Today I’d like to talk to you about neutral density—the neutral density of perpetual being—being awareness without being aware of yourself as such.

It’s February 6th, 1985. I’m at around 9,000 feet. Pulled off at the side of the road, surrounded by snow, at a power place in the mountains of Colorado, up in the area of the Continental Divide. Every once in a while, a car whizzes past and then disappears around the bend as if it had never been.

The neutral density of being is the acceptance of your own immortality, your awareness of awareness.

One of the problems that you will probably come up against in self-discovery at a certain point, or maybe at several repetitive times, is role-playing.

Now, role-playing is something that you encounter first when you begin to meditate, when you begin to learn about awareness in new ways and you see or realize that you’ve been playing a series of roles all your life, that the world is not what it appears to be and that we’ve been taught to perceive in specific ways.

Each of these methods of perception, or perceptual modalities, defines life.

Our parents give us a series of them. Our school system, books we read, television programs, our encounters with other children growing up or with adults, experiences we have within our own mind, feeling our body perceptions—desires, pain, sensations of comfort and discomfort—all of these things paint a description for us of the world.

But as we learn in self-discovery, the world is not, of course, what it appears to be.

The world is awareness, endless awareness.

And there are rings of awareness, circles of awareness that we enter into for a period of time. You’ll experience a type of awareness, a circle of awareness, and then pass on to another and to another.

As small children the circle of our awareness is an open circle. It’s not a binding circle. It’s not something that stays with us all of the time. It’s a circle that leads to other circles—

• the numinous ring of awareness.

But as we appear to grow older the circles become constricting; they’re binding.

The circle of awareness is closed.

We can’t seem to get around to the other side without going back to where we’ve been. Everything’s the same wherever we go. It isn’t—life isn’t—the feeling that you’ve perceived this before, that you’ve just made love and it was like the other 500 times, that you’ve just eaten dinner and it was like so many forgotten dinners, that you’ve just met someone and they’re just another person, you’ve meditated and it was [just] another meditation.

In nature we tend to open ourselves, the circle opens a little bit because there’s no mind in nature.

It’s the mind, the circle of the mind, the circle of ideas that causes us to believe.

And these beliefs eventually permutate into an interlocking system of awarenesses, which is a role.

Each person plays a role and the role becomes more defined as they grow older.

Now by role, I don’t simply mean father or mother, sister, brother, wife, husband, lover, soldier, scientist, cut-throat, good person, bad person, rich person, poor person, Indian chief.

By role, I mean not so much a socially defined structural way of being

• but the actual method of perception that you employ to look at yourself—

• how you think of yourself,

• how you think of yourself not simply as you define yourself in relation to the rest of the world,

• but how you define the world in relation to yourself.

You see life according to your awareness.

• Everything you see is a reflection of your awareness.

Life isn’t really a specific way. It’s an endless series of rings that we step in and step out of. Each ring has certain parameters and permutations. Each ring houses awarenesses.

• So if I’m in a specific ring and it’s a ring of emotion, then everything I see will be colored by emotion. Everything will move me to a passion, a love, an anger, a disquiet, sorrow, a rapture.

If I’m in the ring of mysticism, everything I’ll see will be imbued with power. Everything will be a manifestation of power. I’ll look at a rock and I’ll see the type of power that it has. I’ll look at a tree and see its living power. Everything will be power.

If I’m in the ring of spirituality, everything will be in the realm of light and stillness. And each thing will have a gradient of stillness, a quotient of light. And that light I will see as a reflection of a universal light, an endless light that is perpetual being, which is God.

In the ring of religion, I’ll relegate all things to higher powers and think of myself as someone who’s insignificant, who’s not particularly capable, but only by the grace of God, some extension—which we call love, the grace of God—I exist, I breathe, I live, I have being, and I will owe my allegiance to that.

If I’m not necessarily religiously oriented but I’m oriented more in the direction of the pure experience of the cosmos without the terminology, then everything will be nirvana, perpetual being—not a sense of God as person or object or thing or even objective correlative of awareness, my awareness—undifferentiated reality. No beginning. No middle. No end. Beyond comprehension, beyond knowledge, yet containing both knowledge and ignorance in all things yet not bound by them.

Each ring promises us something. But the rings turn inside on us. In the beginning when you start to meditate, you’ll see that you’ve been playing a role all your life.

You’ve been playacting.

But the role you’ve been playing has very little to do with yourself, which is why you’re not particularly happy [and] why the energy—the kundalini—doesn’t flow through you very well.

