Dharma is the truth.

Dharma is the truth throughout the ages. There are two types of dharma, universal dharma and individual dharma. To understand one, it’s really necessary to understand the other. They can’t be separated, although human beings try to.

Universal dharma is existence. We begin with the assumption that there’s a primal cause for all things, there is an omnipresent reality or being that we call God, the self, nirvana, eternity. This omnipresent force or reality is existence. All of the worlds, realities, beings, experiences and times that we call existence come forth from and are directed by this reality.

Human beings like to think of God as a big person. We identify through the medium of ourselves, so we explore and come to know, to some extent, our own tonal ranges. We know that human beings think a certain way, feel a certain way, see life in a certain way. And so we assume that eternity or God must do that, and we are, in fact, correct, to an extent, since God exists in all things, at all times and all places and at the same time is beyond all times and places and things. God exists as human beings. The aspect of God that is each of us does see and feel existence in a certain way—the way we see and feel existence.

But God is not limited or bound by the human mode of perception. God may be a tree: growing, experiencing wind, heat, the passage of time in a very different way. God is in a stone that experiences a different type of awareness. You may look at a stone and say, “Well, there’s no life there.” But a physicist will correct you. A physicist will point out that there is as much life in a stone as there is in a human being. While the stone may not be, or appear to be, animate to you—it doesn’t get up and walk around and move and talk and dance and perform—the molecular structure of the stone is in a constant state of motion. The atoms, the electrons, the protons, neutrons, sub-atomic particles, the worlds within worlds that exist within a fraction of an ounce of a stone, are galaxies; they’re fathomless. And who is to say that those atoms and those electrons don’t have consciousness, don’t have awareness, simply because we are not aware of their awareness? Yet are we not made up of the same thing? Are we not made up of galaxies of universes, of sub-atomic particles that whirl and whirl together to form a certain aggregate which we call a human being?

ॐ

Everything has awareness. Simply because a person does not see that does not mean that awareness does not exist. It was only a hundred or two hundred years ago that human beings were unaware of bacteria and viruses and their effects. The plague would roll into town and devastate 90 percent of the population, and people would have no idea how or why. That which was invisible was the causative agent, the bacteria, or the virus. Today, through the marvels of the microscope, we know about the existence of these things. Simply because we don’t see something, we’re not currently aware of it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. In spiritual practice and in all learning, we have to constantly be open to vision and revision. We need to be able to see beyond the known, to expose ourselves to that which we are not familiar with.

At the same time, as new information and knowledge and data, new ways of seeing life enter our being, we must be able to push aside outmoded ideas, ways of thinking, ways of examining existence, which we find are incomplete. Young children, of course, find this very easy to do because they don’t have a lot of concepts and ideas. A child learns one, two, or three languages very quickly. The child can accept technology because the child is not wrestling with conditioning. The child hasn’t been programmed.

In spiritual practice, we all become children again. We erase the tapes that were made before and we create new tapes. Any information that was valid we retain. But as we meditate, we explore the unseen. Meditation is the microscope, it’s the telescope, it’s the ultimate research tool. And we see that, just as there is a physical universe, so there are nonphysical universes, countless universes. Most human beings can’t see them with their eyes. Well, most human beings couldn’t detect the bacteria or the virus, which didn’t suggest that these things didn’t exist. Of course they did. These things had a tremendous effect on all human beings. Simply because one isn’t aware of something does not mean that one is not affected by it.

Meditation enables us to see in new ways. When we’re able to calm our minds and still our thoughts, we discover that we have other parts of our being, which enable us to perceive in alternate modalities. We have a facility to see into what we call the subtle physical universes. The subtle physical or astral universes, as they’re popularly known, are like the sub-atomic worlds, unseen but active. These are the other dimensions which you enter into, of course, in dreaming.

In meditation, we consciously experience the subtle physical worlds. We see that some subtle physical worlds are high and beautiful; their vibratory rate is much finer. Then there are lower subtle physical worlds, with a very slow vibratory rate. The physical world as we know it is somewhere in the middle. It’s an access point, a joining of all vibratory fields. It’s not the center of the universe, it’s not the most important of the planes; it’s another world in a succession of worlds, another dream in a succession of dreams.

