the library and get the dictionary and look it up. I don't mind telling you what one or two words mean, but you are asking me every other word, what does this mean, what does that mean? I'm doing the book report, how are you going to learn? I'm not going to tell you the whole thing.' So, because I can see that, I can foresee his future to a degree. It's everything else that the kids do too; we've got the education, the experience, the years, we know that a child's state of consciousness with a particular energy behind it, directed in a particular way, you can pretty much foresee the outcome of it. If one is observant as a parent, we can predict the outcome. We can even see that in individuals in adulthood. So, if one could remain in that state as much as possible, to see yourself, that you are not exempt from that; if one is aware of that then there is no blame to go on anybody else. Because you didn't take the responsibility in one area or another. It was lacking in your own awareness or responsibility, something that you are not following through with, and that is the cause to whatever the outcome of that was.

Corky: Does that make sense to everybody. Makes sense to me. That is really a good example Al, of cause and effect and responsibility, dealing with your own will inside and understanding things directing our lives and everything. You know, it's really interesting, the swing of the pendulum that swings in every aspect of our lives, it is just unbelievable. We build up an immense amount of energy in the pendulum, for example when we don't eat. We are right here in the center and then we don't eat, and we swing all the way up here, and we've got all this potential energy of starving to death, and then food is put in front of us, and then we use all that energy we built up and we begin to gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, all the way through the swing of the pendulum all the way over to the far side instead of stopping right here in the center. And then we are in pain. This is what I do...because we eat so much over here, and then we have all this energy of bloating, and as soon as the pain is gone over here then we swing all the way back over to the other extreme of not eating. And then we gobble, gobble, gobble, and we swing back and forth because there is not much moderation in most people's lives in certain areas. They pick certain things that they just go nuts on and that is what each incarnation is about; to swing into the drama of the extremes. Once we get tired or fulfilled of the pain in both the pleasure and the pain of it, because there is a pleasure side and a pain side to everything, and both the pleasure and the pain become painful after awhile, as Patanjali said we round off the edges and we get to the center and we evolve out of that one. That one becomes an old story because we don't do it anymore, it's a very natural process that we all evolve though.

Although when you have insight into yourself like Al was talking about, like where your will comes from and your position of cause and effect, it makes it a lot easier, instead of being a pawn to all these circumstances you can look at them and say "Goll, look at what I'm doing to myself!' Instead of "Look at what Rooster is doing to me.' It's sort of like, I put on some clean pants and then go over to play with Rooster, and she's got these big floppy wet lips on her face, and she shakes her head and it flips all over the clean new pants and gets them all dirty. Then I say it's Rooster's fault. But if I look at it real logically, I'd say, being conscious and responsible for my own actions, if I have on clean pants, then I know that I give Rooster a gentle straight arm on the head and rub the top of her head to keep her lips away from my clean pants. You don't hurt her, you just push her head to the side, and she thinks it's a fun massage for her ear.

This happens because of having insight into my responsibility to the things around me. What happens is we want to give our responsibility away to the world around us, and we want to take credit for the good things, and we don't want to take credit for the bad things. Which, there is no such thing as good or bad. And then we have a real difficult time with our potential in a lot of areas, because it's built up so intently in some areas that when it finally lets go, it overcomes us. And it is sort of like a falling rock, and the potential energy of a falling rock, like we were talking about yesterday — a rock is sitting on the top of a cliff and it's a 4,000 pound boulder. You can roll it around on top of the cliff and everything, it's fine, you can roll it around with a crow bar, and you are holding onto this rock, and you get next to the edge and then it lets go...it's pretty hard to slow down this 4,000 pound boulder in mid air when it's headed down with its potential to let go. And you are underneath it, and it crashes down and smashes you under dirt and it is too late, it has got you. Because it has so much potential built up.

And what we do, instead of venting and letting the pressure off of all these potentials that we build up and neutralizing them and bringing them to the center, we go for an extreme absence of something, and we build way up here, and go for an extreme consumption of some kind of pleasure, and it just buries us with the huge potential way up here, and it swings back on the pendulum the other way.

