The Yo-Yo Story

June 1, 1986

God is a paradox.

We are going to talk about yo-yo's today. There is something very basic about a yoyo. Have you had the experience of using a yoyo? It is a toy that allows the user to toss it down while holding on to the string and then it recoils and rolls back up into your palm. There is a certain technique in using a yoyo in order to make it work correctly. There is something really amazing about them.

The principle of the yoyo has every aspect of everything you ever needed to know about in life. Over time in our lives, what happens is we lose contact with the yoyo principle, and when you lose contact with the principle of the yoyo you only get one side of the story.

There are a variety of philosophies going on around the planet. What is amazing about them is that every one of them is correct. They are all telling the truth.

You might ask, "How in the world could they all be correct when they are all in contradiction to each other? One philosophy says this particular thing, and another speaks against it. One says you have got to do this, and another says you will be condemned for doing that." I would propose that it all has to do with the yoyo. There are two aspects to it, and everything is relative. There are different functions to everything that takes place. For example, when you hand a yoyo to someone for the first time and you say to them, "Well just let yourself find god. Just let it be. You have to let it happen. In order to find god you just have to let it happen." Have you ever heard that before?

But how do you do that? Does it have anything to do with the yoyo that is released? God is in the yoyo. God is at the bottom of the stroke. It is found in the resting of the yoyo. This is called the sleeping yoyo. I will show you by using a yoyo. When I release the yoyo, somehow it keeps coming back up to my hand. I have not found the god in the sleeping yoyo yet. After enough practice using the yoyo, eventually it rests at the bottom and I find god in the sleeping yoyo, god is in the resting yoyo at the bottom. This is where I let it happen. But at the top of the yoyo, I have to make it happen. It is a paradox. It takes both the making, and the letting. It will not work without the other one. It takes the practice to make it happen. Just like in life, if you never turn your attention towards it or if you never practice, nothing ever happens.

Some people would say "Well there was this person that came out of the womb and walked East seven steps, walked West seven steps, walked seven steps to the North and seven steps to the South and stood up and said "I know god, I am god." If this is something that happened, it is not because it was the first time that being was born on this planet. This being would have had millions upon millions of incarnations to work up to that point. It would have experiences that built up a residual of practicing the up and the down with the yoyo, practicing back and forth, and then eventually they find god at the bottom of the yoyo, where you let it sleep. So it takes both a practice to find it, and then a letting go to find it. Christ said something like this that heaven and god is a gift, that you cannot earn it through works. It is true. But you cannot have it as a gift without the works. It is a paradox.

You have to work first, before you are given anything. I wanted to raise this issue because in the past I have heard students say "All you have to do is let it happen. That is all there is to it, you just have to let it happen." I would respond that this idea is correct; you do have to let it happen. But what do you do before you let it happen? You have to do something, because that is what life is, that is what existence is. It is doing. So it is a combination of both of those things. Something has to happen.

Let's go back to the story about how every philosophy is correct and appropriate. What they are doing is fulfilling the needs of the individuals at that particular state that they happen to be in within evolution. There is not really a straight path that goes somewhere directly. The path is a round one, it is a global path. It is a cyclical path. All things move in cycles. For example we have a basil plant that we planted yesterday in the garden. The sun will come up tomorrow and it will shine on all the basil leaves, and cause photosynthesis to happen and the basil plant will jump out of the ground. It will begin to worship the sun and as long as you tend it and take care of it, it gets really big and worships the sun. The sun gave it life but at the same time it is a paradox. The same sun is going to kill the basil plant in the end. It is going to shine on it and let it grow, and it is going to make it big and beautiful and then it is going to suck the life right out of it, and make it dead. That is the end of the cycle.

What a cruel thing for that sun to do! I mean it blessed it and loved it, nurtured it and made it grow and allowed it to become a powerful plant. Then it sucked the life right out of it, and shriveled it up until it fell on the ground as a dead weed. What a paradox!