Meditation unlocks the doorway that leads to immortality. In the subtle physical world there are beings who progress through incarnations just as the people do here in the physical world. But there’s something that lies beyond the subtle physical worlds and the physical world. We call this eternity, nirvana. It’s the ocean from which all the waves come forth. It’s the ocean through which all the fish pass. It’s the ocean, which is the heart of life. This is God. How and whence it came from, who knows? Existence simply is. Our mind can run around in circles trying to understand it, but whether we understand it or not, that won’t alter existence. It will be as it is and has been, whether we understand it or not. In meditation we come to understand existence. But there are no words for these expressions. Because in order to understand existence you must become it, you must experience it directly, firsthand for yourself.

When you meditate, you move beyond the realm of your awareness, the realm your awareness is focused in. If you focus exclusively on the physical world, this world, in time—your body, your emotions, your feelings, career, friends—if your attention is centered on that which happens from the moment of birth to the moment of death and the time in between, your attention is in the physical plane.

If you’ve meditated for some time in this life or other lifetimes and developed your facilities of seeing, you can perceive the astral worlds, which are less time oriented. And while you are in this physical world with your physical being, your astral being, your occult body, as we call it, is able to explore and have experiences in countless astral worlds.

But the deepest part of your being, your third body, is the body not of ether as is the astral being, the subtle being; nor is it a body of matter; nor is it the life force that animates these bodies, which we call the kundalini energy; but rather it is that which is the ocean, which is timeless, birthless, deathless and immortal, which all things arise from and all things return to. In higher meditation, in advanced meditation, we experience that, the superconscious. In introductory meditation and intermediate meditation, we experience the astral. Our knowledge of the astral colors our understanding of the physical. Our knowledge of the superconscious, which we experience in advanced meditation and samadhi, colors our knowledge of everything.

With this as a basic cosmology, with the recognition that there is time, place and position in the physical world; that there’s an astral world or countless worlds, subtle worlds that have their own conditions, that are not physical; other dimensions, which we also exist in since we have a part of our being that is nonphysical, that is etheric; and [that there is] the absolute reality, which is eternal awareness, nirvana, the ocean, which is our real essence—with this understanding we can begin to contemplate dharma.

Dharma is the truth. And there are three types of truth. There’s the truth of the physical world; there’s the truth of the subtle physical world, the astral world; and there’s the truth of the superconscious. Truth means everything is in place. Everything fits.

Our understanding of truth will change as we change. Truth to most people means alignment. If the sun is out and I go outside and say to my friends, “The sun is out,” then I have told the truth. I have seen what is and reported it accurately and fairly. I have been a mirror of what is. If I say to my friends, “The sun is no longer out,” then I have lied. I am not properly mirroring what is. My mirror is bent out of shape. In order to reflect truth, one must be a perfect mirror.

In meditation, we clean the mirror of the self. The mirror of the self has been covered up with layer after layer of dust. And almost nothing reflects. The mirror in the physical world is not as delicate as the mirror in the subtle physical world. In order to perceive that which lies beyond the physical, we must first understand the physical. Then we can move into the subtle physical. As long as the first mirror is obscured, we will never see the second mirror, let alone the third mirror, which is eternity itself, which is both the mirror and that which we see in the mirror.

Each human being has a part of themselves that is a mirror, which reflects truth. They also have a conscious awareness, which tells them if they are being honest. And no one can ask more of you than to be honest. If you can be honest, then you’ve done all that you need to do.

If a person’s attention is centered in the physical world and they’re honest about their physical experiences, about position and place, if they tell the truth and if what they see as being right or perceive of is right, if that’s what they do, then that’s honesty, then they are living dharma. If a person’s attention is in the subtle physical worlds, or mixed between the subtle physical and the physical worlds, they will perceive a different set of rules or truths. Not only will they know the truths of the physical world, but they’ll know the deeper elements, higher truths. And if they follow those truths, they are following the dharma. If a person perceives the superconscious, if they merge with that, then they’ve gone a step further and they’ve become an extension of the truth.

