There are four principal pathways that lead to self-realization. Mysticism is the hidden way. The mystic practices the art of intentionality. Intentionality is the awareness of being in all of its profundity and a gentle humor, a not-so-serious view of our existence, a pure love of life in both its finiteness and its infiniteness.
The path of love seeks to unite us with immortality through love of God. The path of selfless giving seeks to unite us with immortality, with nirvana, through action. Love is passive; self-giving is active. Jnana yoga, the path of discrimination, seeks to unite us with eternity through knowledge. By pushing away all illusions of the self and coming to know who and what we are, we become conscious of our own infiniteness.
Mysticism uses power — the utilization of power to unite us with our eternal self. When we practice mysticism, we deal with two sides of ourselves: that which is seen and that which is unseen. The part of our being that we see is the island of the first attention. The part of our self that we’re not conscious of is the ocean of our second attention.
Imagine that you’re standing on an island right now. This is the island of your awareness. You can explore the island; it has many parts, many sides. This is what you see and feel in your day-to-day life. But around the island, surrounding it, is something else — there’s an ocean. Within the ocean there are different creatures; some are friendly, some are not. Out in the farther reaches of the ocean, the farther shores are found, other realities, other eternities. But in order to go to those other shores, we have to leave our own island and journey through the ocean, to reach them.
So mysticism is the study of our own island, the island of our first attention, of our awareness in this world. It’s the study of the ocean, its currents, its winds, the life forms that exist in it, methods of travel. It’s also the study, in its more advanced stages, of those other islands, other continents, other worlds, and of the nature of being itself. It’s a very structured study.
When we start to learn about mysticism, we begin by assessing our being. Step one is to consider your island. Your island is probably not in the best of shape — part of it may be overgrown; the palm trees are not healthy; the paths need to be cut; there’s a jungle that has to be pruned back and made orderly. And this is not something that you do once, but as long as you’re alive you have to do this. You have to keep up with it, just as you have to keep up with your yard. If you have a yard around your house, you may cut it every other week. If you let it go, soon there’ll be a jungle. In mysticism we turn our attention to our life and we bring order into our life by constantly cutting it back — through analysis and awareness and the skillful utilization of power.
During the Arab oil embargo, those of us here in the United States became much more interested in being fuel-efficient. With the price of oil and gas soaring, particularly in the colder regions of our country, people began to become aware that they were losing a tremendous amount of energy, that they were wasting energy.
Pictures were taken of homes in the colder regions, with infrared film. Infrared film is a heat-sensitive film and it records where heat is being lost in a home. So a photograph would be taken of a home and the photo would reveal by coloration where heat was being lost — if the heat was being lost around the windows or the doors, through the chimney or wherever. And with this knowledge, the owner of the home could then insulate those areas and conserve heat, conserve energy.
So in the early stages of the path of mysticism, it’s necessary to learn where you’re losing energy and plug up the holes in your being. It’s also necessary to become aware of where you gain energy and to try and increase the energy that you are taking in and decrease the loss of energy. And we start to do this in our physical life, in the island of our first attention, in our day-to-day awareness — let’s not be concerned with traveling across the great oceans or exploring other islands until our own island is together.
So, the first step, really, is to understand where power comes from and increase it within ourselves, because without power we can’t do anything, we can’t be anything. Everything we do and are, according to the laws of mysticism, is dependent upon our personal power — the energy at our command. You might want to go places and have wonderful times but if you’re so weak that you can’t get up off the bed, then there’s no journey. So it’s necessary to have energy and power, and of course to direct that energy and power properly.
If you’re in a very cold place, if the house is freezing cold, you’re not really worried about where you’re losing heat. The first step is just to get the fireplace going so that there’s some basic heat there. Even if you’re losing it, you can stand near the fire and become warm enough to survive. Then you can turn your attention to where you’re losing the heat, become even warmer, and then perhaps even increase the fire. So step one is to understand where power comes from.
Power comes from eternity, it comes from the void, from the unseen realms. Each one of us has infinite power within us, but it’s necessary to access that power and bring it into your life. There may be a great deal of oil under the ground, but unless you can bring it up above the ground you won’t be able to refine it and use it to heat your home. So, the first step is to understand where power comes from. Power ultimately comes from eternity, from life itself. There are different strands of power, though, just as there’s power in the sun and power in the wind, power in coal and oil and things like that.
In mysticism we begin to learn about the different types of power and how we can access them. The primary way to develop power is through making your mind quiet, shutting off your internal dialogue.
Thoughts drain you.
They block your power.
