I would like to address what I consider to be the most difficult topic for a person who seeks enlightenment to deal with. There are different types of spiritual teachers. The ultimate spiritual teacher is life. Life is constantly teaching us, if we’ll only open our eyes and observe.

Because we have so much, such a large self, such a developed personality and persona, we don’t really see. We see ourselves. We’re always basing everything that we see in life on a comparison with our own views, our feelings, our ideas. It’s only after the self has been swept away that we can really see. Otherwise, everything is colored by our own perceptions. But when we are no longer a separate finite individual, then all there is, is the universal, real perfect sight, perfect seeing, perfect perception, untainted by personal want, desire, gain, past recollection, sorrows, hopes, ambitions.

Life is the teacher. We are part of life. We are the teacher. Our own body, our mind, the aging process—all of these things are teaching us. We learn to listen to the wind. The wind is a wonderful teacher. You could learn much more from the wind than from myself, unless I happen to be the wind, which I am some days. The Earth, the water, all of the elementals, the things that go to make up this universe teach us. Each has a force, a power.

Human beings teach us all the time. We can observe them; they’re all our spiritual teachers. Observe people when they’re happy and understand why. Observe them when they’re unhappy, angry, hateful, and jealous and understand why, with no judgment, no recrimination. Just with understanding. This is how you study consciousness. You observe. You sit and watch, quietly. You don’t think about yourself or worry about yourself, your problems, your ambitions, because you won’t see correctly if you think of these things. You must push them all aside, just as when a physician is performing an operation. The surgeon is in a critical moment, he can’t be thinking about other things. All his attention must be on the operation. You have to place all of your attention on that which you study, to learn it. And the more you can do this, the more complete will be your knowledge and your learning.

Every moment, every day, is an opportunity to learn, to observe what I call the theater of the soul. The orchestrations of eternity. If you’re by yourself you can watch yourself, watch nature, watch your house, watch the time pass, watch the moon rise, the sun set. Each time of day teaches you something, each time of day has its own mood. The morning, noon, the afternoon and the sunset, the early evening rounding around until midnight, after midnight, the sunrise, the early morning—each has a mood, each a power. Naturally, if you’re completely caught up in your thoughts, in your ideas of what’s important and not important, you won’t learn. You have to be still, you have to learn to listen. Listen to nature. Observe human beings. There’s a lot to learn there.

Practice meditation. Stop your thoughts and learn from meditation. Practice self-giving. Self-giving is a wonderful spiritual teacher. And observe what happens. It’s like lifting weights or working with your body. If you do it on a regular basis, your body changes, it becomes stronger. When you practice selfless giving on a regular basis, you change. Oh, if it’s very sporadic, you won’t see too much. If you lift weights once a month, not much will happen. But if you do it every day, if you exercise every day, it’s amazing how fast the body can change. If you don’t exercise every day, it’s amazing how badly the body feels, how quickly one can regress.

Practice compassion. Compassion is a wonderful teacher. Compassion means loving without attachment. Caring, not trying to lead other people’s lives for them, but being helpful and useful when you can, without feeling that you’re important. You can always learn. There are so many teachers. The birds teach us when we watch them fly. Love teaches us, hate teaches us, everything. There are so many teachers. Anyone who says they don’t have a spiritual teacher is so wrong. You have infinite teachers. Everywhere there are teachers—books teach you, movies teach you, There’s so much to learn if you’ll only watch and observe.

Naturally, there are human teachers, teachers who specialize in teaching us not simply factual information as they do at the university, but they teach us how to learn about life, how to be independent, free and strong. These are spiritual teachers. A spiritual teacher teaches us about spirit, about the formless and how that relates to this world, to the form. There are different classes of spiritual teachers. But from my point of view, there are only three classes—some people make larger divisions—unenlightened spiritual teachers, enlightened spiritual teachers and harmful spiritual teachers, or ignorant ones.

Unenlightened spiritual teachers are persons who have a type of knowledge that they may have gained in past lives or in this lifetime. They themselves may not be really capable of doing everything they can see or know. For example, your teacher may say, well, lead this kind of life and you’ll be happy and free. And they themselves may not be able to lead that kind of life completely. But they’re not hypocrites, not at all. We must be more cosmopolitan in our view because what they say may be true. Now, if they pretend to lead that type of life and don’t, then they’re hypocrites. Your coach, if you’re a runner, may be able to help you run very fast and to win the Olympics. The coach can’t necessarily run very fast himself or herself. They don’t need to, to be a good coach. Certainly, it would be helpful if they had run themselves, so they would understand what it’s like. But they don’t have to be the fastest runner in the world to be able to help you run. They just have to have the knowledge of how to run and be able to transmit it.