ॐ

The superconscious is the ultimate truth. It is God. When you can no longer separate yourself from God, when you’ve merged with God, then you no longer need to tell the truth, to think about the truth, or even to show others the truth. You are the truth. You are the way and the light.

When a person does not follow the dharma, when they deceive themselves, then they suffer. They’re out of alignment. The mirror does not properly reflect what is. All suffering comes about because a person is not a perfect mirror. Now, when I say suffering, I don’t mean suffering in the sense of physical pain. Physical pain is a transitory experience, as is pleasure, which occurs to the body in time. Pain is something that cannot be avoided. However, it can be lessened, and pain doesn’t really have to hurt. There is always going to be a certain amount of pain and a certain amount of pleasure that the body will experience in the physical world. But this is neither here nor there. It’s only important if all your attention is focused on the body. If your little toe is in pain and you focus all of your attention on it, then that little pain will become the entire world for you and all of life will be pain. If you ignore it and put your attention elsewhere, then you won’t even notice.

However, the emotional pains exact more damage to a person. They’re more problematic. The emotional pains come from attachment. When we’re attached to something, when an emotion surges through us and if we listen to it and follow it, we experience pain. We desire something, we want something, something didn’t work out, we get frustrated—we feel pain. We love someone, we fail ourselves, we fail others—we experience pain. There’s always a certain amount of pain in loving.

If you wish to go beyond pain, the way is the superconscious. The only way you can completely end pain is to be absorbed in eternal awareness. When you are absorbed in eternal awareness, there is no sense of this world, a world in which there must always be some pain. There is no sense of pleasure, there is no time, there is no space and there is no condition. In the highest strata of meditation, all of this falls away. You have merged with the superconscious, which is birthless, deathless and timeless. If a candle is held up to the sun, we don’t see the candle, the flame cannot be distinguished. All the pains and pleasures of this world, all the transitory frustrations, in the intense light of the superconscious are not seen. They exist, but like the fish underwater, they’re unseen.

Meditation, then, is a conscious entrance into the superconscious awareness, until we are so immersed in it that we are basically unaware of this world. That’s samadhi. When we say that someone is absorbed in nirvana, this is what we mean. You can’t find them; they’re no longer there. Oh, you may see the body, their body may still be here, but their spirit has departed and has merged with the cosmic all.

ॐ

Dharma is following the truth.

When you follow the truth you will see that there is a way beyond pain for your frustration and suffering.

When you negate the truth, you create karma, what most people call bad karma.

When you follow the truth, you create what they call good karma.

Karma and dharma cannot be separated.

Karma

Karma is a Sanskrit word that means action. Most people think of karma as a cause and effect process. The idea is that whatever I do produces an effect of some type. This effect is karma. Ultimately, this effect works its way around to me. If I’m a good person and I help people, good things will come back to me. If I harm others, hurt others, if I don’t follow the dharma, if I don’t do what’s right, then I create bad karma. The only way one can distinguish good karma from bad karma is through the dharma. Dharma is the line that separates good and bad karma. What they call adharma is bad karma; dharma is good karma.

Now good and bad only exist in the relative worlds. Notions of good and bad, evil and salvation, pleasure and pain, these are all what we call pairs of opposites. To the human dualistic consciousness—meaning the way you see things because there’s a personal form, a personality—there appears to be opposition or complements. To a person who lives in this world, there is, of course, light and dark, sound and silence. But if we erase the person, if the person no longer exists, then there are no pairs of opposites, there’s no sound and silence. If there’s no one to perceive it, it’s not there. This is absorption and meditation. What’s there is absorption. Karma only exists in the worlds that are worlds, which have conditions. When a person is liberated, there is no karma, meaning that they have gone beyond the pairs of opposites. They are in the sun itself, they have become the sun, the candle flame is unnoticed. Karma becomes meaningless.