As your mind chatters away incessantly during the day and night, you block the source of power. Within you there’s an infinite ocean of power. The sun is always burning within you, but it’s in a state of perpetual eclipse because you are blocking it with your thoughts. In mysticism, you have to learn how to stop thought completely. Once you stop thought, the power, and light, and energy of eternity will pulse through you. That’s step one.
To start with, it’s necessary to bring order into your life. The program for the new student of mysticism is to practice gazing exercises. Gazing exercises, which are very similar to meditation, involve the controlled use of will and thought to silence the mind. If you were to practice gazing two or three times a day, what you would do is sit down to meditate, open your eyes, or keep them partially open, and focus on something. You might want to focus on a candle flame, a brightly colored stone, a cloud, a star. Whatever you focus on will have an effect upon you. In mysticism we’re dealing with the elementals; we’re drawing a great deal of power from nature.
Everything in nature has a certain power, a certain radiance, or aura. And in mysticism, we become conscious of the radiance and aura of things and we bring those radiances and auras into ourselves. Whatever you focus on will affect you, so you must be very careful about what you choose to gaze upon. Gazing is not, in other words, an arbitrary exercise where you’re just, for a short period of time, looking at something and no great effect will occur. A great effect will occur when you practice gazing.
So in the initial stages what you need to do is to gaze on something that is relatively stable. I would suggest a candle flame; a flower; perhaps in the evening, if you’re outside, a star; or a yantra — the yantras are the ancient mystical symbols.
Sit up nice and straight and for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes simply gaze at the candle flame, let’s say, or at the dot in the center of the yantra. When you gaze, don’t exert your concentrative powers so intensely that you get a headache. Just sit back. Sit up straight, though, and focus without focusing too hard, sort of like daydreaming. What you want to do is become aware of the object that you’re gazing at. Try and feel it, but not become totally immersed in it or wrapped up in it either. So it’s not a hard concentration; it’s exactly as the word implies, “gazing,” looking at something without a hard focus.
As you do this, you should disassociate yourself from all thought. Any thoughts that enter into the mind you should ignore — in the early stages — and eventually, you should stop thought completely. This will really happen of its own accord as the power of your gazing develops.
The idea involves the spheres of attention. You have a certain sphere of attention. Whatever you direct your attention towards, you become. Right now your attention is directed towards your life’s actions, your thoughts, your emotions, the interactions you have with others, philosophical ideas, visceral physical experiences.
It’s necessary for us to unhook ourselves because right now we are definitely hooked. We’re hooked on sensory experiences and ways of seeing things and what we need to do for a while is simply unhook our attention and free it. In other words, we’ve been looking at something for so long that we’ve forgotten anything else exists. We’re so busy looking straight ahead of us that we’ve forgotten that there are things on either side of us or behind us or above or below or within. So by gazing, we’re learning to unhook our attention from the way that we now view and see life.
And as you sit and gaze for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes at an object and ignore thought and gradually overcome thought or go beyond it — step up to a higher level where there is no thought — you will unhook from seeing life through your eyes; through the senses; through the sensory apparatus; and through your intellect, which reasons and analyzes; and also through your emotions which feel. These are three very fine methods of perception — sensory perceptions: seeing, touching, tasting, feeling, smelling and hearing; or analysis: thinking about something, analyzing its qualities, comparing and contrasting; or emotions, feeling: feeling love, joy, fear, apprehension, oneness. These are the three primary methods of perception.
You’re going to develop a fourth method of perception, which is the second level of attention. This is intuition. With intuition we “know” things. We can know what something looks like without having to look at it physically. Actually, we can see what it looks like completely. We can feel something without having to go through an emotional process. Intuition is shorthand; it’s a faster method of apprehending the true nature of something. And we’re going to learn to develop the field of attention called intuition, the second field of attention, to a very fine and exacting point. To do this, though, it’s also necessary to bring order into the primary level of attention, the island of the first attention.
So early in mysticism it’s necessary for you to work very intently, for the first five or six years that you practice the study, at bringing order into your life. You need to bring order into your physical life on the basic level. Your house has to be clean and orderly, everything in place. Anything that you don’t need in your life, you eliminate. You go through your clothes closets and eliminate any clothes you really don’t wear and give them to someone else or just throw them away. You go through your paperwork, and you’re always caught up with it. Your desk is never a mess. Everything is in order. Your career is in order: it’s the right one, you’re happy with it, you’re working hard at it. You’re getting enough physical exercise, your body is in good shape. You’re watching your diet. You’re not sleeping too much, nor are you sleeping too little. Your relationships with others are good, clean, efficient, happy, and progressive. Your relationship with yourself is good. You don’t sit around and feel sorry for yourself; you don’t wish for things that you can’t be or become. You’re taking charge and control of your life. This is simply on the physical level.
