There is no end and there is no beginning. There is only eternity. Eternity can be warm, assuming the shapes we love, the petals of the beautiful flowers of existence. Eternity can be cold and ruthless—the solar systems and worlds which begin and end, the winter of our death and then the spring of our rebirth. As human beings, we try and understand, in the brief span that we’re given here in this world, why we’re here, what we should do while we’re here and where we’ll go from here. And, of course, we wonder how much time we have.

At first glance, we appear to be people. The world appears to be physical and solid. There appear to be universes, stars, planets, our planet, seasons, different species of animals, plants, protozoa, bacteria—the visible universe. There are many universes, countless universes, and many of them are invisible. As you know, we call these the astral planes, but they are as real as this world is and they’re filled with beings and forms that have life spans, as do the beings and forms in this world. They too wonder about the nature of existence, where they’ve come from and where they’re going to and how much time they have.

Meditation is wondering. It is both wondering and wonder at the same time. When we meditate we quiet the mind and open ourselves to our limitless possibilities. As a human being you are capable of a higher level of perception than you may now be cognizant of. You are not really who you think you are. There are many selves inside you, not just one. In introductory and intermediate meditation, we seek to know ourselves. We get a sense of the countless selves within our self, the different forms that they take. We become acquainted with them. We find that some selves agree with us, some don’t. Those that don’t seem positive or helpful we push aside. Those that seem progressive we enjoy.

Meditation means the cessation of thought. For years, we practice meditation, like any art, and we get better at it each day. In the beginning it’s just enough for us to sit down and focus our attention for twenty minutes or twenty-five minutes, to chant a mantra for a minute or two to start, practice a couple of gazing exercises, concentrate, and to try and still the mind as best we can—and if we can’t stop our thoughts, to ignore our thoughts and just let go and feel. Feel beyond our thoughts.

Our thoughts will swim around and talk to us while we’re sitting there, make fun of us, ignore us. We’ll think about everything that one can think about. But if you pay no attention, if you don’t look in the direction of your thoughts, you meditate. Your consciousness expands. You are no longer focusing on the thoughts, but now you’re increasing the spectrum of your focus. As you meditate, as a singular meditation evolves, you’ll find the nature of your thoughts will change.

At the beginning of a meditation session your thoughts will be relatively Earthbound; you’ll think about yourself, your world, problems, difficulties, and anxieties. Then as the meditation evolves, your attention, as it passes into higher realms of consciousness, will cause a resulting change in your thought patterns. Your thoughts will become more pleasant, more creative. You’ll think about positive things you can do, good feelings will start to flood your being, feelings of hope, joy. You’ll have visual experiences—you may see flashing lights, hear bells, feel energy changes inside your body, have a sense of being weightless, as if you’re floating, and feel altogether pleasant.

Sometimes you won’t feel pleasant during a meditation session. Sometimes it just seems like it’s an uphill run. But then when you get to the top, the view is rather beautiful and breathtaking. You should learn not to judge your meditation. Just meditate, do your best, set a minimum period of time and meditate. When that period of time is past, stop meditating. If you’re inspired to keep going, keep going by all means, but don’t meditate less than a specific time. If you’re a beginner, it’s good to meditate for twenty minutes or a half an hour twice a day. If you’re more advanced, 45 minutes to an hour, two or three times a day.

It’s really not necessary to formally meditate longer than that. Naturally, if you’re going to a meditation session with your teacher, as my students do with me, we may meet for three or four hours. During that period of time, some will meditate, doing the defined meditation session when I formally meditate. Others will meditate the entire time that I’m there. Others will meditate even before I arrive. It depends on their level of attention.