Most people think of karma in physical terms. I saved someone’s life, someone will save my life. In a previous incarnation, I did a lot of good things and now, in this incarnation, a lot of good things are happening to me. There is certainly a subtle cause and effect in the physical plane, but it really isn’t specific to a person. That is to say, if you give a lot of money out, that doesn’t mean a lot of money will come back to you. Or if it does, it won’t occur because you physically gave money out and there was someone keeping a record somewhere, in the sky, noting what you did and then making sure that in the express mail the next day you received back what you gave out. That’s not the way karma works.

Karma has to do with fields of attention. There is basically no physical karma, or we could say that all physical karma is an outgrowth of a field of attention. It works the same way, it’s just that the causative principle is somewhat different. For example, let’s say that a person, perhaps yourself, is walking down the street. And you see a small child who’s lost. Now, if you help the child find their parents, doing this will place you in a different state of awareness because it’s the dharma. It is the dharma in the world that we help one another, that life fosters life. That’s a correct reflection in the mirror. We see ourselves as we really are. Whenever you do anything that’s right, or that’s dharma, then what will occur is that you will go up a level in the school of consciousness. The school of consciousness has thousands and millions of levels, and your consciousness is always climbing in and out and changing levels.

Most people’s consciousness follows a relatively small spectrum. Let’s say there are a million floors in the building. Well, you may be in the first hundred thousand, the second hundred thousand, the third hundred thousand, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth or tenth. There are ten levels, there are a hundred thousand gradations in each one, let’s say. Now, in each lifetime you will be in a particular level, and most people will never leave that level. They will experience some of the hundred thousand gradations within that level, but it is unlikely that they will climb up to a higher level or drop down to a lower level. There’s so much gradation, just within the level that they’re in, that it’s unlikely that they’ll change. There are different levels of attention or cosmic awareness. Whenever you approach the dharma, when you do something that is the dharma, when everything lines up, then you will raise up to a higher level of attention within your overall level. Whenever you do something that is not the dharma, the reflection is not clear, it’s misshapen, and you will drop several levels.

Most people will rise and fall throughout their lifetime, again, within one level, within the gradations. As a matter of fact, over a course of many births and deaths, as their soul reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime, they will only rarely move to a different level. You may have 50 or 100 lifetimes within the same basic level, experiencing the different gradations. Gradually the soul will work its way higher, but rarely does the soul go through a full transit. Rarely will the soul jump to an entirely new floor and experience all the variabilities and new gradations within that structure. I don’t mean to confuse you with all this kind of rhetoric, but it helps you get a schematic understanding.

What I’m suggesting is that spiritual evolution is a relatively slow process, or let us say that it has a grace all of its own, but it’s not as quick as many people might think it is. There’s no rush, essentially, since there’s nothing but time.

So then, what karma does, is it determines your level of attention, your field of awareness. Karma is not simply physical, it doesn’t involve just your physical actions but also the thoughts that you think and the emotions that you become affixed to. All of these things determine what your state of awareness is. If you love and you’re kind and you give of yourself, if you meditate, you’ll develop a very pure consciousness and you’ll always follow the dharma. You’ll be able to see what’s right and follow it. If you only follow the dharma, you only create good karma, then your level of attention will constantly rise. Of course, if you do the opposite, if you don’t listen to your inner voice, if you hurt others, if you don’t follow what the dharma is, if you practice adharma, then your consciousness will descend and you’ll drop down.

All effects in this world are based upon vibratory forces. That is to say, the things that happen to you in the physical world and ultimately the things that happen to you in the subtle physical world, in the universes that have some form, all of these events are predicated upon the fields of attention. Think of it in terms of freeways. I’m driving down the 405 freeway to San Diego from Los Angeles; I will be able to experience what’s on the 405 freeway. If there are signs on the road, I’ll see them, the cars that are there, and so on. If I take the 10 East out to Palm Springs, of course I’ll be on a different freeway. Instead of moving down along the ocean and experiencing what’s between Los Angeles and San Diego, I will experience what’s between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. I’ll go through the mountain ranges and the desert, the high desert and so on. Our experiences are determined by the freeway that we’re on. Now, while I’m on the freeway, I can think whatever thoughts I want and feel whatever feelings I want, but still, on a basic physical level, what will occur to me is predicated upon the freeway that I’m on.