On the mental level it’s necessary to sharpen your mental faculties, to become precise in your understanding, to not be lazy mentally, to not sit around and watch television but develop your mind. You need to become aware of the transference of power. While in the primary exercises in mysticism and practicing our gazing we develop our awareness of the second field of attention, we also have to see where we’re losing power. But more of that in a second — let’s drop back for a moment here to the gazing exercises and developing more personal power.
Personal power comes in many forms. We have it within us. As you learn to stop your thoughts, as you practice gazing each day for 15 minutes, then maybe half an hour or 40 minutes twice or three times a day, you’ll shut the mind off. And as you shut the mind off you’ll find more and more power entering your life. You’ll simply have more energy.
Power can also be exercised — it can be accessed — through the elementals. Everything has a power — fog, wind, fire, water. These are all conductors of power and in more advanced mysticism you’ll learn how to bring power through these elements, from the elements into your being. There’s also power in the etheric, in the ocean that surrounds the island. You can learn how to conduct that power.
When you gaze, don’t try and do anything in particular. Just have fun with it. Sit there, twice a day or three times a day and focus your attention on the object of gazing — look at it.
Get lost in it!
But be very diligent. When you start to think, push your thoughts away or if your thoughts are occurring, be very unattached to them. As you do this, you’ll gradually unhook your awareness from the sensory.
While you’re gazing at something — and this is a sensory experience, that is to say, your eyes are focusing on one point — you can blink and relax your eyes or shut them once in a while.
You don’t have to be too rigid about it — but while you’re gazing, let your other attention wander … wherever it will.
You will find that after gazing you’ll be in a very relaxed, tranquil state of mind. And that suddenly — as you practice gazing (this form of meditation) for some time — you’ll find that you’ll begin to feel less physical. As you walk around through the day, as you interact with people, as you talk to them, there won’t be as much of a sense of being a personality but rather of being a whole person.
You will feel that your island is getting larger. Your island is getting larger and larger all the time. Or you might say, before we used to think we were the island. All our feelings were those which occurred on the island — but suddenly we find out that our awareness is actually stretching out beyond the island into the ocean that surrounds the island, and we’re feeling ourselves as being part of the ocean too.
So. once you’re practicing gazing every day (this form of mediation) you’ll begin to see your power increasing. Then you have to turn your attention to your life and start going through it, going through your physical life, and bringing order into it. You need to do this again and again as long as you live. The house of the mystic, as I suggested, is perfectly clean. Everything is in complete order, but it’s not a nihilistic order, it’s not an unhappy order. It’s a balance that we have to achieve. And you’ll find that as you go around through your life ordering things, while you create outer order, you’ll also create inner order. This order will free you from the physical and its confines.
Your home is a very important place. In mysticism we feel that our home is everywhere. Our home is the Earth, our homes are the stars in the skies and the ether and that which lies beyond. We draw a great deal of power from our home, particularly the room we live in and sleep in. So that’s why your home is a very special place. It should be exactly as you want it to be. The room in which you sleep is very, very important because that’s where you do your dreaming, and it’s an energy base.
It’s a good idea to have your meditation table in your bedroom, to set aside a special corner where you meditate and practice your gazing exercises and other exercises every day. Try and keep this area very clean. Perhaps put a rug down and have a little table that you put your candle on, some flowers, whatever it may be that you’re gazing on, but it should be a very sacred place. You’ll develop a very strong field of energy there. This energy will permeate your whole room. This energy will help you at night when you sleep, in your dreaming. And as you’re outside the house during the day, your inner being will constantly come back to your room and your home, in which you’re developing a very strong vortex of energy, and will draw energy from it. It’s your base of operations. After you’ve been out in the world all day and you’ve been kind of worn down by the world energy, when you come home, as soon as you walk inside your house you’ll feel that vortex of energy and it will renew you.
So your home is where you’re developing a field of energy and awareness.
Everything in your home should be as you’d like it to be. It should be a beautiful place, filled with light and color. You should live in a neighborhood where the energy is clean and good. If you don’t like where you live, you should change it — it’s very important for the mystic because the mystic draws power from where they live. So you should never be concerned about spending money on where you live — it’s a very, very important thing. Better to drive an older car and spend a little more money on your rent because it’s where you spend a great deal of your time and you should feel very good about it. You should feel you’re living in a place with good energy, basically.
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You have to assess the power of the area where you live. That’s why for those who live in Los Angeles — there are many fine areas — but I recommend Pacific Palisades. It’s a very good area. It’s a place of power. Certain areas of the Earth have more power than others, and if you’re drawing power from the Earth, if you live in a place of power, the energy is with you. It’s easier to meditate. It’s easier to walk between the crack that separates the worlds, into eternity.