We have longer meditations, we have spontaneous meditations. After you’ve been meditating for a while, you’ll just be sitting in a room, your living room, talking to a friend at a restaurant, working, and suddenly you’ll feel yourself enter into a meditative state. You’ll find that it will always come at the right time; it will never interfere with your work or with anything that you have to do on the physical plane. Sometimes these meditations occur because our soul is reaching to the infinite, even though our mind is not conscious of it. Sometimes they come because a being, a spiritual teacher, or something or someone else is reaching out to us and filling us with something, giving us an inner present.

For most people this is meditation. Getting up in the morning and as soon as you get up or whenever you get up, meditating and never leaving the house until you’ve meditated. Your mind is most receptive at this time, even though it may seem more difficult to meditate because you’re a little sleepy. Still, the mind is quiet, you haven’t been thinking, so you’ll find it easy to meditate. Meditate then for half an hour or an hour. Then, don’t think about your meditation. Go out into the world, do your best all day, try to think higher thoughts, try to be kind and compassionate, but don’t let people take advantage of you. Then at noon, try and meditate again for a few minutes.

I always meditate every day at noon, the time when the kundalini is the strongest. If you have to work at noon, at least try and think about eternity, think about your ideals, what you’re trying to do with your life. Feel the pulse beat of the universe. It’s very strong then. Try to meditate at sunset or in the early evening. It’s very easy to meditate at sunset; there’s a feeling of peace and there’s a transcendental awareness from about 4:00 in the afternoon on. It’s a very high energy time, from about 4:00 until about 8:00 or 9:00. Try to meditate then, before you start your evening. If you’ve been out in the world or working, that meditation will clear off all the energy you’ve picked up during the day, the unhealthy energy, and it will balance you and progress you.

Some people like to meditate for a few minutes before they go to bed. You won’t really gain quite as much from this meditation because you’ll be sleepy, you won’t absorb as much. But you can gain something.

One who practices basic or intermediate meditation is learning to still their thoughts; trying to get on a regular schedule with meditation, which may take a while; getting used to meditating a couple of times a day and never missing; learning what the different basic experiences are like; and of course, dealing with the resulting changes that occur in your life from your forays into the infinite.

As you meditate and you move from the introductory phase to the intermediate phase, your life will begin to tighten up, you’ll change again and again. You’ll become smoother, more collected and crazier, in a positive sense. You’ll begin to be yourself. There’ll be an ease to your being, a deeper joy to your life. You’ll see your own eternality. You’ll remember a little bit more of who and what you are. And you may never go beyond this point in this life, if you just can meditate regularly.

Try to meditate with a group, hopefully with an advanced teacher, once a week or so if your lifestyle permits that or by yourself. Just reach to God, and you’ll feel God and you’ll feel eternity. Light will come into your being and you’ll have a remarkably beautiful life. The world won’t necessarily change but your understanding of it will, and therefore the world will change. A tree won’t appear to be a tree anymore, a person a person, an experience an experience, because you’ll see level upon level within it and beyond it. Your attention will no longer be confined to the physical body and the physical world.

If you never go further than that, then you’ve advanced to a very nice, safe place. And when death comes, it won’t frighten you. And when life comes, it won’t frighten you or excite you. You’ll care more for those around you and you’ll be able to do more for them, because as your own awareness advances, everyone who comes into your field of energy is positively influenced. This is as far as most people get.

Then, of course, there’s graduate school. Graduate school is advanced meditation. Advanced meditation assumes certain things. It assumes that one has meditated for many years, five, ten, fifteen years, and learned to meditate well. You can meditate for an hour, stop your thoughts completely at some point in the meditation, even if it takes you half an hour or forty minutes, and enter into a timeless state of existence. You’ve worked out the basics in your life. You become a very nice person.

You can’t really go into advanced states of meditation if you’re holding a lot of baggage in your hands. You’re too heavy. Over the period of years that you’ve been meditating and studying and practicing, you’ve let go of your attachments. You can live in the world and have friends and family and possessions if you like. But you don’t take them all too seriously because you know that death removes everything. And you feel that death is every moment, as life is every moment. You enjoy, but you don’t fixate. If it all goes away tomorrow, that’s OK, you trust God implicitly. The universe will always do what’s right for you. You have this feeling.