Well, let’s say that the overall levels of attention, those ten floors I was talking about before, or however many you’d like, are freeways. OK, I’m going to mix my metaphors here, so let’s see if we can make a salad. And these freeways take you someplace and they go to different places. Now, while you’re on the freeway, there are many possible experiences. Hopefully you’ll have a smooth trip. You might hit another car, you might be hit by a car; you might have a conversation with a friend, you may drive alone. There are many variable possibilities, but all those variable possibilities are within one construct, which is the 10 freeway or the 405 freeway.

Your karma determines what freeway you’re on, your level of awareness. Your level of awareness is determined by the dharma that you followed, and you will draw to you experiences according to your level of attention. Whatever happens to you in this world happens to you not randomly, but because you have drawn it. That’s what karma really is. Karma is not someone keeping a record book, saying you should have this experience because you did this to someone else. That has nothing to do with karma; that’s a very pedestrian understanding of the workings of the universe. It all has to do with the vibratory fields of attention. If you’re in a good, open state of consciousness, then you will draw certain things towards yourself. If you were not, if you were in a frustrated, depressed consciousness, then you will draw other things towards yourself. That’s karma. Your karma determines the state of awareness. The state of awareness, then, will determine what happens to you. In other words, it all takes place inwardly.

Now, you are probably only aware of the freeway that you’re on, and you think that everyone else is on the same freeway. But that’s not the case. What I’m trying to suggest is that there are many freeways, and they go different places. One place is not better than another, they’re simply different. However, eventually you can reach a point where the freeway ends and the ocean begins or you can ride the freeways forever. Rebirth, reincarnation, is just changing freeways. For a hundred lifetimes you’ll ride the San Diego freeway, then for a hundred lifetimes you’ll move to the 10 freeway, and so on. You’ll gradually change.

It is possible within one lifetime to totally change levels of attention. That’s my business and the business of spiritual teachers. I have about 900 or 1,000 students. Now, most of my students are on a specific level of attention. They’re on a certain freeway. What I do is, in their lifetimes I work with them, try and have them rise up to the higher aspect of it. Back to our mixed metaphors, if there are ten floors in the building and there are a thousand gradations within each floor, what I try to do is, when I meet a person—perhaps they’re in the lower ten gradations of the floor—I try to bring them up to the top ten. And to do this, to bring a person through a full level of attention in one lifetime, is a marvelous feat. If I can do that, or if I can do that in concourse with the individual, then perhaps it would have been a hundred or a thousand lifetimes in one. Instead of them having to take a thousand lifetimes to work their way through all this different stuff, we can do it in one incarnation, which means in their next lifetime they’ll move into the next level of attention. It’s easier for most people to have a major transition in levels of attention with death because it’s hard to break out of their conditioning.

Occasionally I meet a person, hopefully yourself, who has enough drive and patience and a good enough sense of humor, who cares enough, who can within one lifetime not just change gradations, but change freeways. It is literally impossible to take someone who has just started incarnating, who is just on the most basic of all our floors in the building, and bring them from the first floor to the tenth floor in one lifetime.

In a sense, people who have just started, if they have any inclination towards spirituality, are easy to work with, because one of the things that holds you to a specific floor is what we call the samskaras. The samskaras are the past life tendencies, conditioning. You’ve taken that 405 freeway from San Diego to L.A. for a hundred lifetimes now. You’re so used to it that you don’t really want to leave it. It’s hard for you to even conceive of the fact that there’s another freeway, you’ve built up such a pattern. The samskaras are the ways we see existence. You’re so used to believing that the world is physical, that there’s life, that there’s death, and so on; you’re so used to seeing things in a certain way, you’ve done that for so many lifetimes that it’s very difficult for you to have a total transit, a complete transition to another floor.

A person who’s in their very early incarnations will find it easier to make that transit because they don’t have all that conditioning. Someone who is in their first five or ten incarnations has almost no conditioning at all. It’s very easy, if they were to work with an advanced spiritual teacher, to move very quickly. But usually such a person is not interested in self-discovery. Their level of attention is like that of an infant. It’s very, very basic. They’re not drawn to the higher life. It’s only usually after thousands of lifetimes that a person will begin to become interested in self-discovery.