These are unenlightened teachers. They may be able to do some of what they teach; they may not be able to do all of it. They’re sincere and they are not capable of leading you to enlightenment. Only an enlightened person can do that or God will do that directly. The unenlightened can only take you to the beach, but they can’t bring you across the ocean. God can do that directly, if that’s the will of eternity, or God will do that through the voice and the guidance of what we call an enlightened person.

In my estimation, there are very few enlightened teachers in this world. If we were to believe everyone who says that they were enlightened, I suppose there’d be thousands and thousands of enlightened persons. And I suppose there are thousands and thousands of enlightened persons, perhaps millions, and billions. It depends what you mean by enlightened. I’m rather traditional in my classification of what liberation means—full liberation, beyond the samsara, beyond birth and death, no self left, just a caretaker personality to go through the world. Nothing but light inside. Incarnation after incarnation of spiritual practice until the self is completely refined. Absorption in nirvana, continuously inwardly and outwardly, sometimes completely, and so on and so on.

In my estimation, at this time, there are twelve fully enlightened teachers in this world of which I am one. It’s important to note that a fully enlightened teacher is not in any way, shape, manner, or form better or superior to anyone or anything else—to a blade of grass, to a person wrapped up in ignorance, to the cosmic beings. We’re all the same. But there are different hallmarks in our evolution, in a way of speaking.

Think of the fully enlightened teacher as the twelfth-degree black belt in martial arts. Maybe there are just twelve of them in the whole world, so you may study with many different teachers. The first teacher you have may just have a brown belt; they can show you some basic moves. Your next teacher may have a black belt. Well, once you’ve come up to the level of the teacher, now you have a first-degree black belt also, now you need, if you want to continue to progress, a second-degree or third-degree or fourth-degree. You work your way up. You wouldn’t begin your study as a beginner with a twelfth-degree black belt. You might start even with a third- or fourth-degree, perhaps, if you were fortunate. But the twelfth-degree black belt would be reclusive and only work with people who were more advanced. Oh, he’d drop in on the beginner’s classes, perhaps, from time to time, or maybe even just teach one for fun. But his art is a very advanced art and could only be understood and appreciated by those who were in the higher ranges, who had their eighth- or ninth- or tenth- or eleventh-degree belts. Others wouldn’t understand the subtlety of the moves. As a matter of fact, they might even think that the fifth- or sixth- or seventh-degree black belts were more proficient because they made more noise, because they were more obvious. But the twelfth-degree black belt will be a master of inaccessibility. Only those who are very, very advanced will recognize him, and they will be drawn to study with such a person and learn.

It’s not necessary to study with a self-realized person, for most people. Most people should content themselves with the best teacher they can find, and feel and know that when the time comes you will be directed to a self-realized teacher—when it’s necessary. One should not be so egotistical to think that it’s necessary simply because one wants it to be. Life knows what it’s doing. Trust it. When you are ready, you will be directed. But perhaps you need humility, perhaps you have to wait. When the time comes, the door will open.

Now, I say there are twelve and they’re really all the same. In this Earth, at this time, eleven of them are men and one is a woman. However, we’re trying to change that, even it out a little bit more. That’s history.

Then there are those who claim to be enlightened, who take the power of others, who dominate them, who create cults. And some of them are very, very impressive. One must be very careful. Some of them have maybe made it up to third- or fourth- or fifth-degree black belt. They can be very impressive. They can speak the language flawlessly and they can do a very high kick and you might think that’s all there is. Perhaps they can manifest a few occult powers, a couple of siddhas, but their realization is not completely rounded. Unfortunately, the great danger, of course, is that people get stuck in their knowledge. Knowledge is as much of a trap as ignorance, and it’s very easy to get stuck in knowledge. It’s very easy for the fourth- or fifth-degree black belt to stop, set up their little school, teach, and not go any further. In order to progress spiritually, continually, you must have tremendous humility and realize that your own knowledge is only knowledge if you continue to progress. Otherwise, it’s stagnation.