Some people refer to the inability for the kundalini to flow through someone as “blockages,” as if there are specific places in the subtle physical body where there’s some sort of a dam and the kundalini can pass no further.

• It’s really not like that. There are actually places where the kundalini does rest. But the blockages are not in the subtle physical body.

• Rather, the blockages are awareness rings that we put around ourselves to keep the totality of existence at arm’s length.

There’s the sense of not being able to deal with everything, with all of eternity, all of its vastness, its complexity.

So we build a wall around ourselves, a ring of power. This wall is very much like the dikes that they built in Holland to keep the water out—this vast ocean is all around and if we don’t have those dikes, the ocean will just flood us and sweep us away and destroy us.

So we build a dike and the purpose of the dike is to keep chaos—that which is beyond the human form and understanding—away from us and to create a defined area, a sense of definition—the land as opposed to the water—where human life can exist.

Everyone has that ring. To not have that ring is to be enlightened or insane—

• insane, suggesting that a person is in so many different realities that they can’t quite catch up with themselves and so they’ve lost the command of the totality of their being;

• enlightened, meaning that a person is in so many realities that they’ve found themselves and that they are in the command of the totality of their being.

To simply push yourself forward into the unknown, to stretch your awareness endlessly, to just push your mind and your consciousness into the infinite awareness

• does not necessarily engender enlightenment

• because consciousness is very fragile and

• you are made up of a matrix of awareness, of

• very sensitive lines of light that are your being.

And to just throw those awarenesses into that vast cosmos at random can be destructive, in the sense that the fragile organism that you are will be destroyed.

• You will merge back into the totality of absolute being.

• It’s a type of death.

Enlightenment is different than that. Enlightenment is “seeded awareness.”

We plant a seed and it sprouts and grows, and it grows from this world into other worlds and from those worlds into eternity itself. But there’s a sense of growth and development of harmony—the same type of harmony we see reflected in the organic life of plants, in human beings and animals and all structures.

So the role that we play—the role that you play, that you grew up playing, that formed around you—

• was initially there to provide a sense of self, a sense of being,

so that if you’re at a traffic light in your car, you’re not so out there in perpetual being that when the light changes color you’ll have no sense of what color it is or what a car is or what you’re doing there—

• the ability to function in the first level of attention,

the world of time and space, to be here now, in the moment, aware of the moment but not bound by the moment as an idea, to create a description of life that enables you to walk through this world and enjoy it,

• but not a description that’s so tight that it constricts you

• and prevents you from realizing God—eternal awareness—the beauty, the plain old beauty of the moment, of now, this second of your life, which is forever.

So in the early stages of self-discovery you go through a lot of changes. As you’re meditating, as the kundalini begins to circulate a little bit, you begin to break out of the stratified awareness that you’ve had all of your life. The ring that binds you falls away.

And you quickly pick up another ring. It’s a habit that we have. It’s like a snail that abandons its shell to seek another shell. It doesn’t want to be outside of its shell for very long because it’s very vulnerable.

So here we are. You’re listening, I’m talking. I’m at around 9,000 feet and the energy is different here.

The forces are different up here in the Continental Divide, or whenever you reach a very high altitude.

As I’m talking, some of them are gathering around the car; I can see them.

These are beings that live up here because they like it, because the vibratory energies of the Earth are radically different at different altitudes.

A great sense of the commotion of the world, the fwif and fwam, the noise, the thoughts, the thought forms of human beings, which are powerful in their own right, don’t really reach up this high. And even if someone is up here thinking them, they don’t have the power to overcome the neutral density of this area.

You see, the United States is divided into power zones.

That is to say, the eastern part of the country on the eastern side of the Continental Divide is one power sector.

The lines of energy, the magnetic lines of energy, run in specific directions and they run in almost the opposite direction on the western side of the Continental Divide.

The Divide itself is the point where the energy meets. It’s like two rivers merging—at the point of merging there’s a great deal of activity.

The sunset—it’s neither dark nor light—and the sunrise, are the moments of transition.

And moments of transition are a time when the ring of our awareness falls away for a moment and we can see eternity more clearly.

So for me to be here in this moment is to be aware of you, to sense you, to feel who, in what you would call the future, will be listening to my voice—to feel each one of you because the future already exists.

It’s just a ring of awareness. And I step into that ring for a moment so that I can be with you now.

Not with a sense of knowing that Joe or Suzie is listening, but feeling your being—because what’s in a name anyway?