ॐ

Your progress in the process of reincarnation, or within a given lifetime or within a given moment, is dependent upon dharma. Dharma is correctly reflecting what is true, being a good mirror. When you follow dharma, this arbitrary line, then you will create good karma. Good karma means that your own consciousness will expand. And as your consciousness expands, it will bring you into a different level of attention. You’ll be on a different freeway. On that different freeway, there will be different experiences. If you don’t practice dharma, if you practice adharma, if you do what is untrue, if you don’t do what is right, if you don’t follow the will of your soul, if you don’t do all that you are capable of doing, then you will drop down to another freeway, one that’s not quite as nice. And you’ll have a different set of experiences there.

Then there is that which is, of course, beyond the freeway—the ocean, the desert, the sky and eventually we want to get out of the car and move to another level of experience. We go back and forth, actually, we go up in the sky for a while, then we find our self on the freeways of existence. But even when you’re on the freeway of existence, if you’re enlightened, you’ll still be in the sky. You can sort of do both at once.

How do you finally get off the map? What is this thing that finally breaks you through? Because you see, the problem with karma is that—let’s say you create nothing but good karma. The good karma will raise your level of attention. You’ll go higher and higher and higher. But even then you’re bound by it. You can be stuck in your own goodness, which doesn’t mean that you should go off and practice untruths. How can you break out of that? Because even the best freeway is still a freeway. Even the best level is still a level. Well, that’s the tricky part.

In order to even ask that question, of course, or to understand the answer, you need to be at the top level of attention. You need to have practiced self-discovery for many lifetimes, have thrown off your conditioning; you need to meditate impeccably and be pure of heart completely. When your motives are spotless, when you will not be swayed by that which is untrue, then you are ready for the final stages of the reincarnation process, to go beyond karma itself, and to no longer practice dharma but to be it.

Don’t judge the purity of your heart by what you think or the emotions you feel or even, to some extent, by the actions that you perform. Sometimes certain parts of our being are still working out transitory desires. In other words, don’t be too judgmental of yourself. Don’t say, “Well, gosh, because I do this or don’t do that, that means I’m not very evolved,” and so on. The purity of your heart and the level of your soul’s evolution inwardly is not necessarily in harmony with your body and your mind and your emotions. What will tell the story is not what you think or feel, but how you live.

You may wake up in the morning and meditate, and then after meditation have a lot of terrible thoughts. You may get depressed or discouraged or frustrated. You may get angry at someone. The sign of spiritual evolution is not that these things don’t pass through you. The sign of spiritual evolution is that you don’t follow them. That even though, suddenly, hate is surging through you—although actually you don’t hate anymore after a while—but let’s say some very strong emotion is passing through you, the sign is that you are not affected by it. You won’t follow it. Suddenly I’m angry at my friend. But that anger will never go anyplace. I’ll step out of the way. I won’t get on that particular train. Don’t feel because you have moods or desires that you’re not necessarily an evolved being. The test, of course, is whether you follow dharma.

The dharma is, for an advanced spiritual seeker, to remain unaffected. If you were depressed for a long period of time, it won’t bother you. If you’re elated, it won’t bother you. Because you’re not looking at these things, you’re not looking at the candle flame, you’re looking at the sun. These are of little or no consequence. What you do physically, what you think, what you feel, is of very little consequence, if your attention is absorbed in eternity. It doesn’t really matter how your toe is feeling today. It’s your overall awareness. While the toe does contribute to that, if your awareness is strong enough, it really doesn’t matter. This is the higher dharma.

Don’t be too concerned about what you see, do or feel. Don’t worry about yourself so much. As you fixate upon your body, as you fixate upon your mind and your emotions, then you lock onto them, you become attached to them, and then you’re on those freeways and you’re stuck. You must experience what’s there. Some freeways are nicer than others but they’re all freeways. You can do a lot of driving.

Or you can go beyond all such relative states and conditions. To do that you need to focus your attention only on God—God beyond the world and God within the world, God beyond people and God within people. You need to care about, in other words, nothing but light. You can be very active in this world, working, participating in society and relationships; you can do all of those things and not be bound by them. But in order to do that, you have to think and feel and care about nothing but light and the spreading of light.