You should always seek not to be around those who have less knowledge than you. You may feel better, you won’t be threatened, you won’t have to do anything and everyone will admire you. But between you and me, let’s face it, you know you still have a long way to go, and I know that too. And if you fight against that, then you’ll be unhappy. If you accept that with humility, then you’ll grow and you’ll remember why you started all of this. But you definitely cannot fool me. I know, I’ve done everything that you’ve done. I’ve gotten stuck in all the places one can get stuck, made the mistakes, had incarnations of delay and then learned the way, remembered it again. There’s nothing you can do that’s wrong, but you can delay your progress and your happiness or the happiness of those you could help and reach if you wouldn’t be so stuck on yourself.

The false teachers set up cults. They have people worship them. They say, “I am the guru, I am God, and I can do no wrong. I am a perfectly enlightened being! Everything I say is wisdom. I am above maya.” Only fools talk this way. No one is above maya, not even the enlightened. And they’re convincing. Because a person seeks truth. They want to know what’s right. They’re very sincere.

You go to these teachers, they speak knowledgeably, you might even feel some sensations when you’re around them, a little bit of power. And if you don’t know better, you might think they’re enlightened. And they’ll tell you wonderful things about yourself to flatter your ego. But you will see, while you may experience a lot of growth with these people in the first year or two, after a while it will slow down to a snail’s pace. Then you’ll discover, hopefully, if you have the humility to realize that eventually, that it wasn’t they who gave you the growth, it was you. It was your own aspiration. You were so happy to attribute all your wonderful growth to that teacher, but it wasn’t the teacher at all. The teacher didn’t have that much power. All the teacher did was fool you and took credit for what you did.

There are a lot of these teachers. Oh, and they have vast followings. But they lack integrity. They lack humility and purity. They’ve forgotten. They no longer care. They surround themselves with a small group of people who are not a threat and if you disagree with their policies, if you don’t like what they say, then they’ll throw you out of their community. They make rules such as, “Well, no one in the community is allowed to speak to someone who’s been asked to leave, or associate with them, because they’ve been taken over by evil forces, the devil,” whatever it may be. “They’ll drain your energy.” I mean, they make up the most wonderful rationalizations. And people believe them. It’s astounding, the damage that these idiots do. They can be very persuasive and very convincing.

When you work with the fully enlightened teacher, you are dissolving all the time. You won’t feel wonderful all the time but you will change constantly. And as time goes on, the changes will become faster and faster. Now, naturally, a person has something to do with it. A person can resist the process and therefore slow it down, not meditate, not participate. Naturally then, you have to assume some responsibility for your lack of spiritual progress. But even so, when you meditate with an enlightened person, if you’re in the room when they meditate or outside with them, you will change. The radiance is too strong. It’s like going into a particle accelerator, standing in front of radioactive isotope. It’s going to affect you, it has to.

When you meditate with a person who’s truly self-realized, you will see them surrounded by a glowing golden light and you may see other lights. But the sign of realization is the golden light; it’s luminous and very light, very refined and it doesn’t necessarily have to be flashy. And you will feel a still presence of eternity—if you listen. Oh, some people come to the enlightened teachers and they see and feel nothing, obviously. Christ was crucified. Do you think that the people who pounded in the nails, who laughed and jeered, saw anything? No, everyone doesn’t see enlightenment. You have to be sensitive to it. There are people who come to see an enlightened teacher and they’ve meditated for three or four or five years or they’ve done what they think is meditation—they’ve just been dabbling actually. And they say, “Well, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t feel anything, how could they be enlightened? I’m so wonderful, I’m so perceptive, I’m so knowledgeable, I can tell an enlightened person instantly.” What vanity.

Very often it’s hard to recognize enlightenment unless you’re very advanced spiritually. You have to sit with it for a while because it’s subtle, it’s not obvious. It’s very subtle. Occult power is obvious, it’s flashy; the siddhas are obvious and flashy, but enlightenment is quiet. An enlightened teacher uses the siddhas and is flashy sometimes, but ultimately they’re just very quiet. They take on all forms, all personality structures are at their beck and call, they use whatever one they need to help their friends progress. But when they’re by themselves or with people who they love who have great purity, who they can be close to because it’s not painful to be with them, they’re like little children, they just laugh and play with the universe. They can be the most awesome, powerful beings in the world. And then just like children. There’s an innocence there. A humility. At the same time, they’re not afraid to confront someone, to take on the whole world if necessary, to yell at someone, anything to help the person with their enlightenment process. But what happens is light. They are light; nothing but light flows through them.