It is a natural cycle that goes around. Why do we think that the part about the sun killing the plant is bad? We are looking at the yoyo, the going up and down rather than the sleeping yoyo. We are only looking at the work side of it, rather than looking at the transformation of it going on to something else. Both of the cycles are just as important as the other, the growing cycle, as well as the killing cycle. So, when we kill people in war, it is good. A nuclear war is ideal! To the extent that it causes the end of the cycle. When the planet blows up and explodes into a nova, blows away the planet and all of the people and everything on it, it is a good thing.

Isn't there a large contradiction to what I am saying with most of the philosophies out there? All of them say "God is love! God is sweet! Let's kiss each other and everybody be happy because everything is fine, and this is enlightenment, and we will find the god within us and go to heaven." Nature has both sides. Nature is a paradox. God has both sides also. God is a paradox. Why is nature that way?

Planets live several billions of years, suns live trillions of years, and everything has a cycle. The thing that creates it also destroys it. So it is okay for sooth-sayers and philosophers to speak to people to get their attention, so they will discover the reality of the whole. Most paths are there to simply fulfill the needs of those on that path. Every cell within the body is an important cell, if you remove a few of those cells, then everything will get out of balance. Creation made all the cells.

I want to go back to the very first basic lecture where I taught about the cylinder of evolutionary absolute time. There is a really interesting phenomenon that takes place in creation. We have talked about it a lot of times. The reason I want to talk about it again, is because it is like making the yoyo sleep. This philosophy is talking about a universal thing that has happened. It is a total consciousness of the whole thing rather than just a portion of it, which would just be an effect of it. The reason I want to talk about this is that we can talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, but nothing really happens to anyone until they let their yoyo sleep. I am inviting you all to let your yoyo sleep. But you first have got to talk about it and talk about it. You have got to meditate on it and meditate on it. That is what practice is. It is the meditation.

There is no right or wrong about any of this. You cannot be right in this discussion and you cannot be wrong about it. Wherever you happen to be is safe, because it is right for you. This can also be called god. It can be called god because it is so abstract. When you discover this god, it does not have any happiness or sadness to it, it just sort of is. It does not have any judgment. It does not have any good or bad to it, it just is. Anything that comes out of any side of it can be good or bad. The destroying end of it can be good and the creative end of it can be bad. Or the creation side of it could be good and the destroying part of it could be bad. It is the cycle of the way it works. It is something that is just happening. It is beyond our involvement in it. It is before our evolvement into existence. So it is difficult to put any judgment on it, because it is the thing that created us.

This cylinder of evolutionary absolute time starts off with the premise that there could be nothing. This nothing comes before we are, or before thought, time or space, before planets are. It is a philosophical look at it from a place that is not in us. As if we were looking at some place per say in the universe that has nothing in it. But there is no universe to look into and there is no place to look from into this nothingness. If this nothingness were, there would be nothing and not even us to think about nothing, and there would not be anything to recognize nothing. That is one side of it. There would not even be a void, because there is nothing to even allow a void.

The next chapter is that if there is nothing it has to be possible. It would have to be possible for nothing to be. So in this philosophical examination of this, if there is nothing it would have to be possible. If there is no big bang, no universe, nothing — it must be possible for nothing to be. So nothing creates possibility automatically. So these two things are grand opposites. In a philosophical view, you have always existed. Because there is no such thing as time in this cylinder. These are just philosophical thoughts, examining from this side to that side. We did not create them. We are a result of them.

These two grand opposites come into bond in a harmonic manner. They come into bond, into sex, in a harmonic manner. They both decide they want that bond, automatically. Infinite amount times in a finite moment. That is called an explosion. An infinite amount of these explosions happen in a finite moment. That is called the big bang. All things, and all events, every happening, all words, planets, stars, electromagnetic waves, quarks, atoms, all come into existence in a finite moment at this one little point. They explode out into the big bang and create the universe, and then what replays is the movie, very slowly as it moves out, and as it collapses back in the movie continues to play. So everything has happened already, all of it already is in existence and we are simply lost in it. We are lost in it, believing that it is something significant, and trying to find our importance in it individually.