And so those who are masters of themselves, first everybody has to master themselves before they can master anyone else, they learn not to dip into the extremes as much. And it's real difficult when you are enjoying yourself to cut back on the pleasure. Because there doesn't seem like there is anything wrong with that. You just zip right up there into that pleasure and get higher and higher and higher and higher, and then it swings back. Like if you were doing some kind of drug, and you dosed up, and dosed up, kind of like crack, which I've never done before but I guess it's supposed to be some great thing.

Janet: Yeah, but the other side of it is when you are in pain you should be able to realize that you are in pain and be able to cut back on the pain too.

Corky: Exactly. That is exactly what we are saying. You can cut back on both the pleasure and the pain. But you can't cut back on just one of them, you have to cut back on both of them. Because if you just cut back on the pain, automatically you are going to go way up here into pleasure and you will swing back into the same amount of pain. So you have to work both ends at the same time.

Janet: I see that, but I think in our culture, whatever we are and have made, we say well this pain is good for me, I'm going to knuckle down into this, and endure this, because god wants me to suffer, I don't know, there is a lot of things that get into people's minds that I see all the time.

Al: Those cliché's of "Well, I'm supposed to be going through this right now... '

Corky: Right. That is the abstinence that I am talking about right now. Or the extremes on either end, that is exactly what I am saying. Your way of saying it is just as correct as I'm saying it. We should stay away from the depth of that pain and try to transcend it, and try to transcend the pleasure, although the participation in the action that we take in both the pleasure and the pain needs to be edged off. Moderated, okay? I'm not saying people shouldn't have pleasure or pain a little bit, but the extremes of them are unsettling. And what it does is it keeps us on that swing, because it's difficult to get off of a moving swing. Anybody ever been to the park? When it's going back and forth remember when it goes WAY up, and when it goes WAY up there, who wants to jump? Nobody wants to jump off of the moving swing that's way up in the air. You let it slow down until almost a stop and then you get off and you go get on the next ride. And so you slow it down first of all. So it's neutralizing the energy within the swing of this thing from one side to the other side. You don't have as much pain and you don't have as much pleasure, you don't do these extreme things. It is a type of moderation. Moderation in all things is the Mormon saying, in their word of wisdom. It's said everywhere, but it's the local thing here so we have to plug in.

Anyway, and it's been really interesting over the last ten years, I have seen a lot of really interesting situations where people will get on a swing and come here to Summum, or to the womb of creation where we have the nectars, and the words, and the meditation and stuff. And they will get excited about seeing what's going on here, and they will feel an energy of what's happening, and then they'll go on a swing from one side or to another and they'll get into a situation of the rock falling off of the cliff. As the rock is pushing them down and crushing them into the earth down below, they lose consciousness. They panic. And in the panic it is impossible for them to take responsibility for their situation. Because a rock is doing it to them. It is the rocks fault, it's nature's fault. Or it is something else's fault; it's the wheel bearing's fault, it's Corky's fault for not telling me, why didn't he just tell me, why did he have to hint about it? Or it's Corky's fault for making it happen because he conjured this up in his head just to give me a bad time on the way back from California, just to poke on me and give me a bad time to see what I would say and stuff like that. Or it's the Netter's fault or it's god's fault, that did it. Or it's Chris Persky's fault because he didn't do this or that.

We fail to see all the cause and effect relationships that lead up to an event. The cause and effect answer is that it was the freon that did it to the car, and it was going to happen. It was inevitable. But the hint didn't hurt. It gave you an introspection of what is going on in the cause and effect chain because you were in a position to use it for your betterment.

Al: The one thing you said on the phone was 'That's not logical is it?' That is exactly how my mind works; that is not logical. If you were to put a match to that candle, that candle should light. Unless there is another element that is preventing it from lighting. And I kept going in my mind as I was driving, over and over again, that it is not logical, I've got to go back to the principles of logic. I have greased too many wheel bearings, and I have driven too many hundreds of miles, it is not logical. There is an answer, and what is the answer, and I went back and back. When I took that thing apart, I looked at the grease that was there, and saw that there was a characteristic about it that it turned into a cake like substance, and I realized that grease doesn't do that. It doesn't do that. That's like being able to drink gasoline, you can't do it. It's impossible. What caused it? What was different when I did it this time? The only thing that was different was that I had never used freon as a solvent before. I experimented cause this one guy suggested it. It's incredible.