Sometimes I think it’s easiest to tell if a person is enlightened when you’re not with them physically, but you have to be somewhat receptive and meditate well. Sometimes it’s easiest just to sit at home and meditate on that person. If you have a photograph of the person to look at for maybe a minute or two, then close your eyes and just try and have contact with them. Now, first you have to be able to stop all your thoughts. If you can’t do that, you can’t really tell. But if you can stop all your thoughts for five minutes or so when you meditate, clear yourself completely, then when you focus on them you’ll have a very profound experience because you’ll be right with them, in the room with them wherever they are. You’ll just feel a quietude. Don’t look for flash. And don’t be fooled by their appearance.

Truly enlightened people are characters. They’re the most unlikely looking people. Everyone has an image of what an enlightened person will be like and I assure you it won’t be like the image unless they’re just playing images one day. Each one is different and they change constantly, there’s no set form. Each time you see them, they’ll be a different person. There’ll be some repetitive patterns, some repetitive caretaker personalities that they use. But then if you were to go and see them with another group of people you’ll see them in a different way. They’re dreamers, enlightened people. Whatever dream the people happen to have they’re with they enter into that dream and become it. And they do it so cleanly and completely that no one can tell. Then once they’re within the structure of the dream they try and teach the people to go to the high end of the dream or then to change dreams or go beyond dreaming to nirvana.

I have seen so many wonderful people go to false teachers and have their lives ruined. They place all their faith and trust in them, give the teachers their possessions, leave their families for the teachers, only at the end, possibly to realize—if they can, if there’s enough of them left to realize anything, after they’ve been so psychologically brainwashed—that they’ve made a terrible mistake, that the teacher was selfish all along, played piety, made rules, made demands upon the students that the teacher didn’t live up to. The teacher wasn’t interested in the growth of the students, the teacher didn’t place the welfare of the students above and beyond their own. Oh, they may say they do and quote the right scriptures. But the test is always kindness.

Real spiritual teachers are exhausted all the time. They’re beat. This may not fit with your picture of enlightenment, but they have to be, they’re always working for others. Oh, when they’re absorbed in complete meditation, they dissolve, they disappear, they’re gone, no forwarding address. Nothing but light. But when they move into the field of action, into this world, they have to use every moment for the welfare of others, either in conditioning themselves so that they can be of more use or in actual service — both are service. There is nothing else, nothing else matters but to serve eternity.

Enlightened people usually have a pretty good sense of humor. They think life is pretty funny and that death is even funnier. And they can do some interesting things for you. The spiritual books tell us this. They say that there’s lots of good things you can practice to help you attain enlightenment, to become conscious—meditate; do good works; don’t eat too much; don’t eat too little; travel to holy places; be a vegetarian; exercise enough; don’t be attached; practice love; think of God as much as you can, of eternity; live in the world, if you live in the world and make the world a better place; don’t be attached to the world; let the world come and go; be absorbed in eternity. They tell us many different things. They give us creeds to follow, ways. But if the books are any good, they tell you one thing ultimately—all of this is fine, but it won’t cause enlightenment. It will prepare you. It will clear the ground, which is necessary. And we do this for many, many lifetimes. But for enlightenment really to occur you must have contact with the enlightened, with the holy.

Most of the enlightened are recluses, to be honest with you. I certainly am. There’s nothing that the world holds for us anymore. Oh, it’s beautiful to be at a shopping mall or a field of flowers. It’s all lovely, it’s all infinite forms of the self. But we tend to stay by ourselves because there’s no place to go or nothing to do anymore, unless we’re out teaching. It’s fun to go for a walk in the hills, but there’s really not any need for contact with people anymore. We have nothing to say to them. What can I say to someone? “Hi, how are you? Did you have a nice day? Hope you’re feeling better.”

Oh, I can teach the sophisticated processes of rebirth, how to attain enlightenment, how to have more fun with your life, how to avoid pain and misery, how to enjoy pain and misery, but there’s really nothing to say anymore, because there’s only eternity, there’s only light. Once you have attained liberation, there’s only light. You’re a member now of a different race. It’s a different species. You look at human beings and you watch what they go through and you love them and you do your best for them. But they’re all just blown about by the wind of the samsara, by their emotions, by their ideas and their attachments.

You’ve become eternal. You’re a member of the staff of the school and you see the students come and go every year and the new ones come in with their ideas and expectations, some go out and have experiences, get married, have children, careers, some go to graduate school, a very few elect to become teachers themselves. Some become poor teachers, some wonderful teachers, some go beyond that to enlightenment and then come back and teach. Some become enlightened and go beyond. There are so many variables, so many possibilities. But you’ve become eternity, you’re the eternal watcher, when you’re conscious of this world, and much of the time you’re not, you’re absorbed in eternity, in nirvana, beyond form and dissolution and death and rebirth.