Emotional storms may pass through your being, upsets; the sea of life is not always smooth. But these things don’t affect the deeper you. You have a link, you’ve established contact with your deeper self. You no longer envy others. If someone gets the larger piece of cake, you’re happy for them. They’ll get fat and you’ll stay thin. You feel a comradeship, a kinship with life, a deep love of nature and existence. Like the whales that we see here off the California coast this time of year in February and March, it’s just enough sometimes to play. As I’m speaking to you now, I’m looking out a window and there’s a whale playing in the surf about 150 yards out beyond the beach. Every once in a while it surfaces and it just plays in the waves and goes back under.

The self plays among the waves of existence. It surfaces, it comes up for a while, and then it disappears again. We are that self, playing in the waves of existence as my friend the whale is—I’ve just spotted it again, breaking through. In deeper meditation, then, we’re no longer concerned so much with putting our life into order. We live in a spotlessly clean house, our papers are in order, there’s no extra accumulation in our closets. In other words, you lead a totally tight life. Your relationships are as good as they can be, you don’t feel the need to possess anyone or be possessed by them. You’ve learned to love, to share, to be fair, and to be humble. Your only real concern in life is either being absorbed in eternity or working for the welfare of others. And there’s still time to have plenty of fun. You’re very busy, reflective and the thousand voices of existence speak through you. This is the preparation.

Anyone who really practices advanced meditation has spent quite a bit of time, of course, doing karma yoga. You have to work for others. Usually such a person will live in a spiritual community where they have the opportunity to give to others, as the personal family doesn’t mean as much to us. The personal family is a fixation. Not for you, perhaps, but for people who are advanced meditators. You can enjoy your family and your friends and your career, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

A person who practices advanced meditation has gone a step further. It’s like joining an order of spiritual aspirants. The family, career, money, the things that most people strive for don’t mean that much to you. You may have them, you may not. But usually such people don’t have families anymore. They’re usually not married, some are. They usually don’t have children, some do. But the chances are, if they’ve become an advanced meditator, they will not marry or have children because it demands too much time. This isn’t selfish, it’s just that God is directing them in another way. If they become an advanced meditator after they’ve had children or married, they may choose to leave their family, feeling that it was a nice stage that they went through and now eternity’s pulling them in another direction. They know that God will take care of their family as God would if they died, which they have, because in advanced meditation we die and another self is born.

Or, they may choose to stay with their families and see that it is the dharma for them to be with their children, with the person that they married, and that they can practice selfless giving right there. It’s a wonderful opportunity to raise their children without trying to make them into anything special. They’re not trying to make them into spiritual aspirants, but just let them be and give them what they need to love and be kind.

But, you see, when you enter into the world of advanced meditation, you no longer fixate on an individual. It is not your husband or your wife or your child or your parent that matters anymore. I realize this may be hard for either you to accept or for the child or the parent or the husband or wife to accept, but if they truly love you, they’ll understand.

I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and it was understood that if you became a priest or a nun, your family would understand that. You’d chosen another way of life. You weren’t expected to marry or have children. You wouldn’t see your family too much because you’d given your life over to God. That was understood. Well, people who practice advanced meditation have done that. It wasn’t a hard choice to make. No one forced them into it. As they progressed spiritually, those things just didn’t matter. It’s easy.

Now, you shouldn’t be afraid that if you meditate, you will suddenly feel that way. Meditation will give you a clear mind and a solid purpose and a wonderful life. As I said before, most people won’t go beyond that. It’s only by your personal choice, something in you will elect to go to a higher level of power and knowledge. Then you’ll choose a different way of life and it will be fun for you. You won’t miss anything. You don’t even have to force yourself to give anything up.