There are places on this Earth where there are holes, you might say, in space. These are places where it’s easier to pass into the other worlds. We call them places of power and if you can locate your home in a place of power, it’ll just make it easier. If you’re trying to fly a kite it’s much easier when there’s wind. If you’re very advanced in mysticism, you don’t need wind — you can bring the wind up yourself. If you’re even more advanced, you can fly your kite without any wind. But in the beginning it sure is a heck of a lot easier if there’s some wind around. So if you like to fly a kite, you should live in a windy area. If you’re interested in practicing mysticism, you have to pay a great deal of attention to where you live. It’s always best to live by water, if you can, within a mile or two of the ocean or a lake or a river. The energy or the power within water is a very stable energy and whether you’re conscious of it or not, your being will be drawing power from the water. Water is a marvelous conductor of energy.
Speaking of water, it’s very important to take showers or baths two or three times a day, if you’re practicing mysticism, because water is a terrific neutralizer. During the day we pick up all kinds of different energies that come through the ether and through other human beings, and if you take a shower two or three times a day it just cleanses you, not only physically but psychically. It neutralizes any bad energy that you pick up. So try and locate your home near the water if you can. Try and have a lot to do with water. It’s a beautiful element.
Keep your house perfectly clean, beautiful, have nice art objects around, flowers, plants. It’s very important to have a lot of nice plants in your house. The energy of plants is very conducive to spiritual development. Plants give out a radiance of life. Not only do they give us the oxygen that we need to live in this world, but they also provide us with a luminosity — they have a very high strand of luminosity.
What I’m suggesting is that you’re affected by everything in your environment, more than you realize. While you may not see the effects physically, they affect you psychically, they affect your spiritual development, and in mysticism we pay attention to everything. Even the most minute things affect us and we pay attention to them.
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So you have to draw up a plan for your life. You need to find a place that’s a place of power to live in. You need to find a home that feels right — we do it all on intuition. Power will draw you to it if you really want it. You need to have your house in great order. You need to work at a career that feels progressive and good, and you can’t be afraid to change midstream if your career doesn’t feel proper. You need to associate with people who have higher levels of power. Granted, at work, or just in the world, we’re going to associate with all types of people — and that won’t necessarily hurt us; it can actually help us if we handle it properly. But in your free time you should associate with persons who are also seeking power because you’ll draw higher power from them, and they’ll draw higher power from you.
If you’re just dealing with people who have no interest in these studies — in your free time — then they’ll pull your power and you’ll find yourself being drained.
It’s necessary to assess — in your personal life — whether the people you spend your time with are elevating your consciousness or slowing you down. It’s easy to do this. After you’ve been with someone — not during — see how you feel. Sometimes you can be with someone and feel very elated and excited, but you can be inwardly drained by them. Inwardly they’ll take your power and you won’t realize it. [Long pause.]
So when you initially meet another person or when you have contact with other people, as the two waves of energy — the wave of energy that’s in your consciousness and the wave of energy that’s in their consciousness — come together, sometimes there’s a lot of turbulence. You might sit with someone and feel that things are going well — there’s a lot of exciting energy, you see a lot of light — but that isn’t necessarily the case, that’s only the surface.
One of the rivers could be very polluted, and while on the surface there’s a lot of action, the pollution in one river could be absorbed into the other river and pollute them both.
So it’s necessary to pay very strict attention to how others affect you.
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And as I suggested, at work and in the world we have to deal with all kinds of people, and that’s fine. We shouldn’t be afraid to go out in the world. As a matter of fact, for the mystic, it’s a field day. It’s wonderful to work and live in the world. It gives you an opportunity to learn about power, to watch it in action, to gain power from others and to help others. A mystic loves the world, loves nature, and loves people. But at the same time, it’s very necessary in your own time, when your life does not cause you to be with others, to spend time alone so that you can just feel your own energy field and develop it, and to spend time with others who generate higher energy.
So, after you’ve been with someone, after they’ve gone away and you’re no longer in their physical presence, about 20 minutes later, see how you feel. This is how we evaluate. Are you in a higher energy state than before you were with that person, or are you in a lower energy state? If you’re in a lower energy state and this happens on a regular basis, then you need to eliminate that person from your life. Or if you can’t eliminate them — if they’re a relative or something like that and you feel you have strong bonds with them, a strong connection — then minimize your contact with them, and when you’re with them put up a shield. Just simply become aware that they’re draining you psychically.