So what can one say? But what the enlightened can do for you is change you. You see, it’s very hard to attain enlightenment on your own. You have to meditate perfectly, you have to give perfectly. You can’t fool yourself with your self-styled humility and purity and integrity, which is usually just a laugh. Well intentioned, but it doesn’t go very deep — because you have no sense of what deep is.

But you see, an enlightened person has countless powers of transformation that they use with their students, both when they’re physically with them and when they’re not. Actually, the largest part of the teaching that I or any enlightened person does occurs when we’re not physically with our students. It’s necessary to be with them, hopefully once a week or twice a week. When we’re with them physically, when we gather in the meditation hall or we go out in the desert for a hike or we go to a movie together, whatever it may be, the radiance and the light is moving into everyone. It’s very strong in the physical proximity of the teacher and it creates an opening. In order to work with a teacher, you have to have what we call an inner connection. Once the inner connection is fully developed, you don’t have to physically be with the teacher. You’re always with the teacher. You’re with each other.

Now, remember, the teacher is only an intermediary. You see, we don’t want to get into teacher worship because that destroys everything that we work for. If you think the teacher is some remarkable being who attained enlightenment and you can’t, that they’re different, that they ate a better breakfast cereal, then you’ve kind of misunderstood. It’s a convenient way of avoiding enlightenment yourself. It’s like saying, “Oh, the teacher’s an avatar, a wonderful being. She went to the right schools, she ate the right breakfast cereal, came from the right family, that’s why she or he attained enlightenment and I didn’t, and what can a poor soul like myself do? I’m lucky just to be around such a person. Oh, let me worship them, they’re marvelous!”

What trash! It has nothing to do with enlightenment. All you’re doing is saying, “They’re special and I’m not. That way I don’t have to do the work.” Hey, they were just like you. I’m you. We just kept going to school, that’s all. We didn’t quit. And we worked harder and harder. Even when it was difficult, even when it was easy, we just kept working. When we made mistakes, we made them. And then we got over them and went back in and worked some more. It’s just a lot of work, that’s all, to attain liberation. But if you love the work, it’s not so hard. It takes time. But you’ve got all of eternity, you know.

Then there’s truth. Truth in everything and truth in nothing. And to get to that truth, you need to learn to be still and sometimes to be active. You go and see the teacher whenever you can, at every opportunity to be around an enlightened person, you’ll travel thousands of miles to do so. Because those hours or minutes you spend together are eternal. Being in the physical presence of a teacher, in this vortex of light—it’s a power place, the teacher is a power place and you go to it, and when you’re there, at a power place, everything changes. You may not even be all that aware of it when you’re there, but later, the next day you’ll see you’re different. You’ve been opened up to another plane of consciousness. Oh, you might just think it’s some accidental process, you just sat in the light. But I assure you when you’re with the teacher, when I’m with my students, I’m doing a thousand different things on a thousand different planes of consciousness, sometimes simultaneously, to create those openings for all those people who are there.

Then, when you leave, the rapport doesn’t end. By being with the teacher you create an inroad, you open a little doorway. The idea is not to get stuck on being physically with the teacher, but to go home and meditate, to learn to have contact while you’re at work, to tap into that source. Remember, the teacher’s a doorway, the teacher is an absence, not a presence. You see a body and you hear them talk and you see a bit of a personality. But that’s all a front. It’s a prop. It gives you something to look at and focus on. The teacher is an absence, the teacher is a nothingness, a wonderful nothingness that you can walk through. And then there’s nothing but light, there’s no teacher, no you, just light. Or there’s you and light. But we’re just light. Eternal vortexes of light. We can’t be separated from the rest of existence. You can’t either, but you’re not aware of that yet. You can think it, but you don’t know it, you haven’t lived it or outlived it.

You have to develop an inner connection with a teacher. It’s necessary to love. This is how the whole process works. In the beginning, you come in contact with a teacher and you decide they have something to offer you. You study with them for a while. But there comes a point in time when you have to kind of commit yourself, not to the teacher, but to what the teacher believes in. If the teacher’s an absence, how can you commit yourself to an absence? A real teacher will never ask you to do this. Real teachers don’t ask for commitment because they know, how can you ask for it, it has to come on its own. How can you demand love, it has to grow in its own way. Real teachers are wise. They know the human species very well. Oh, they play dumb a lot so people can still relate to them.