Such a person can live in the world on their own, which is unusual, or they join a spiritual community. Spiritual communities come in two packages basically. One package is the ashram where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds, like a monastery or convent. You get up in the morning, early in the morning, usually, and you meditate, and then you may work in the community, helping to sustain it, or outside of it. You go to work all day and you come back in the evening, and there may be a group meditation or private meditations. You get together with your friends and spend time. It’s a big family; it’s like a kibbutz. The single-family unit is nonexistent because you just feel that it’s selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don’t just love the one—you do love the one but you love the many also. Your politics have changed. You’ve become a larger being. If everyone felt this way there would be no wars, no hatred, because you don’t have to rush to defend anything because you love everything.

The other type of community, of course, is like the one we have here at Lakshmi, and that’s where we have a spiritual community but everyone lives where they want to. Many of the people in the center live in the same area. I recommend certain areas to live because of their power, and most of us live near each other and we see each other at the supermarket, or whatever. People get together and go to the movies or on hikes or meditate together, but everyone maintains their own independent domicile. Some students live alone. Some share places with each other. And in that way, not only now but as they grow older, there’s no loneliness. There’s no loneliness because when you meditate well, you feel eternity. How could you ever be lonely? You just feel God’s love for you and that sustains you. It’s totally clear; it’s part of every aspect of your being.

Of course, whenever you want to do something at night you just call up one of your friends and get together, or a group of them have dinner together, whatever. There’s so much love between people, there’s just not a sense of absence. That’s what a spiritual community is for. You join it, it feels right, it’s a group of advanced souls who have had many, many lifetimes, many incarnations, in which they practice spirituality, who now work together and play together and enjoy their lives in a very different, but very fulfilling way.

Meditation is a way of being, and it assumes so many shapes and forms. But there is a spirit that guides us, if we will listen. It speaks softly. In order to hear it we must still our thoughts and meditate.

Advanced meditation is the entrance into the superconscious. When you can successfully stop your thoughts for a period of time, you’ve started to move into advanced meditation. In advanced meditation, we not only pass through other planes of consciousness or awareness but we become them.

There are primarily two levels of what we call samadhi. Samadhi is a Sanskrit word for the advanced states of meditation. There’s salvikalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi. Some people say that there are a few other levels of samadhi, which are beneath salvikalpa samadhi. But from my point of view, it’s sufficient to say that there are two.

Salvikalpa samadhi is a rare experience for most people who meditate. It not only means stopping all thought, but the awareness of this world vanishes totally. Unless you’ve had many high births, unless you’ve practiced self-discovery for many lifetimes, it’s unlikely you’ll experience salvikalpa samadhi in this lifetime, unless you have tremendous intensity, unless you just burn and ache for God, for eternity, for absorption, or unless you study with someone who is enlightened.

If you study with a fully enlightened teacher, a liberated one, then that person is samadhi. They are just a being of light and when you meditate with them, particularly in person, they have the power to give samadhi. That is to say, when they meditate with you, if you meditate well, they can actually bring you into some of the lower levels of samadhi at will. But they will only do that, of course, if you’ve developed yourself sufficiently so you can retain that light.

You have to be somewhat formable. You can’t be too rigid anymore. If you’ve done your homework and meditated for a number of years, then they can transmit samadhi to you. You can experience it on your own, but you have to meditate very, very intensely with complete willpower and purpose for long periods of time. That’s why most people go to a teacher.

I am a multilevel teacher. I teach introductory, intermediate and advanced meditation. And of course, I run a spiritual community called Lakshmi, named after the Indian goddess of beauty, purity, and prosperity, which opens its arms to people who are beginners, people who are on the intermediate level and advanced seekers.

My specialty is advanced seekers. I’ve had many, many lifetimes as a teacher, but what I really have to offer are the fine points that a person needs in advanced meditation. While I enjoy teaching people on the basic and intermediate levels to work them up to those levels, my real talent, again, is for the advanced students. You could say I’m like a ninth-degree black belt in martial arts. While I can still teach a beginner’s class or an intermediate class, my real skill is not even teaching the first-degree black belt, let alone the lower belts, but those who are in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth range. But I’m happy to do either, personally.