They may not realize it. They may not mean to hurt you at all, but they still may. You could spend some time with someone who’s carrying a fatal disease, and you could contract the disease. They could be the nicest person in the world, and they didn’t mean to hurt you. But nevertheless, if the microbes get in your system and you catch the disease, you’ll be ill and perhaps die. So simply because others don’t mean to hurt us doesn’t mean we shouldn’t avoid them. If they’re sick we should stay away from them unless we’re strong enough to cure them rather than pick up their illness. That’s not going to help them or us.
So after you’ve been with someone, evaluate, and see how you feel.
Now, everybody’s moods go up and down. One day you’ll be higher, the next day you’ll be lower. So simply because you’ve been with a friend and after being with them you feel a little drained, that’s just part of loving and giving. You have to be willing to be with people and once in a while be drained by them a little bit. Once in a while you’ll elevate them. That’s not what I’m speaking of. But sometimes we have developed associations with persons that just are not right, and we don’t break away from them because we’re attached. Therefore you really get your power drained. This, of course, happens to women constantly. As you know, one of the primary reasons that women don’t attain enlightenment is because they’re manipulated and dominated by men — have been for thousands of years. And the subtle bodies of women are very fragile, and as men constantly throw sexual energy at them it damages the subtle body, it drains their energy and their power.
You have to learn a new lifestyle, is what I’m suggesting, if you practice mysticism. It’s a very tight lifestyle. It’s fun and it’s exciting. It’s very realistic. You have to look around and find out what’s going on, not just on the surface, but within. And when you see that people are harming you, you have to be willing to push them aside. You have to generate enough of an energy field yourself, through your gazing and other practices, so that when you’re out in the world you won’t be drained by the world.
Everything is an opportunity for the mystic. Everything is something to be learned. You should never be afraid of experience, but on your own time you have to minimize your contact with things that will drain your power. Start to look at your life, examine it — this is something you do as long as you’re here in this world — and see, “Where am I losing power?”
You could have had a relationship that was very, very good for years. You might have been married and it was wonderful, but now it’s changed. The relationship no longer adds to either of you, but you’re draining each other. Well, the sensible thing to do is break it off. And while a certain amount of pain may be connected with that, believe me, it’s much better than the pain of dragging it on for years.
Start over. Spend time with people who are more like yourself. We change. Just because you get along with someone for a short period of your life doesn’t mean you have to spend your whole life with them.
You have to be smart.
You must always feel that death is around the corner. Never be afraid of it, but recognize its importance. It can come at any time. Don’t assume because you’re 20 or 30 that you’ll live to be 70. We never know if we’ll see the end of the day or night. You should live every minute as if it’s your last moment. Live your life fully. Don’t procrastinate and put off change. Do it now. And if you live that way every moment, then you’ll have an impeccable life.
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Examine your career, whether you’re at school, at work or you stay at home most of the time. Determine if you’re using your time most efficiently. At the office, do you waste time talking with others when you could be working? Are you always associating with the same people in the office? Have you gotten into an energy drain with them?
Don’t talk too much. Mystics don’t talk too much. They’re silent.
Talk and enjoy conversation with your friends. Conversation is a wonderful way to share energy, alleviate tension, and just bring love into our lives. But only talk if you have something to say. If you don’t have something to say, if you can’t contribute, it’s better to listen. Don’t listen to those who have nothing to say. Better to be by yourself a little bit.
Now, here you have to be careful. Some people will tend to be indrawn and hear these words, and say, “Well, gosh, since the people in my office are not seeking mystically or spiritually, I’ll just sit by myself all the time.”
And all you’ll do is make yourself a target.
Inaccessibility is very important for one who practices mysticism. You want to pass through the world and not draw attention to yourself. Whenever you draw attention to yourself, people will focus their awareness upon you and they’ll send you energy, and the energy that you’ll receive is not necessarily good.
So if you sit in the office and you’re too obviously different and you never talk with anybody — in your own little world — everybody is going to regard you more than had you blended a little bit. This is not a very healthy thing to do. They’ll start to send you bad vibrations and bad energy, and you don’t need it. You’re very sensitive in the early stages of your development to these different energies.
Blend with the world. Have enough conversation with people so that you blend, but no more. Don’t overdo it. Yet don’t be afraid to stand aloof, to be by yourself. If we look at those who have been great in the world — Einstein, Buddha, Christ, Thoreau, Emerson, Lincoln — these were all people who went their own way. They didn’t follow the party line, but they did so with decorum, they did so with good manners. So always exercise good manners. Be inaccessible. Observe the way you dress, the way you wear your hair — all these things matter. You’re picking up points, either pluses or minuses.