Then, of course, there’s the emperor’s new clothes or the false teachers who say that when they make mistakes they’re playing dumb so people can relate to them when actually they’re just dumb. [Rama laughs.] It’s tricky! It’s very tricky! You have to have a pure heart to tell and even then you can be fooled. I’ve been fooled. In this life, I studied for many years with a teacher who claimed to be fully enlightened before my own realization returned, and gave the teacher my heart, mind, body, and soul completely. I was fooled. But it didn’t hurt me. My own aspiration kept growing and increasing. And then I started to go into samadhi, day after day, night after night, year after year, dissolution after dissolution and the realization came back from other lives. Of course, I’ve been a spiritual teacher in hundreds of lifetimes.

But see, you can be fooled. Never feel that you’re above illusion. Once you’re enlightened you’re not going to be affected by illusion as long as the enlightenment is complete. But even then you can get stuck when you’re not sitting there absorbed in samadhi, but stuck is eternity too. There’s as much light in ignorance as there is in knowledge. Just a different form. Not to worry so much about it.

You develop an inner connection with a teacher. It’s really essential. You can only do it through your hard work and your integrity and your caring. And the teacher always sees. Remember, if you’re dealing with someone who’s really enlightened, they see everything. Oh, not the time you spent this afternoon by yourself, they don’t have a knowledge of the things you do, but when I look at someone, I see the composite that they are, all their past lives, presents and futures. Not in terms of events, I don’t know what you did when you were in Egypt two lifetimes ago. I can look it up if I want to, but who’s got the time? It’s not necessary. Because what I can see is the result, your current state of evolution, the strands of being that you are and how to turn them around and inside out and redo them over and over again, so that they become more and more refined, until enlightenment is a reality for you.

There’s this great concept that people have that if you go to an enlightened teacher and if you sit down with them and meditate, that that’s all it takes. “Oh, I’m just going to sit here with my beloved teacher and that’s all it will take.” I really hate that phony devotionalism, tacky stuff. The really saccharine spirituality bothers me. It lacks clarity and humility and laughter. Real devotionalism doesn’t have to be very demonstrative. If you really love somebody, you don’t have to say it, it shows. You don’t have to fold your hands every time the teacher walks in, you should do whatever you want to with your hands. Because the reason most people fold their hands is that it’s a ritual. Better to sit still. Love is always understood, it doesn’t need outer signs.

You sit and you meditate with the teacher, whenever you can. And that’s how you learn. You ask questions, hopefully dumb questions sometimes unless you’re too proud to ask dumb questions. You ask anything you can, that you really want to know. And if there’s nothing you want to know, you sit and you listen with humility to the questions of others and you learn by listening and watching. The whole time with your teacher, when you’re with a teacher though, you should meditate. It doesn’t matter what the teacher’s doing. Don’t over focus on the physical body of the teacher. If you go someplace together, don’t have everybody stare at the teacher. Don’t be so dependent on the physical. The awareness is what you’re interested in.

ॐ

Sometimes I take my students to Disneyland and we play in the world of Disneyland mysticism. Hopefully they don’t all stand around and stare at me, they should go off and have a good time on the rides. I’m there meditating the whole time with them, generating a field of light to make Disneyland into a slightly different experience. It’s not necessary for them to watch my body, what’s the difference? I have a body like they do, so what?

You see, a real spiritual teacher makes you independent, not dependent. They’re not interested in worship. They’re not interested in making you happy, actually, in a way. Happiness is a nice state but it’s transitory. You’re happy today, you’re unhappy tomorrow. They want to give you something more solid. But they realize that they can’t do it for you. Oh if you want a father figure or mother figure, go out and find one. But a real spiritual teacher is your friend, he’s your buddy, he’s your comrade. They deserve respect, only because if you don’t respect them you won’t respect what they say. And you need that respect to access the light. But they can’t do it for you. You can’t just go to the teacher and smile and love them and that will do it. Well, that’s nice, it’s nice that you love them and it’s nice that you smile. But you have to work out your own realization with their guidance and help. But simply being there is not enough. It’s nice to be there. If you have to be somewhere, you might as well be with the enlightened. I mean it does rub off. Keeping company with the holy definitely transforms you, but it won’t cause enlightenment. But it might get you started. But then you have to, over a period of time, realize that, well, time to change! Time to die! Time to be reborn in this life, over and over again.