The way advanced mediation is taught, the way I teach it, the way all enlightened people teach it, is through transference. We transfer light and power to someone else. We teach someone how to hold that light, how to eliminate their attachments, the holes in their beings through which they lose light. We teach how to become selfless, pure, and humble and just generally how to have a heck of a lot more fun with their lives. But the way we do it is all inwardly. We use the powers that we have developed in previous lifetimes, or in this lifetime, to bring a person through a series of altered states of consciousness, different planes of existence, very quickly, to expand their being, to dissolve their selves. It’s a very, very complex, sophisticated process, which I really can’t describe to you in words. It’s something that you may have experienced if you’ve ever worked with someone who is enlightened. If you’ve sat with them and meditated with them, you have a sense of what I’m speaking of. Otherwise, these will just sound like words. You can do your best to imagine it, but it’s nothing like it.

Advanced meditation is taught, then, in most cases, by a self-realized teacher, one who is liberated, enlightened—not through words but through transmission. That transmission does not have to take place physically, that is to say, the student doesn’t have to be sitting across from you. But it’s easier if they are because the vibration of the teacher is strongest in the physical proximity of the teacher. Once the student has spent some time with the teacher and learned the frequency, you might say, the student can be thousands of miles away and tune in and gain quite a bit. But it’s still a good idea, whenever possible, to be in the physical presence of the enlightened teacher because it’s not physical. You can hear the ocean from quite a ways away, but if you’re standing right in front of it, it’s easier. Then of course you can just jump in, like my friend the gray whale, who seems to have vanished from sight, which is not a bad thing for all of us to do—you can just be absorbed.

Advanced meditation has an awful lot to do with nothing. You become friends with nothing. First, you experience salvikalpa samadhi. Salvikalpa samadhi means that there’s no thought, no form. As you’re meditating there’s no idea of this world, time goes away, and as you sit there meditating, there’s no sense that you’re sitting there meditating. You become consciousness itself. But there’s still a slight sense of self. There’s still a vague feeling, ‘I’m eternity, I’m God, I’m all of existence.’ You become that. Your awareness has merged with the transcendental awareness and it is the sense, without having to think about it, without you as a perceiver or a person thinking about it, that you are the transcendental awareness. This is salvikalpa samadhi.

If you experience salvikalpa samadhi even for a few minutes, you’ll never be the same because to enter into salvikalpa samadhi, the human self, the old self, has to die in a sense, or be reborn. You’re composed of an aggregate of different forms and energies, and those energies are held into focus or line by your past life development, what we call the samskaras. These are lines within your being. When you enter into samadhi, these lines dissolve gradually so you become less formed. You’re freed each time you enter into samadhi.

For years and years, you enter into samadhi every day in order to attain liberation. For years and years you enter into samadhi every day and each time you enter into samadhi for five minutes or five hours, whatever it may be, it’s as if your inner being, your substance, has melted down in the core of eternity. And eternity fashions a new self, which you find yourself with when you come out of samadhi. But you never quite come out. Each time you come out a little less, you might say, or your real self comes out a little more. There are different ways to talk about it. None of them will be exactly what it’s like, except to say it’s an experience of such absolute beauty, radiance and completion, such life, such depth, such joy, such indifference and such love, that nothing else is really like it or worthwhile in comparison, yet it gives shape, color and meaning to everything. In other words, there’s nothing you should be afraid of. It’s not going to take away your humanity. It will give it to you. But you will become more cosmopolitan, more conscious, more infinite.