Corky: Anyway, so one thing that I'd like to try to get out today for everybody to think about or to look at is that Summum is a real interesting thing. I've heard the comment before over the last ten years, lots of times, when we had the classes up at the University of Utah and when we built the little pyramid, and then after we built the little pyramid in about 1976, there was sort of a lull between 1976 and 1978. That was about a two year or three year period there before we bought the property over here and started construction in '79 or '78 something like that. And we had a whole group of people that had joined Summum when we built the first little pyramid. There were about 75 of them, or 50 of them. We still have the membership certificates. And there was a lull for a couple of years. And the comment was, "Well, my god, there is nothing happening at Summum!" Nothing happening over there. There is nothing happening in the little pyramid. We just go in there and we meditate and that's it, and we're doing the meditations that we've been taught to do and we're drinking the nectar that has been made and nothing is happening over there. Or nothing is happening to me over there. They aren't doing anything to me when I go there.

And right up until today, I hear that comment all the time. That you know, we have these different phases that we go through; we make the nectars, and then we start on the mummification, like that. And it is really interesting how most everybody misses the point on what the place is about. All Summum is, is the little womb, okay? And it has the Kybalion or the basic lessons which are the same thing you know, such as the law of Cause and Effect that you learned about. And it has the nectars, and we'll do mummification and it's got a little building here and stuff like that. And most people come here expecting Summum to do something to them. It's going to DO something to them. It's like the rock is going to fall on them, instead of them doing something with it.

Al: It's common when you spend your most of your existences on these two high peaks all the time, to say that right?

Corky: Exactly, because you are not the mover. You are the pawn. You are used to having things being done to you. You go to the doctor and the doctor gives you a shot, okay? And the shot of penicillin, if you have some kind of bacteria, it helps resist the bacteria and it helps to knock it down in your body and it has an effect. And the penicillin did have an effect on you and the doctor did the shot to you, the doctor did something to you. And it's sort of like, no one becomes a master of anything if someone is always doing it for them, or doing it to them. Like you were talking about the boys and the book report and the words that they wanted you to tell them what the answers were, and what do they have to do? They have to take the book and learn it and then apply it, right? And that is what existence is about. All the lessons that are here at Summum, everything that we need to know is here, to be honest with you. And it's our application of it in our lives that makes it happen, in our consciousness and in ourselves inside. And the story about there is nothing happening over there, whenever I hear that, a person is saying nothing is happening inside of me because I'm not doing anything. Or, I want to figure a way around it. I see that one a lot. People will come, and they'll say, "Well, I've got this problem. And the problem is that when I stay up for four days in a row, I get REAL tired and I sleep for two days! What's the solution?" And I say, "Well, what you do is you try to stay awake for maybe 12 hours, and then sleep for 8, and mellow the ends out a little bit." And they say, "OH! That is not in my program man! I want to get around that one!"

And so, instead of being neutral about it, and mellow about it, you give them a tool but you can't make them do anything. You can just give them the tools. Here is a book, it says right there that so and so and Moses and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Karl Marx, and David Early, and who's that guy that sells cars in Bountiful...Mr. Menlove gets on TV, and says 'Hey man, it says in all these places and everything that you should sleep 8 hours and work 12 during the day and you sort of fiddle fart around the other 4, do whatever you need to do. And it makes it easier, you don't have to stay awake for four days and sleep for two straight in a row.'

And I said "See! All those guys say it, it's in the book there and everything and there is nothing I can do about it, to be honest with you. Because you are in charge of your destiny and your own will and the strengthening of your will is to take those edges off of it and do it." And what they want to do is they want to figure out how to go up and say 'Okay, what I'll do is I'll practice this thing. I will just sleep two days and then see if I don't have to stay awake four.' So, they try you know, the sleeping part of it and see if they can get away with this part, instead of working both ends. They try to compromise it, instead of taking the package and putting it together to make it work. Because they don't want to do away with the pleasure, they just want to get rid of the pain part of it. Because the pleasure part they like, and they want that, but they don't want the pain part so they do the pleasure part instead. And they say 'Well, I'll stop doing the pain part and just do the pleasure part'. But it's on the same pendulum, see, and it sort of takes a balancing on both ends to come off to get to the center of it.