In past ages there was renunciation. The way out was to leave it all behind, leave the kids, leave the wife, leave the husband and just go up in the hills and meditate. The idea was that it was easier to break your fixation with these things if you weren’t around them. True, you still carried the attachments with you, yes. But sometimes it’s easier to break an attachment, an addiction, when you’re not around it. If you’re an alcoholic, it’s very hard, if you’re in a bar, to not drink. If you’re away from liquor, it’s easier. Then eventually, if you overcome that particular inclination, then you can go to a bar and have a glass of milk and not be affected. But initially it’s easier to break with separation.

In the olden times, in other cycles, in the previous three cycles of existence, in this particular creation, there was more renunciation. However, in this cycle renunciation is not the way. In this fourth section of the creation, the final one, the way is to live in the world but to be unaffected, be unattached. It’s actually been that way really in almost the last two [cycles].

That’s why I say it really doesn’t matter whether you have relationships, whether you’re celibate or not, whether you work, whether you make a lot of money, whether you’re famous, whether you’re infamous—these things don’t matter. Now, the only reason I can say that to you, as a spiritual teacher, as a spiritual master, is with the assumption that they don’t matter because your attention is fully engrossed in the consciousness of eternity. Therefore these things have little effect. They have a tremendous effect if your consciousness is not absorbed in eternity.

I’m suggesting that there are two ways to look at it. One way, in terms of self-realization, is that everything counts a great deal. The condition of your body, the condition of your mind, the types of emotions you feel, everything counts. Another way is that these things are relatively unimportant. This is what we call tantra. The pairs of opposites are relatively unimportant. What matters is something larger, a bigger picture.

Now, to get to that bigger picture, it’s kind of a Catch-22. You have to work your way through the levels to some extent. It does matter what you think and feel, how your body feels. But then eventually we go beyond it all—beyond light, beyond darkness, beyond karma and dharma—to absorption. When you’re fully absorbed, which is an enlightened person, it really doesn’t matter what you do anymore.

This is what the Zen masters always had fun with and used to confuse the heck out of the local people. You know, the Zen master would come into town and break all the rules. But he wasn’t breaking the rules. There were no rules. Once he reached the top floor and beyond, once he was absorbed in eternity, then it didn’t really matter what he did in the sense that he was no longer affected by it. He wasn’t even that conscious of what he was doing, his consciousness was so absorbed in eternity, he was so drunk with immortality, that what he did or said no longer created that much of an effect on his consciousness. However, for a person who has not attained that level, who is still bound by karma, karma hurts or karma liberates. But for a person who’s gone beyond all of that, it doesn’t matter. You’re no longer affected by the gravitational pull. Someone might observe your body and say that it is, but from your point of view you don’t have a body anymore. Your body is light.

ॐ

Think of karma, then, not as action. Action is a result of karma, not the other way around. That is to say, what you do is determined by your awareness, and as your awareness changes, what you do will change. Your awareness is karma. Your awareness is created not by what you do but by how you are. If you meditate, if your heart is open, if you think of nothing but eternity or as much as you can, if that’s your concern, then your spirit opens, it evolves. You change freeways.

It is possible, if your attention is pure, if you care for nothing but light and truth, to not just change within a level but to change full levels, to go all the way to enlightenment in a lifetime—again, not from the very beginning, but from quite a ways. If you work with an enlightened teacher and if you care for nothing but truth, you can do this. Such people are rare. I keep looking. But such people are rare. It can be done, but it’s not a strain when you do it. It’s a natural inclination. It’s fun. That’s going beyond karma and going beyond the lower dharma, which is right or wrong.

The lower dharma—there’s left and right, right or wrong, good and bad, and there are these things. There are laws in countries that must be followed. But then there’s something beyond all of that. We tear the picture away and we find that there was something else on the other side. And that’s the higher dharma, which of course there are no words for. That’s what you will become engrossed in, in the superconscious.

Some thoughts on karma and dharma on a windy afternoon in March.