But also to be aware of the beings that are around my car, that are standing here hovering, vibrating, forms of energy and light, drawn by the energy of my body, my awareness. And I celebrate life with them as I’m drawn up here by the energy of their bodies.

Together we’re all part of creation. And they have a ring of awareness as I look at them now and describe them to you—sort of our on-the-spot, man-on-the-spot reportage, Walter Cronkite at the Continental Divide with the astral beings. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen,”—that sort of thing.

And they’re most beautiful, they’re most luminous, the ones that are here now. They have many shapes and sometimes their shape changes constantly. It’s not necessarily fixed. All kinds of colors. It’s just most beautiful. Some are more powerful than others. Some are funny. Some don’t have feelings like you do. No emotions. They hover in worlds of power, of energy. Others are extremely aesthetic. Some are forms that were once human and now they’ve transmuted into something else and have never been part of the human cycle or bardo.

I lead an interesting life.

So the description that you have falls away. It gradually disappears as you meditate and you adopt a new description, which is the description of the world of meditation and self-discovery—different terms and phrases denoting levels of consciousness, planes of attention. The methodologies of self-discovery.

And this ring doesn’t bind quite as tightly. It’s freer because its very essence suggests that it’s only a ring.

But it’s easy to get confused again and create another description, which is the egotistical description of self-discovery in which there’s the apprehension—in other words, you think and feel—that you know more than somebody else. You know more than the waitress who’s serving you coffee just because you can go into some other dimensional planes. Big deal. She’s in other dimensional planes all the time; she just doesn’t know it. We all are. Everyone is everything anyway.

So the spiritual elitism takes over and there’s a sense of superiority, or a sense of goodness takes over.

If you have to choose between one and the other, choose a sense of goodness. But that can be just as binding.

The idea is that suddenly you’re going to become very good, and let’s say you actually do. You have a set idea of what goodness is and you manage to achieve it—a rare accomplishment unless you have a pretty loose idea.

Now you’re good. [Rama chuckles.] Now what are you going to do? You’re stuck with goodness. You’re in more of a mess than you ever figured because now that you’ve become successful at being good, you’ve got to be good all the time. What a drag! You are good. Wonderful.

But you’re not. That’s one aspect of your being. But you’re many more things than just good.

So now if you’re going to be good and be good all the time and be good for everyone—you’re totally selfless, humble, kind, considerate—all of the wonderful qualities. If you’ve managed to polish the stone of the self till it shines and you reach that point, that’s a great achievement.

And now you’re stuck. You’re happy, yes. But you’re stuck. Because there’s a force within you, that kundalini, that wants to break out even beyond goodness, beyond happiness, beyond knowledge.

And that’s to be something that can’t be perceived by the mind, to follow a road that doesn’t have a destination.

There’s no sense as you walk along this road of going anyplace or having been anyplace because this road changes constantly. It’s not a road that leads through the hills and you can walk on the road today and tomorrow you’ll walk on it and see the same things.

It’s simply not like that. This is a road that changes every moment. Thousands of realities come in and out of it. In one step you can go through a thousand shifts of attention.

And you can’t ever take that step again. You can turn around and what you saw behind you before is gone; now turn back to where you just were and there’s something else there. You look at yourself and it’s someone else—continuous permutations of the self—not one ring but many.

Now of course, inside the ring there’s nothing, and outside the ring there’s nothing.

• The ring is the idea that you hold of yourself.

So the thought then, oh nobly born, is to be very, very careful

• of not being who you are.

And the litmus test, the way you can tell that it’s happening to you, is very simple.

If after you’ve been meditating for a year or two or more you begin to find that you’re not quite having as much fun with your meditation—your life does not seem to be quite as revolutionary, the Che Guevara element is lacking, you’re not taking your machete of discrimination and hacking down the weeds of knowledge and logic, the should be, have been, was, I will be, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, grammatical forms slashed away; pronouns, pronomeal adverbs slashed away until there’s nothing left—no language, no form, no description, no discussion, no sanity, no insanity—alive, feeling, wondering, shifting, changing, lost, found.

If it’s not like that, it’s getting dull.

And you should do something about it!

But what are you going to do?

[Rama talks in the tone of a whimpering person] “You’re so good now, it’s terrible, I’m so sorry for you. Oh gosh, Suzie, what are you going to do? You’re stuck and there’s no way out. You’re good and you know it.”

[Rama talks in the tone of an icily stern person] “And you’ve let everybody else know it and they’re all walking around hating you because you’re good. They can feel your goodness and they loathe your goodness” [back to normal voice] because everybody knows you’re not really completely good.