Nirvikalpa samadhi, of course, is the pearl in the oyster. Nirvikalpa Samadhi—there’s nothing we can say about it. I use the term “nirvana” interchangeably with it, meaning that you’ve gone off the board, you’ve gone off the map, there’s no way to describe it. You’ve attained liberation, you no longer are bound by the cycle of existence. You can’t be born and you can’t die anymore. You just are, and yet you’re not at the same time. There are all these paradoxical ways of discussing it, suggesting that it’s beyond discussion, though it happens to some of us. It happened to me and to not me. You just become eternity.

When you’re absorbed in nirvana, there’s not even a sense of self as eternity. There’s no way to describe it. Then you’re liberated. Liberated while living, what they call a jivan mukta. And when death comes you won’t be reborn, unless, of course, you’re reborn, in which case you won’t be reborn as other people are. You’ll be reborn as a liberated being. While a number of years will go by after you’ve been reborn—if that’s what happens, if you choose to be reborn to come back to help others—a number of years will pass and you may look like everyone else. But then one day you’ll be drawn to the light, you’ll meditate, you’ll study for many years and then your liberation will return without you having to try a whole lot, in a way. It comes back. You dissolve again. It was never really gone; it was just dormant. It was sleeping for a while. But then your old personality comes back, all the selves from before and then liberation, of course, that which is beyond.

There’s not really a whole lot you could say about liberation. The closest experience you can have of it is to come meditate with someone who is liberated. Many people claim to be liberated. Oh God, if we were to believe everybody who said they were liberated and self-realized, I mean, it’s an endless list. According to “moi,” as Miss Piggy would say, there are currently on this Earth 12 beings who are self-realized. Eleven are men, one is a woman. Most of them are in the Far East, most of them you’ve never heard of and probably never will. They work with a very small group of advanced students. A couple don’t even have students. They have friends, I suppose, but they just meditate a lot.

Liberated souls are a rare commodity in this world. They’re no better—it’s just you, a little later, in the next act or in the next play. But if you yourself seek to learn advanced meditation, that’s really how it’s done. You devote your life to such a person, you have to, but they will never ask it. A real liberated teacher never asks for a commitment from a student. They realize that that’s absurd. How can you ask for a commitment? That’s looking at it the wrong way. There’s no commitment—a person wants to be there and they want to learn everything they can.

When I was a graduate student and I was studying English literature, working on my Ph.D., on my Master’s, there was nothing else I wanted to do in the sense that I wanted to find the best teachers and learn all I could with them, study everything that was possible, learn the art. It was fun. I suppose you could call it commitment. I never thought of it as being commitment, it was just what felt right.

When you find a teacher, you devote your time and energy to what they believe in. If they think you should all go to the movies, you all go to the movies together because obviously you feel they see something beneficial about going to the movies that night, maybe just to have a good time. Or if you should meditate for five hours, you all meditate together. You surrender not to them but to the infinite, which operates through them.

Now, here, of course, as you know, I’m always a stickler on this point, this is where the abuse of power manifests with the phony spiritual teachers and phony gurus who tell you how to run your life and what to wear and what to eat and all that sort of stuff, what to do with your money. They abuse. People who don’t realize that, of course, listen to them and ruin their lives. They [phony gurus] make themselves objects of adoration and worship. Real spiritual teachers aren’t interested in adoration and worship. They like respect only because they realize that that respect will actually help the student. When you respect something you do better with it or for it. If you respect your teacher, you do better. You feel, “Gosh, this is someone very knowledgeable, I have to give them my best. There’s a lot to learn from them.” If you don’t respect them, you’re not going to give them the time of day.

Respect is good only because it will help you. But a real liberated teacher or liberated person, what can you do for them? They’ve got everything; they are everything. They don’t need to be worshipped, they don’t need to be adored. It’s nice if you love them and you should because they love you. They’re lovable. They’re children playing in a very, very unusual world filled with vortexes of dancing darkness and light. A sense of eternity, that’s what you need, a sense of timelessness beyond time and within time. If a spiritual teacher says something that doesn’t make sense to you, you should always listen to yourself and not to the teacher. A little common sense would end all cults. Of course, one person’s cult is another person’s spiritual organization. There are many sides to it all, I suppose, I don’t know.