So, when this thing is first discovered for what it is, as a sleeping yoyo it becomes depressing. It appears on the outside that nothing is happen. It seems that it does not matter what happens, and that we ca not say what is good and what is bad. The good and the bad automatically go out of it. We can play the game in the movie of life and get lost in it temporarily. But every time we look back at this thing, we are able to observe that all we are is a result of this thing, and everything has already happened. What is going to be is going to be and it does not make any difference anyway. We begin to see that we have no control over it, because we are a result of it. We are just the expelled gas that came from the explosion. So then it becomes a trick that we play on ourselves because we actually are that thing in totality, but we play a trick to stay stupid from it. We trick ourselves into staying stupid because the reality of it is very depressing. Because when we find out the reality of it, it makes you feel utterly insignificant. Everything that you have to do, everything you say or think is ultimately meaningless. Life is meaningless. There is no meaning. It is a paradox, because if there is a meaning to something, then there is also no meaning. Everything has its opposite, everything is just half truth. At the point of creation, there is no meaning to it because the explosion already happened and there is nothing you can do about it. But out on the periphery, you can pretend to be stupid and believe that you have control over it, and that you can do something about anything in life.

This can be a positive experience as well. Everything has its opposite. When you look at it from the positive attitude of how good it is to be alive and you look inside of it, then it has got to be depressing! It is only logical that everything has its opposite side. Because of the two grand opposites going into intercourse and exploding out, everything that comes out of that result has an opposite. Up and down, back and forward, black and white, in and out, life and death. Everything manifests its opposite. If you look at it from the outside as great and you look into it, it is depressing. If you look from the outside of it as bad, then automatically because of natural laws, it becomes happy or becomes god. If you are miserable in your existence you find your salvation in the explosion. You find comfort in going out of existence as you cycle back around and god kills you after it created you.

The depressing part comes from wanting control over your life. There is no control in your life. The only choice you have is to choose what is. At the same time choosing what is, allows us to feel we have control when we would have had to choose it anyway. This is where you allow your yoyo to sleep at the bottom of the string, which is letting it happen. To experience this, instead of just hearing the philosophy of it, it becomes very unreal to be honest with you. I cannot give you the experience. Everybody has to have it their own experience with it. It is not an experience in words.

We do things in our lives because we want to, because it was our creation and it is what we were doing. It is still mundane, meaningless and painful to be doing our own things in life. All the good things that happen in the world as well as all the bad things become painful when you observe them from this creative point. They become painful because they are so mundane; it is ridiculous that you are even doing them. So while enjoying yourself in the outside world, and enjoying yourself in the manifest movie that we just happen to be living in, when looking back at it you find that it is miserable. If you are in there and looked out, it would draw you out into the manifest material world and it would be fun to play out there. Which is what we get involved in. We go both ways, back and forth. It is both. We move in and out. What I am trying to say is every facet of every teaching of every philosophy is correct. It is a very necessary point that everybody have these things going on in their movies of life, and the total-ness of the explosion, you would be trying to deceive yourself about it. Being able to accept every facet of it is being honest with it. There is a meeting between the two extremes, and that is honesty in the center. Admitting that everything just is, without the good or the bad, that is the honesty of it. Sometimes that is not happy and it is not sad, it just is. To be able to say, this path is wrong, and that one is right is just ridiculous. Although I would say that at a certain point in evolution getting close to the cylinder of evolutionary absolute time, is very interesting! We are playing in the game of evolution. What I am saying is a certain point of evolution, you stand in the experience of this thing, and you begin to see the reality of what is going on. Instead of it being a philosophy or an intellectual exercise, it becomes an experience. I cannot give that to you, you must experience it. It is the sleeping yoyo.