Because goodness is just another idea, it’s another abstraction. And you’re stuck and you’re a pompous ass; even though you’re good, you can be a pompous ass.

Take it from one who’s been there.

Goodness is disgusting. So is its opposite. So then, what’s a mother to do? I mean what can you do in a situation like this?

You’re up here in the Continental Divide and the beings are zooming around you and the sun is setting and the snow is everywhere. And at the same time you’re with someone in some distant future who’s listening to your voice, understanding exactly what they’re going through.

Well, what you can do is offer hope.

See?

Noah’s out there and it rained a lot. He’s out there. He’s got all these animals on the ark, right? So he takes a bird. He says, “Listen, dove, go out there and, you know, see if you can find anything out there.” The bird goes out there and cruises around.

He comes back with a McDonald’s wrapper and they know they’re safe. There’s a McDonald’s out there. The waters have receded and they’re doing good business. [Rama laughs.] So you want to be enlightened, hey? Are you willing to pay the price?

The doorway is everywhere and the price is your life.

Everything in it, every moment, every state of attention, everything that you are, everything that you dream—and being willing to throw it away constantly—all your self-importance, all your knowledge, all your ignorance, all your ideas.

And of course, the further you get in your self-discovery and the more wonderful you are, and the more you know the spiritual books and you read them, and after a while it’s actually getting boring reading the Bhagavad-Gita or The Way Of Life or whatever it may be, because you’ve read it so many times.

How could you have ever read it before since you never even existed until this second as this current form? If you’re reading it again—dull, dull, dull!

Same old meditations? Same old kundalini? Same old tantra? Dull, dull, dull!

What are you going to do to break it up?

You’ve got to start over and be a perpetual beginner. That’s the safest—to be a perpetual beginner, to find yourself a newness, to define yourself as newness, to run up the flag and walk away and leave and let it be on its own.

To leave everyone you know, and more importantly, to leave everyone who knows you.

We are prisoners of the thoughts of others. Thoughts have power.

Your friends, your loved ones, those who love you, those who could care less but who know you, who you’ve been too accessible to, you’ve let them inside your life.

[Rama talks in the tone of a whimpering person] “You’ve shared your emotions, your good feelings. Oh gosh, you’re so swell.” [Back to normal voice.] You’ve just let everybody see your pantyhose. How wonderful.

And now everybody knows all there is to know about you or about the ring that you’re bound in, and they can apply pressure to it on various sides. They can hold you in your thoughts.

Your own ideas when shared with others become your undoing, in a sense, because then after awhile, they see you the way you see yourself and they hold that image in their thoughts and minds, and they apply it and it becomes stronger. It strangles you.

Leave everybody you know. Don’t see them. Anyone who knows you absolutely well, leave them. Oh, you may see them, but leave them.

Inside, let go.

See people who don’t know you well and don’t do it again.

Become a mystery to yourself because if you know what you’re going to do tomorrow, if you know how you’re going to make the bed, if you know the kinds of clothes that you’ll buy the next time you go shopping and you definitely know what you won’t buy, if you think yourself beautiful or unbeautiful, if you are wed or unwed, if all these things are so apparent, then you are so stuck in a boring life.

And everywhere you turn you see reflections of your own boredom.

Life is never boring. Only you are boring.

You are boring because you don’t live dangerously. You’re not willing to live in eternal attention.

You’re too lazy. You’re not lazy. Look how much energy you have to do all the things that you do. You’ve never been lazy. No one’s lazy. What we would call the laziest person on earth expends a tremendous amount of energy to not do things. So there are no excuses except the ones that are boring.

Everything is life. Everything is energy. Everything is consciousness.

So you’ve got to let go.

And stop playing a role, even now that you may have adopted a good role—this is what I’m suggesting.

We broke out of the old ones. Wonderful. And now we’ve all been meditating together for some years and we’ve got new roles. I’m a spiritual teacher. You’re a spiritual aspirant. And the role of the spiritual teacher can be as deadly a trap as the role of spiritual aspirant. The role of the enlightened one can be as much of a trap.

And you say, “Well how can, how can, how can?” I don’t know, but it can be. Who says it can’t be? Who says anything is anyway, anyhow? Who are these people who keep telling us everything is this way or that way? Who wrote all those books? How do you know they’re right? Have you experienced it yourself?

Why can’t something be and not be at the same time? I see it all the time. I live in a world of constant, changeless, endless confusion. It’s wonderful—the redolent disorder of life, which is perpetual, perfect being. Uniform nirvana. No measurements. No sizes. Nothing ever comes in the mail any more. The box is gone. Nirvana. No address. No forwarding. No zip code. No cellular phones.