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Blend with the world. We don’t want people to see who or what we really are because they can’t fathom it. Most people are so caught up in the dream of this life that they see nothing else. They’re caught up in their own fears, frustrations, and illusions. Don’t rock their boat. If you do, they may get angry. Pass through the world quietly and become aware of eternality. This is the way of the mystic.
With those of like mind who understand, you can share it — your understanding. But don’t try and convert others or explain what you do to others. Rather, just appear very evenly in the world. Don’t stand out. When you stand out, it’s just your ego. Be humble, blend, converse with others, be friendly, but be inaccessible. Don’t talk to people about your life and your beliefs; keep it to yourself. Talk in a level which people can understand. Talk about baseball or the weather, a little bit about this or that, but don’t become too involved unless there’s somebody you have very deep communication with. Naturally, if you meet someone whose heart is open, interested in higher perceptions, then you can share more with them. But be very careful. Human beings lose most of their power in their relationships with others.
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It’s very advisable for women to be conscious of how they dress — just don’t attract a lot of attention to your sexuality. You’ve grown up in a society that tells you to display yourself. It’s terrible! How can you even have an integrated personality when you’re always something on display, an object, a commodity, when you’re trying to show yourself off hoping somebody will come along and buy you? It’s ridiculous. There’s no integrity in that. Dress any way you want to, but be aware — be aware that you’re always being watched, that human beings are very conscious and that you pick up energy from people all the time. Blend. Don’t stand out either way. Don’t be too conservative; don’t be too liberal. Simply blend. It’s much healthier this way.
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So we’re going to pay attention, then, in our early study, first of all to gazing and meditating. Meditate several times a day to develop power. Then we turn our attention to our lifestyle. We begin by selecting a nice place to live and keeping it impeccably clean. We keep the house in order; we keep our friendships in order; we pay attention to where we go to school, where we work. We’re friendly with people — friendly enough but not overly friendly. We don’t talk too much; we listen and we learn from life. We spend our free time with persons like ourselves whom we have fun with, who are advancing themselves to higher and higher rungs of consciousness.
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We’re always aware that there’s danger in the world, all of the time — danger of physical violence from others who are not particularly stable, danger from the unseen, from the astral, from negative forces. We’re not afraid of danger but we’re aware of it. Never underestimate your opponent. The day you do is the day you lose the battle.
Respect your opponent, but always know that you can win,
The mystic is extremely patient. Sometimes it’s necessary to wait through a whole lifetime just for one event to occur. So you have to be conscious of time and use time to your advantage, but at the same time you have to be very patient and know that eternity does everything properly. You have to have terrific faith in life.
Then you can begin, as you bring your life into more and more order,
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Now, the second attention will develop when you find a teacher. It’s necessary to find a benefactor or teacher, one who lives, or who is, the second attention. Such a person has a very strong energy field. They won’t look necessarily different physically than anyone else. As a matter of fact, they probably won’t stand out at all. That’s part of their inaccessibility. But this is someone who has practiced mysticism for many, many years or lifetimes and they have a very strong second field of attention. They live in it constantly. They’re no longer aware of just the sensory, mental or emotional interpretations of existence but they live in the ocean all of the time. Occasionally they come on land just to make sure things are going well on their island, but most of the time they’re out there in the ocean, traveling, becoming, whereas you are always clinging to your island and it’s enough once in a while just to put your foot in the water and maybe go for a short swim. For them, it’s unusual to come back on land. They come back on land just long enough to make sure that things are well attended, the gardens are growing well, the pathways are properly cut, and then they’re off again.
So you need to find a teacher of mysticism, one who generates that power and energy. The way you learn about the second attention is by spending time with them.
While you’re gazing in meditative exercises and tightening up your life and learning about inaccessibility and all of the different things like that … dreaming, all those things … will help you develop a certain amount of power… you can’t really expect to begin to move into this second level of attention until you have a teacher.
The way you move into the second level of attention is that the teacher takes you there. If I’m out in the ocean and you’re on land, I can extend a hand and bring you out into the ocean. I can teach you how to swim, teach you how to dive, teach you how to travel through the water. If you just try and go in the water on your own, you’ll drown. But with some instruction, you can learn to be a very good swimmer.
So, the teacher teaches you about the second level of attention.
Now, the second level of attention, you have to understand, has nothing to do with this world yet it has everything to do with this world. It has nothing to do with this world in the sense that you can’t think about it or discuss it. It’s an act of power. I deal with the second level of attention, for example, when I take my students out to the deserts or up into the mountains, the ocean, and we go to a place of power. A place of power is a multi-dimensional field of existence where it’s easier for us to walk through the doorway to the other worlds. I personally can walk through the doorway anywhere, as any teacher of mysticism can — the doorway is everywhere, there’s nothing but a doorway — but for those who are new, it’s much easier, and even for me it’s much more fun, to go to a place of power.