ॐ

You have to take up the cause of the teacher, whatever it is, if you really believe in it and work with the teacher, help them with what they do with their work in the world, and by doing so you’ll stop thinking about yourself and your enlightenment and your happiness and your unhappiness and you’ll get absorbed in the work, and the work is light and the light will enter you and you’ll be transformed. It’s work, that’s how it all happens. And the work is all done because of love.

The whole basis of the relationship is complete trust and love, which develops not all at once. I never trust those quick loves, to tell you the truth. They come and they go. Real love grows over a period of time. As you work with a teacher and you see your life change, when you see that their motives really are pure and you throw your suspicions aside, then the love begins, the connection begins, you learn each other’s names. If your spiritual teacher does not know your name, you’re in hot water. It means that you’re on the outer periphery of the student body, which is maybe where you belong for a while. But if they don’t know your name, personally, then they’re working with you, perhaps very profoundly, inwardly, but you haven’t reached a close level of contact yet. You have to give them something to help them know your name. And the way you do that is by being fantastic. You have to be a fantastic student. You have to glow, you have to meditate well, you have to do profound acts of self-giving. Then they learn your name. There’s a reason to learn it. Until then you’re an interesting commodity. You’re someone they’re working with, but you’re with the twelfth-degree black belt and you’re still out in the first or second degree. There’s no need to know your name, they can just show you some basic things and you have to work on them.

Most of the teaching is not done physically as I suggested before. It’s done inwardly. When you meditate, you should always think of your teacher if you work with an enlightened teacher first. Don’t focus on them the whole time. Some people like to focus on a teacher’s picture when they meditate. It’s neither a good nor bad practice. I don’t recommend it to my students only because I know that most of them would start looking at my picture when they meditate and they’d become dependent upon it and it would be kind of culty in my opinion. It does work, but I don’t think people should do things just because everybody else does them. It has to be something that you want. I don’t think it’s wrong if you like to do it, if you like to meditate on a picture of your teacher, but you shouldn’t do it the whole time throughout the whole meditation, that’s ridiculous. You might want to look at the picture for a couple of minutes to begin with and if that helps you connect with their consciousness, then you can close your eyes and meditate. But I don’t even think you need the picture, personally. I think the thing to do is to chant their name, maybe seven times, nine times before you meditate, either silently or out loud, think of them. Think of the last time you saw them or a neat meditation you had with them and that will access their consciousness, then close your eyes and meditate.

You see, it’s so easy to get stuck in the image of a teacher and forget that they’re not the body, they’re light. But your teacher will guide you in all your meditations, if you choose to be guided by them. The teacher will visit you in dreams. Very often I go out and visit my students or just people out in the world in dreams, in my dream bodies, and give them instructions, show them things. However, if the teacher gives you a particular piece of advice that’s important in a dream you should always check with them to make sure that you didn’t fabricate it with your own mind. I’ve had students who say, “Well, gosh, you came to me in a dream and you gave me my spiritual name.” Or a mantra or something. And it’s been nonsense. I didn’t do that at all. Whereas other people have had dream experiences that have been very valid and very real where I’ve actually come in my dream body and visited them and shown them different things.

A lot of the things that I have to teach people I can’t teach on this Earth. Their minds can’t understand it, so I come in dreaming. In the astral I can explain things, most of which they usually forget by morning, when they wake, which they should. The physical mind can’t contain it. But other parts of their being will remember. They’ll just vaguely remember that we talked. It doesn’t matter, you don’t have to remember, it’s all stored inwardly, for when you need it.

After a period of time, when you’re really getting closer to enlightenment, you have a closer association with the teacher. It has to happen. You need to spend more time together. And that happens of its own accord. The teacher will tell you. You don’t have to try and sneak in, the teacher will see you in the meditation hall and just give you some work to do, perhaps initially just to check you out, help you grow a little faster, when that’s necessary. The teacher may choose to ignore you for a long time to just see if you’re humble, to see if you’re interested in sticking around, without being patted on the head all the time. If you’re going to complain all the time and want attention, the teacher will have nothing to do with you, if it’s a real teacher. Oh, they’ll let you stay in the community, they’ll meditate with you and see you, but they don’t want to work closely with you because you still have such basic things to work out. You don’t need that close contact. The close contact is only useful for people who are at the more advanced end of the spectrum.