Advanced meditation. I’d love to find some people to teach advanced meditation to, I’ve been looking for many years. I travel all over the world, lecture, and meditate, and I’ll continue to do so. I’d love to find some people eager and enthusiastic about the higher aspects of the rebirth process, who have already put in the time and the energy to reach that point where they’re ready for the advanced study. But there aren’t many in this world. There are a few around. Once in a while I run into another one. But it’s a very limited league at this time in this world. The next best thing to do is to work with those who are not quite there yet to bring them up to that level.

What I’m suggesting then, is that advanced meditation requires a level of complete dedication to existence. Complete dedication is not forced, it’s easy. You don’t think of it as dedication. The sign of a spiritual person, an advanced spiritual person, is that they don’t think they’re an advanced spiritual person until after liberation, and after liberation, you can say whatever you want because you don’t really care, because it doesn’t matter, because you’re no longer a person. But on the way up, there’s a way to do it. In other words, you’ve got to shine, you’ve got to work.

I remember in college, I had a Doctor Klein. He was a biology professor I studied with—he was a marine biologist, he was great. He used to tell us what it took to become a successful research scientist and how, for someone who became a successful research scientist—you know, there were so few positions available, there was a sequence they had to follow. At a certain age they would start. They’d do really well in college and really well in graduate school, they’d get a post doctorate. If they married, they’d hardly ever be home with their family, and even when they came on at a university, if they got a job at a university, they’d have to shine because there’d be four or five other people and only one or two would be able to stay, so they’d just have to work intensely all the time. You have to pay your dues; you have to be an apprentice, putting in 15, 16, 17, 18 hours a day. You have to do the same thing if you become a physician. If you become a physician, my God—medical school, internship, years of residency. Anything that you want to bring to perfection—if you want to be a ballet dancer, if you want to be a first violinist with the Chicago Symphony or the London Symphony, you give it your whole life, it’s all that matters.

Now you don’t have to do that. There are lots of people who are happy—they listen to music, they play a little music, they study and go to college. There are lots of people who have a wonderful time in life just going to college and learning. College is a wonderful place. A handful go to graduate school, five or ten percent. And of those, how many go all the way? Do you see what I’m saying? It’s a small number. You shouldn’t worry about being in a small number because if you’re supposed to be in a small number it will be fun, it will happen by itself. You’ll just be inspired. If you’re not, then that’s not the track life wants to take you on at the moment.

The people at the top are not happier, they just have more responsibilities. Yet there is a way beyond this life and beyond death, and that is the path of liberation, and in order to be liberated, you have to enter into the world of advanced meditation. One path leads back to this world, to rebirth; one path leads beyond. Your soul stands at a crossroads, trying to make a decision. Flipping a coin. A nice image for the soul, I think.

I’m just trying to say that advanced meditation is not just a little bit of meditation; it’s not just sitting and meditating. That’s not advanced meditation. True, you have to sit there and be able to still all your thoughts and move into the superconscious awareness. But the reason you can do that is because you not only practice meditation for many years in both the good times and the bad times, when it was easy and difficult, but because of the type of life you lead, which doesn’t mean it’s a strict life. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to be this or have to be that. You don’t necessarily have to be celibate or necessarily have to not be married. There are variables.

It’s not what you do, it’s the intensity of your feeling that determines how far you go in the spiritual life. If you were that dedicated and that committed to sports, to medicine, to music, to business, to whatever it may be, if you take that same total level of dedication that anyone had to get to the top in any field, and apply it to self-discovery, the same thing happens. Except that when you get to the top in anything else, it washes away, it’s transitory. You’ve devoted your whole life to working and endeavoring, and then you’ll die and you’ll lose it all, whereas here you’ll never lose it. It loses you. The only thing that stays with you forever is your awareness.