The universe is no more complicated that this yoyo. You have to let it sleep, you cannot make it sleep. But you have to make it work at the same time. It sleeps at the bottom of the swing, and yet it is still spinning, but it is not rising up or lowering down. It is not just sitting there, it is still active.

There is a very interesting thing that has permeated down throughout the philosophies on this planet, and it says something like this: "Man is the ultimate creation on the planet. Mankind is the highest creature, highest being in existence that has come from creation. Once you have received manhood and womanhood then you are opened up and you can gain everything." It is a paradox, because everything is a paradox. It is true and it is not true. From the perspective of where we are at on our planet, it could be true. But from another perspective, it is just a beginning. For if we hold on to mankind and if we feel strongly within ourselves and we immerse in the consciousness that mankind is the ultimate, then it is true. Because when man is destroyed as the sun draws the life force out of the man, as it does in the plant and takes away his life, and gives it another life, it continues on that cycle. As long as it remains human then it is the ultimate. But once it lets itself go on to become something larger than mankind, then it can move on. But because of the ego of humankind in the spirit, or the enlightened soul on the other side, in heaven, or the nirvanas, or the universal consciousness, the ego of a god in those states would say that mankind is the ultimate. They would say that a human would have a difficult time giving itself up to become a Sun. Giving itself up to become a ball of hydrogen exploding in a fission process.

It is called phi, or the logarithmic swirl of phi, where these different dimensions of evolution create themselves.

A humankind, a humanoid, a nirvanic god, an enlightened soul would hold on to saying that this human-god-mind-thing is the ultimate. But that is only half truth, because everything is only half truth. There is a continual evolutionary process that is manifested to us in nature. It is called phi, or the logarithmic swirl of phi, where these different dimensions of evolution create themselves. As we evolve out of this point of creation we eventually come to this small level where man happens to be. In the center of this universe, there are the nirvanas and the heavens. The center line, the evolutionary line is the core of everything that has manifested on the surface of if. Any consciousness on that point of evolution within the center of this universe would have total unity consciousness of everything within that universe and everything up to that point of evolution.

But it does not know beyond that point. Because it has not been beyond for the experience of what is beyond. So it would be telling the truth when it says that humankind is the ultimate because humankind is the ultimate at that point. But this evolutionary cylinder never ceases. This point continues to go on into infinity and it goes far beyond what a human is. What humans are like now is similar to an amoeba or a single cell that evolved out of the beginning and became more and more complex as it went on. It cycles around to the realization that this explosion is very scary when you look into it, because you go back into nothingness, and the whole thing was meaningless anyway. But then, it comes back with a whole new set of rules in the next evolutionary stage, giving you a new expression to get all excited about and get lost in that is far beyond humankind.

What I am trying to say here is that we incarnate back and forth on the surface of this eternity and we go deeper and deeper into it with each incarnation until we work our way back down to the evolutionary line, and then we move forward. We move forward then, because of the collectiveness of the larger thing that we become. Just as in nature. One cell joins another cell, and becomes a two cell amoeba. More cells join together and become more and more complex. It continues on and on forever. The reason I raise this point, is that if everybody in their stage in evolution looks at different paths. They look at those paths for answers for the cause of their existence. Some people feel very comfortable at looking towards a stage play for their understanding. Some people can go to movies, and get off spiritually. Some people can go to a fundamentalist preacher, and get off spiritually being told about god. Some people can look at the mathematics of the cosmos and the expression of it in mathematics and get off on it. They are all saying the exact same thing it is just from a different perspective. But it never ceases. It continues to go on. Everybody is saying the exact same thing; it is just a different perspective. Everybody is talking about the same elephant. Some people are saying there is leather on it, and some people says it has skin on it, and some people say it has hair on it. But it is all the same elephant. It is all the same thing. We really are all one.