Now, when you go to a place of power with your teacher, the teacher will have you walk with them, or perhaps talk or perhaps be silent. But what the teacher is doing is broadcasting a power, an energy to you. The teacher is actually opening up your second level of attention and exercising it.
And you’ll find, as you go on these journeys with your teacher, your second level of attention will begin to develop. Suddenly you’ll develop powers and abilities that you won’t even know how or where they came from — they came from the teacher. The teacher developed them for you. It’s a transference principle, but it won’t work unless you’re leading a very tight life, unless you’re meditating every day, unless you have great dedication to the study.
The biggest obstacles to developing the second level of attention are the ideas in your mind, your dependence upon senses and your attachment to your emotions. Once we eliminate this, it’s very easy. You have an idea, a description of the world. You see life in a certain way. This description has been fixed from the moment of your birth. Your parents, society, books, language, advertising, everything has helped to contribute to your description of the world, the way you see life. The way you see life is not really the way it is. Life is a flux, it’s fluid, but you’re ordering it in a particular way. You’re focusing your attention on certain things, ignoring other things.
So, the first thing you have to do is learn to let go.
And the way we cause a person to let go, of course, when they’re practicing all the things that we’ve discussed,
We just take tremendous energy and force and bring it through a person. We turn up the heat — about 50 degrees.
And we have enough power, generating through us — which we draw from the elementals and from eternity — as teachers, as benefactors …
To bring a person right out of their mind and right out of their body awareness into the second attention. In other words, the teacher is actually lifting you out of the first attention.
On your own it might take you a hundred years to get out of the first attention.
The teacher can bring you out of the first attention in the first … in a few minutes, really.
But once you’ve been brought out of the first attention and into the second attention, your first attention will rebel. If we bring you into a cosmic level of awareness, then afterwards you’re going to run away from it and want to hide.
You’re going to want to cling to the physical structure of your being.
And so it’s necessary, also, to teach a person how to integrate their experiences in the second level of attention with the first.
So let’s say we go out to the desert together, and when we’re out in the desert
Now what are you going to do with all of that when you come back home, when you have to go to work the next day?
Well, you can do quite a lot with it, as a matter of fact.
You can see that the desert is everywhere, that the multi-dimensional planes are everywhere, and that you can sit in your office and work, and type, have business meetings, and do whatever you need to
And the very structure of your being, which you’re familiar with, your idea of the world, will feel threatened. Suddenly, when we show you things that are not supposed to be according to your description of the world, you’ll say, “Well, this is all impossible. This is frightening. I can’t deal with this. I’m going to hide out in that which is familiar.” But your description of the world is limited — it limits you, it makes you unhappy, it frustrates you. And you have to decide whether you want to stay with it or go beyond it.
See, your senses are a problem. You’re so used to seeing life with your eyes and your feeling — physical feeling, tasting, and so on — that you don’t realize that there are other ways to cognize information. So we have to teach you to go beyond the senses. The senses and the intellect are fine in their place, but you don’t want them to dominate you. The same is true of the emotions. You associate love with certain pastimes and activities — hate, fear — you have all these associations and we just have to dissolve them all.
What we do in advanced mysticism is,
You have a certain structure, just like an atom has a structure. It has protons and neutrons and then around it, it has bands of electrons. There’s a certain structure that makes an atom of hydrogen or an atom of helium. What we do in mysticism is we take the structure of your being and reorder it.
We dissolve the bonds that hold the personality and the self together and we allow them to reform. We take a handful of sand, which is your being, and we put it carefully and gently down on the ground. And the wind comes. The wind blows the patterns around again and again.
The wind is dharma. The wind is the power of eternity.
We as perceivers simply learn the art, not of ordering ourselves consciously, because the conscious mind can’t possibly order the depth of our being, but of opening ourselves up to the wind of eternity and allowing eternity to order us. This is the art of the mystic.
The art of the mystic is to unhook themselves first from the way they perceive life, which is limited. You do this by exposing yourself to other ways of seeing and feeling. If you’re stuck in one dimension, let’s pass you through ten other dimensions and in doing so you’ll try and get stuck on each one. As soon as we take one way of seeing life away from you, you’ll want to grab on to another. That’s OK.
But each way of seeing that we offer you will be less defined than the previous one, until finally you have a very fluid way of seeing life. You’ll have a very simple description of existence which will allow you to live in this world and get through the day just fine. But it’s so fluid that you can drop it at any moment and zip off into eternity.