Also remember, enlightened people are terribly sensitive to everything. While they go out in front of hundreds of people and meditate and do public meditations and things like that, that’s different, they have their shields up. But as Ramakrishna said, the paramahamsas, the liberated souls, only associate with the pure of heart closely. It’s just very uncomfortable otherwise to be with someone who’s all caught up in ego fixations and still has hostilities, even if they’re subconscious. You’ll notice that the people that the teacher often surrounds himself or herself with are not necessarily heavyweights, in terms of meditation ability. A lot of the people who work in our offices and I spend time with, aren’t my best meditators, they’re not the most advanced people in the community at all. Actually, most people can meditate a lot better than they can and are more spiritually advanced. But they have purity. They have developed that side of their being and it’s very easy to be with them. They don’t have a lot of subconscious, mean motivations. That’s all worked out. They’re progressing in their own way.

There are so many sides to this teaching process—thousands, millions, so many dimensions to it, planes. It’s really quite exciting. But it’s not necessarily the way it appears to be. All you have is your heart to follow and your intuition. Everything else is unsure, which is what makes it exciting. My recommendation is to learn as much as you can, from all your teachers. Life is your teacher, death, your friends, your family, everyone, everything. Don’t try and run away from yourself, it doesn’t work. You go with yourself wherever you go.

Find the best teacher you can find, whoever you feel is not only a good teacher, but someone you feel comfortable with. Someone might say, “Oh yes, Rama, wonderful, he’s an enlightened teacher. But gosh, I just don’t feel comfortable with him, I feel more comfortable with beep,” [Rama laughs] with someone else, whose name we won’t mention. Why won’t I mention it? Well, you have to do some work, I mean there has to be some adventure here. If I give you the names and addresses of the eleven others, maybe they don’t want you coming to their door. Maybe the test, part of the test, at least to get in, is that you have to find them. It’s hide and go seek. And then you have to believe them. I mean, I could just be making all of this up. Maybe I’m not enlightened. Maybe it’s an extra double bluff, where I’m just saying all this so you’ll just think that I am, you see? Who can tell? You can tell. You can tell and your heart can tell. That’s the only way you know.

You must trust yourself and trust life. Life will never let you down. It will put you through some unusual experiences, but you need them. You must trust life and you must listen. And don’t be hasty, there’s no rush. Find whomever you feel is the most advanced being in this world you can study with, you need a physical teacher, and go and see them and spend time with them. You may be uncomfortable with it sometimes. You may not like all the people who are there. It doesn’t matter, learn to love them. Don’t look at their faults, look at the good part.

When you admire a spiritual quality in someone else it will become stronger in your own being. Everyone has limitations, you have limitations, I have limitations. So what else is new? Look at the bright spots. Look at the sunrises and the sunsets. Look for the beauty, we all know about the horror. Follow the light. And if you’re not meant to have a fully enlightened teacher at this time, be humble, accept that! It’s not time, it wouldn’t help you. Do you think God is going to hold that back from you when it’s time? Eternity does everything perfectly. When your hour comes up, it’ll be there. Until then, there are other things to learn, don’t complain.

Learn from the wind, the tide, the books written by teachers. Don’t depend on books too much though, please. You know, people over-read. They read too many spiritual books and it’s confusing. They get too many ideas. Find a few good ones and read them again and again. I have 12 that have influenced me profoundly and I just read them again and again. Oh, I like to dabble and read this and that, but I’d rather read a good novel, to tell you the truth, or go to the movies. But it’s hard to find books that are high enough, is what I’m suggesting. Most of them are very dogmatic.

If you’re fortunate enough to find a fully enlightened teacher and recognize them and you get in the door, then you’ve just begun. Now you’re at day one of school and you’ve got a long way to go. Do well with that. Be excellent. Have spiritual dignity and poise. Avoid “in” groups. They’ll just slow you down. There are no “in” groups. The “in” groups are the “out” groups in spiritual practice. The cliques—all they do is hold themselves back. The people who do the best are independent individuals, who love others and see others, who make friends, but who are too busy growing to get wrapped up in these little personality cliques.

Try not to associate with the same people all the time in your spiritual group. It gets rusty fast. You hold each other. If you’re seeing the same people all the time, when you see each other, you see the way you were the other day. You hold each other back, you fixate each other with your ideas. You should be introducing new people into your life constantly. Oh, if you have a few people who you just click with, that’s wonderful. But click with them, don’t be a clique.

You have to change constantly and always be new in this process. And you have to realize that you’re working with someone who’s enlightened—you’ve never seen him yet. You’ve only seen the part that they have chosen to show you. Remember, they’re more in control of the situation than they let on.

Enough said.

Spiritual teachers and the enlightenment process. Good luck. You’ll have it.