Al: But even though a person is going through that and doing it in that manner, that's all part of the learning process for that individual to arrive at that point.

Corky: Exactly. Exactly! But there is something beyond all of that, and what you just went through on your trip back and what I'm saying here is to get to look at the responsibility of doing it yourself, rather than trying to get around it. See what I'm saying? Trying to find some short cut. Blaming this or that, or taking your attention away from it or whatever. Now I'm not saying there are not short cuts in life and stuff, but there are certain principles that you have got to deal with very logically and very balanced. Rather than trying to get around it.

I want this but I don't want to do what it takes to get there, so I'll do these things instead and see if I can use those as counterfeit money to get my way through it. See what I'm saying? I'll spray it with some 301 oil, instead of packing it with grease, to see if it will get me home, because I don't want to pull a wheel off. And what happens?

Al: It doesn't make it.

Corky: It doesn't happen, it doesn't get it does it? Because the laws that we have to live with in nature and everything requires us to do that. Isn't that interesting? It's a real interesting concept. Everybody does it. I do it. Everyone does it. Instead of just doing it the real logical way that we know works, and going by the real basic laws of nature. To understand the law and balance out with it and then you can grow from the wisdom of it. The next shortcut is, that Al would probably learn is don't' use freon on my things, unless I clean them really well with some other kind of solvent first to get the freon off so that it does not eat grease. Something to neutralize it. So I'll use the freon and then a neutralizer, and then the grease. I'd use gasoline as the neutralizer before the grease, because those two things work well together because they are from the same source.

And so it's a real interesting thing that happens here, and that statement, I have to laugh every time I hear it. That there is nothing going on at Summum. I laugh at that statement, because what they are saying is there is nothing going on inside of me, and I'm not putting any effort right now, into my own will and my own consciousness to work with this thing that I thought at one time was something beneficial to my evolutionary process, the evolution of the spirit from one incarnation to the next. That's all they are saying. It's okay that they say it the way that they do. But it's the reason I'm talking about it today, if we could take a clearer look at what we are saying is, we're saying nothing is going on inside of me right now because I'm not making anything happen there. Because all it is, is a forum for where the information, where the womb is for those people who come here to do something in. It's sort of like you can have a womb but unless you put something into the womb, like a seed and fertilize what's going on in there, you can't give birth to anything. And it takes you, the will to come in and make it happen within it. The people. And, there are lots of places you can go where it's happenin'. They are playing disco music or all kinds of stuff like that, depends on what you are looking for. And what is happening in there is what you make happen at the disco. You can go to the club and sit and watch everybody else dance.

Al: On a grand scale, about as grand as you can get from our perspective, it can be seen that people are like little sperms, and we give life to the discovery of our real true relationship with creation. Discovering that we are creation is the birth that comes out of it, as long as we are swimming up into that womb with the effort of our will, our determination. It's just like the human reproductive story. It's only the strong sperms that make it up through the canal and fertilize the egg.

Corky: It's the same thing. Woody Allen made a great movie about it. He was a sperm. That's the story. That's the exact same story right there.

We give birth to ourselves by doing it. We give birth to ourselves by swimming in there and activating the womb and becoming part of it, we give birth to ourselves and we become larger than ourselves by letting go. Losing ourselves and going forth and making it happen. We don't just lay back and show up there and it happens to us. We've got to make it happen. We make it happen with ourselves.