To some of us it makes sense. We don’t even know why. We’re drawn towards the light like moths to the flame, and into the flame we go and burn up and then suddenly we become someone and something else, all the time. But you have to excel. You have to be exceptional. You have to be impeccable. You have to care about nothing but light, all the time. Then, of course, you put that caring into action, not in a sloppy way but in a perfect way, in order to enter into the world of advanced meditation. It’s a very strict school.

The other schools, introductory and intermediate meditation, are easy schools. But advanced meditation is like graduate or professional school; it’s much more demanding. In one year of graduate school, you might learn what you learned in five years as an undergraduate. But if you’ve done a good job as an undergraduate and if it’s what you want to do, it’s fun. You’re ready for that level of professionalism.

But don’t even think about advanced meditation until you’ve meditated for many, many years, burned your bridges behind you and the bridges in front of you and you can feel that your life is very stable. You’ve got your physical life together; your economic life together, in most cases; your emotional life is tight; you no longer feel the need to have someone in your life, rather your interest is in serving people. And you don’t just think these thoughts because they sound correct, this is how you genuinely feel. When you wake up in the morning, all you think about is, ‘What can I do for my spiritual teacher, or our spiritual journey that we’re on, our community, or for others?’ Or whatever the thought is, for God, it’s the same thought, just taking different forms.

It’s not an obsession, although you’re definitely obsessed. It’s just the way you feel. It’s not right, it’s not wrong; it just is how you feel. You feel that way all day long. You feel that way all night long. You don’t care about anything else the same way. You’re the same as the research scientist who has just given up his life to do that, the doctor or the artist, for whom nothing matters more than their art. You don’t have much of a personal life, is what I’m suggesting. If you want a personal life, it’s definitely not the world of advanced meditation. Advanced meditation is if you want a personless life, one filled with people and with love and with beauty but without that fixation. It’s if you’re brave enough to stand alone, even when you’re surrounded by others. It’s if you have the courage to live your convictions, even when things aren’t going your way, even when you make a fool out of yourself. Even if you fail a thousand times, you get up a thousand and one times and each time try to be more creative, and at the same time you accept your destiny and accept what God gives you.

People who are advanced meditators don’t worry about liberation and self-realization anymore. They’re not trying to become liberated. They, instead, are interested in the welfare of others and aiding others in their liberation. They know that when it’s time for them to be liberated it will happen. They’re not even desirous of liberation anymore, that’s just another attachment. There is no liberation. There is no bondage. These are just ideas in the mind. They’re children, children of light. They’re ageless, timeless, and wonderful. We call them saints, sages, fools, different names. They glow, those who practice advanced meditation, they glow.

Then, of course, there are the old hardcore teacher types like me who just sit around and tell jokes, realizing that what’s the difference anyway, it’s all timeless, and looking for someone who wants to play a good, fast tennis game sometime. If there’s no one around to play a good, fast tennis game, then you teach them how to hold the racket and how to get the ball over the net, as patiently as eternity, and just wait. And if no one ever comes, that’s nice too because what’s the difference? You’re the finite and the infinite, you’re the beyond and the near, everything and nothing.

Advanced meditation is life. It’s the pure acceptance of life in its totality. It’s climbing up to the highest point and beyond and observing the view. It’s being alone with yourself and facing the immensity of eternity, and even at its most awesome, even when it’s most frightening and terrifying, embracing that which terrifies you and frightens you and loving it because it’s God, you’re God.

It’s not being afraid to stand alone and do what’s right, through life or through death, and realizing that you never had anything to do with it anyway—not because you were good or wonderful, it was just the way it worked out, the way the cards were dealt. There is no sense of self, but a great love for all, and total trust. You must have total and impeccable trust in eternity. Whether you have it or not, eternity’s in charge so you might as well trust, you’ll feel better.

Advanced meditation. Never leave the body without it.