Imagine that you have ten layers of clothing on. You can’t possibly go swimming. Every time you want to go swimming, you have to take off all ten layers before you can just get down to your bathing suit and hop in the water. It’s a very cumbersome process — so cumbersome that you might not even want to bother. So what we do in mysticism is gradually take off one layer at a time and keep it off, until we’ve got you in your bathing suit all the time so you can just hop in the water and swim. Then we have you swimming most of the time and just coming back on land once in a while. And then we start exploring, as I said, the other islands, the other realities, and then finally that which is the cause of all realities, that which makes everything that is. We enter into eternity itself, which there’s no way to describe. That’s the most advanced levels of mysticism.
So in mysticism we take ourselves and we hurl ourselves into the light of eternity, and that light changes us and transmutes us. It refines us again and again. Until we become the light of eternity itself. We do this by using power, energy, and consciousness. We turn our attention to our physical life and order it. We practice gazing. We find a teacher who can teach us these arts, the arts of power.
In mysticism there’s a great deal of laughter and happiness because some of the things we have to learn about in mysticism have to do with what is not only on the surface of the ocean, but what is below it. The surface may be happy and have pretty sailboats on it, but underneath there may be some sharks — ”Jaws” is lingering there. There are entities, negative forces; there are people who use power badly, bad occultists who may try and attack you and steal your power; all kinds of stuff goes on. It’s a tough neighborhood sometimes. So in mysticism you have to learn to be fearless, courageous, and powerful and deal with these things. It’s really not a problem.
The danger of the practice of mysticism is obsession.
This is why it’s a difficult path, and I don’t recommend it for most people. I would only recommend this path if it is your nature.
A lot of people who undertake the practice become obsessed with power. They forget that power is simply a device or a vehicle to take us to eternity — to just make us laugh and make us happy and cause us to merge with our real self. But along the way people become so caught up with power and powers as they develop them that they forget. They were on a journey, a journey to eternity, but on the way they forgot that they were on the journey. They got so caught up in their experiences or something that happened to them, that they stopped traveling. People become obsessed with power — obsession is the primary danger.
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We break off obsession by laughing at ourselves, by learning to be funny, by just seeing the joy in life and by having a terrific, terrific love for this world. In mysticism, we’re really not in a hurry to get out of this world because we feel that there is nothing but this world. Rather, we seek to see eternity in this world. And we know that one day we’ll go beyond this world. Just as we were not in it, at one point we’ll leave it. But while we’re here we love the Earth, we love the waters, the hills, the mountains, the streams. We’re very connected with nature in the study of mysticism. And that terrific love of this life and this world and that which makes this world keeps us balanced. It keeps us from getting too caught up with power; it keeps us from being obsessed.
Our ability to laugh offsets the terror of the infinite. When you look at the infinite, when you deal with that vast ocean, it can frighten you. You’re on your little island, you just look around you, and it’s almost too much at some times. But when you laugh, it brings the world into order. The humor is important — being able to laugh at yourself.
The vortexes of energy are so strong and powerful that you pass through in mysticism — as you watch yourself change from second to second, dissolving and reforming — that you have to develop a good sense of humor to deal with the absurdity of human beings and of this world. The laughter is very important in mysticism, more than in any of the other yogas. The sense of love for this world, and for the people who inhabit it, is very important. Balance is the key question in mysticism — the careful balance of power, of light and of love.
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I think personally that mysticism is the happiest of the ways.
I’ve practiced mysticism and, of course, all the paths in a number of different lifetimes, and I teach them all in this life.
I like mysticism
Because it gives people tremendous life transformation.
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All of the four yogas have their place — they’re really all one; they’re different aspects of the same thing. We divide them to make it easier to understand them. We learn them in modular blocks.
As I suggested in our tape on the path of love, I teach all four of the yogas in succession throughout the year. And actually, even during a season, I hop back and forth, but I teach the yoga of love in the summer, karma yoga in the fall, jnana yoga in the winter and mysticism in the spring.
And I deal with all of them all of the time because I don’t separate them — to me it’s self-realization.
You should learn them all — that’s my advice.
Focus on one, but learn them all. Because you’ll be using them at different points in your development.
But I think you’ll find that at least the principles of mysticism will help you terrifically as you deal with society and the world and life. You won’t want to run away from life or the world because it’s the challenge that makes us stronger.
It’s the ability to go into your office and do well, to succeed with people. To be happy. But to be cautious and not lose energy.
To become perfectly free — this is the world of mysticism and power.
Of all the four yogas, it’s the most useful for a person who lives in the world.
Enjoy them all.
Good luck!