There is a book called The Third Eye by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. I didn't realize that the book had all those things that are parallels to our philosophy in it. It tells about when he had his third eye opened, they gave him a crystal. The mummification is talked about in the back of it, and the great ancestors of the planet were mummified and he tells all the way through the book, these aren't the exact words he uses, but the story is, that the veil of Isis is the big secret of life. Everybody talks about the veil of Isis. Blavatsky writes about Isis Unveiled. Isis is the setting of the sun, the going down, and the rising of the sun is the new birth and the setting of the sun is when it goes to sleep or dies, but it comes back up again. And that is where Isis comes from, told about in the hieroglyphs, it tells about the setting of the sun. The unveiling of Isis, or this mystery of death or going through the veil from one life to the next, and he says when he's going through his initiations and becoming a llama, and when he is discovering that there is a spirit inside of him, and he talks about the people in the west how the scientists want to dissect everything and take everything apart. They say you can't put a litmus test on the spirit, prove that it's there, and show me that it's there, and all that stuff. He talks about the communion between birth and death, that when a llama becomes a master or whatever, when they really do discover this communion between birth and death and they actually do die for a period of time, and then come back to life. Then they discover this transference where you go from one life to the next life and the mummification process and everything. It's really good. He talks about that is what the mystery of existence is, and that is the beginning and the end of it. That's what the whole book is about. To discover the continuum from one life to the next life because lives are really so short, and that they are all under cause and effect, and that point of the critical movement of the soul, from one lifetime to the next lifetime is the critical time. The astrologers completely forecasted every move that he was going to make in his life and everything, from the time that he was seven years old because it's all under the law of Cause and Effect and it is all predestined under destiny. It's a great book.

And then, if you get a chance to read that one, we'd like to remind everybody again to read the Kybalion. They go through one little chapter at a time, maybe one chapter a week. The chapters are only maybe two or three pages long. It's such a good book, it's so simple, it puts everything into such little simple terms and it doesn't worry about running around on the planet doing all these different things and everything. It puts everything into a real conscious level so that you can understand it really well. So those two books, we'd like to remind everyone to read again. That is sort of our personal reading material this winter, for everybody to read on their own so we can talk about it in class. And people will sort of all be in sort of a similar singularity of mind, rather than the chaos that lands here a lot of times.

Anything else I was supposed to talk about? There are some comments in these books that are really inappropriate. Like in the Kybalion , there is a little comment, and you can see the guys that put it in there, they slipped in this little comment and it doesn't belong in the book at all. It has been passed down for tens of thousands of years and these guys did their own interpretation of it, at least the one we've got and in one paragraph they say something like, we cannot have any immorality in society like if you saw some frontal nudity on cable TV and stuff it would be the worst thing you could do, and to condone anything like that would be a person not on the path and stuff like that. I thought, "Jesus! These guys really got a lot of balls to put something like that in this kind of book!" It came from no where and there are a lot of them in there, and they are personal opinions from the commentator, and you sort of have to look over them and look for the deep truth that is in the book that has been passed down for thousands of years. And the Third Eye, he takes a pretty mellow approach to most things, he says, well, this is the way we see things and I know everybody else sees it differently and their way is just as right as ours, and they are all saying the same thing but try to look at it this way for a little while it may give you some insight into what's going on. That's what that guy does. So it's just interesting.

He says in there that everybody goes along doing just normal things until they get to a certain consciousness level where they decide to go on a spiritual path and they get mummified because the only real changes take place in that movement of the soul. What do you think of that? Do you think it's profound or do you think that the guy is full of shit? How do you feel about what he says to do in there?

Answer: The way I look at it is that it is just a series of evolutionary series. It seems to me that the masters are people who have had a lot of experience in the universe so to speak, so they get to a point where they have to or they are forced to, or however you want to put it, integrate so to speak. They manifest spiritual field.

Corky: Anyway, let's go back to what we were talking about now that we got off the books. We had a point beyond that nothing is happening here.

Chris: That it is a facility, that you make it happen.

Corky: Oh yeah, we were talking about Woody Allen's movie where everybody becomes a sperm. That's a great place to start. To review for the people that just came, what we were talking about is for a number of years, people have come by Summum and everything and they say, "there is nothing going on there, nothing is happening." And we went through the scenario and everything that there is nothing going on here or anything, it's what's going on with everybody individually. Summum does not make anything happen to you, you make it happen to yourself. And all Summum is, is a forum for information and the energy in the womb, and you can take whatever you are, when you come to it you have to make it happen with yourself there. You are the one that has got to dance with it. It's like going to the disco and they are playing the music and everything but unless you get out of your chair and get up there and dance, nothing is happening. For you. It may be happening for other people there, it may seem like nothing is happening at all there because it is a thing that you can't really get your finger on, something you can't grab. It happens inside everybody, it is everybody's personal thing. And it happens through the will. And tell that story again Al, about Woody Allen's movie.

Al: Where everybody is a sperm. We tend to put everything that we can't see under a microscope, which enhances our perception a great deal. And, as we are a part of nature like these things we put under a microscope, in some form we are a little thing too that is under a microscope. And the microscope is kind of the overall picture, and if we can go on that other side of this microscope that we cannot see, it would say that it would examine us as being like sperms. Because we, within ourselves swim through life and maintain this center consciousness without getting caught on the two extremes of pleasure and pain, or something of great opposites like that and do nothing, we fall by the wayside. Just like the sperms we examine under a microscope. In the human reproductive process which is the best example and easiest example I can see, is I was just totally surprised when I realized this a few years ago, but only one sperm actually makes it out of the millions that there are, in the solution, that is injected at the time. It's only the one that has its determination and its own individual will and this is the Woody Allen story, to make it up through this little canal.

Corky: It is a real interesting story how every little person, or every big person, who ever we are, makes their own thing happen. And nobody else can do it for you. It's a personal thing. No matter what's there or what's happening on the dance floor, you have to get up and dance. If you don't get up and dance, nothing happens.

It's an inward participation, not necessarily an outward participation that happens. It's a thing that happens individually with everybody and it doesn't happen to a group here. The whole group doesn't get it. And usually the ones that think they got it didn't get it, what was happening. It transcends that.

Woody Allen might have made it in the movie, I wish we knew what the movie was [editor's note: the movie was Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask]. What a horrible ending cause you don't know what happens to Woody. What do you think of the whole thing Chris, of his involvement?

Chris: I don't know.

Corky: You don't remember the movie that well? It's a real interesting situation to look at.

Chris: I think he was caught up in analyzing the situation and making jokes about his fears and stuff but I don't think he just really ever got in there and moved with it.

Corky: Yeah, well isn't that sort of what happens? Everybody sort of wonders what they are doing there.

Al: Movies are really interesting. It's like in one of the Superman movies, where he was divided and he was separated from himself, and he was fighting himself and he became the bad guy, anybody remember? He was beating himself up, his duality. His determination of his will to be the good guy, overcame the bad guy.

Corky: And so the struggle is within each one of us?

Al: That was the story. There again it's on the big screen.

Corky: Right. So the struggle is within each one of us, how far we allow ourselves to evolve. And it doesn't make any difference all the other stuff on the outside, all the teachers, and all the forums and everything are just things for us to look at and experience, but there is nothing that changes except for within us.

Su: It is because we want everybody else to take responsibility for our evolvement, for our evolution. Instead of taking the responsibility for ourselves, it's easier to say 'Hey, heal me!'

Corky: That's where we started today's class at, the responsibility. Came full circle right around to that point. Nobody wants to take responsibility.

Al: That's the superman story. He always had everybody's answer, he was always there to save them, written into the character's part were the words of wisdom where he'd always have the answer of wisdom. He was the wise man, you know. In the movies that have come out recently, we can analyze it as him going to the one extreme to the pleasure, then sell himself out and the opposites guy shows up automatically.

Corky: It's the balance between those laws. You can't escape them, they are there. And once you understand them and you work with them, they are your friends.

Chris: Do you think we should talk about that again, for people that just came, for what you can do?

Corky: You go ahead, you do real well at it Chris.

Chris: We were saying when you get involved in an extreme, you build a potential, let's say like an extreme of pleasure - you max out on the pleasure, you build up on the potential and by natures law you have to experience the opposite. And so, we were getting real practical about it and saying what you can do to take the edges off the extremes. And that is just the meditations.

Corky: And what is that? What else?

Chris: It depends. The meditation and the way you direct your attention so you don't max out on either end, not that you don't experience pleasure and pain but that you make a conscious effort not to experience either one in an extreme way and you try to stay in the center.

Corky: Good Chris. Anyway everyone should read the Kybalion, and practice your meditations.