So the key to all of this then would seem to be to develop a wonderful sense of humor and a reverence for life. And that’s really about all you need.

That sense of humor keeps you meditating in new ways, and to meditate is to live. Life is meditation. It keeps you changing because you can look at yourself and realize, in all your spiritual advancement or in all your new discovery, how silly you are.

As you hold up your achievements and measure them against eternity, you know they don’t show. Candle to the stars.

Where are you anyway? How did you get here? Why were you born? What is the meaning of life?

Are you in balance? What is your balance? Are you balancing yourself against some arbitrary standard or description?—is my point.

Or are you like, you know, uh gosh man, are you, uh, geez, are you making it up as you go along?

That’s the way to do it. Just make it up as you go along. Because it isn’t really … the script isn’t written.

You just have to get creative and break away from everyone who knows you and everything you know. You know about yourself so well. You know your reactions, your loves, your rights, your wrongs, your ins, your outs. Gee. [Rama laughs.]

But what good is it doing you! What good is it doing you? Are you seeing the rainbows of life still? Have you merged with the stillness? What good is it all doing you?

Don’t hold on to these wonderful things. They’re not so wonderful.

My judo teacher used to explain that whenever you grab someone and hold them to throw them, at the moment you do that, of course, you’ve just put yourself in a perfect position to be thrown. Because once you’re holding on, that point of pressure, that point of attachment, can be used for your own demise.

So you should be very selective as to what you grab on to, and know that the circuit always runs two ways.

Life is perpetual beauty. Try not to grab on to too many things.

Remember that outside of time, outside of space, outside of duality, which are just ideas—and even the idea of the ideas themselves is just another idea—but still, there is something.

And that something is wonderful. Absolutely wonderful beyond understanding and that is the universe, the eternal universe. It’s not just stars, planets, quasars, black holes and McDonald’s hamburger stands.

It’s endless light. It’s awareness.

The universe is actually alive. It’s intelligence—an intelligence that so far surpasses anything that has yet been seen or dreamed or imagined, and you enter into that intelligence. You are it. You’re a reflection of it.

But to see it all, to be it, to be that totality, that’s what attracts a few of us to perpetually go forward into it.

And it’s neither moral nor amoral, good nor bad. It’s not an achievement. It’s just what you’re drawn to.

We’re drawn back to the sea of eternity, and along the way, there are places you can get stuck.

You’re going down the river of life and there are little sandbars you can get your boat hung up on.

Or if you choose, you can stop at any point and get off the boat and walk around and see things. Then you get back. You know, it’s Huck Finn and Jim headed down that Mississippi River, seeing life. Going into one town and having an experience. Getting back on the boat.

And they’re happiest on that boat, cruising down the river looking up at the stars at night.

But then again, part of us always wants to get off and to see and experience different sides of life … because everything we see is what we are.

So be careful of the trap of selfhood, be it the ultra-boring mundane selfhood, or the selfhood of goodness, the selfhood of spiritual awareness and achievement.

Be neither attracted nor repulsed, nor nebulous, nor advanced.

Beyond all these ideas and goals is perpetual beauty. To know that is to be free. And to be free of that is to know much more.

That which appears to be empty is full, and that which is full is never empty.

To meditate is easy. Stop your thoughts. Don’t try and meditate in a specific way. Any way will do, and use any way. But don’t try too hard.

Look beyond the thoughts, between them. Listen to the sounds around yourself.

• Sit, close your eyes, keep the back straight, be comfortable and listen.

• The birds are singing. The cars are passing by. Life is passing us by.

• Listen.

Don’t listen to your mind talking, no matter what it says.

• It’s just a ring that keeps revolving around and you won’t hear anything you haven’t heard. It’s an old tape played all too often. We’ve worn it out.

Listen to the silence and allow yourself to expand into it.

• Don’t worry about how.

• Something will show you.

• A light spirit will come to you and show you.

Something’s leading you right now. It always has been. You’ve sensed it all your life. Trust the force—it will always be with you. Trust. Trust life.

Meditate each day for an hour or two or three, whatever’s comfortable, and be absorbed.

And you’ll grow to love those silent moments—those silent eternities, as you will dissolve in and out of the clear light of reality. You’ll merge with all that has been, all that will be. You’ll be the play of existence, and you’ll see your thoughts parading before you sometimes—your frustrations, your desires. Be neither attracted nor repulsed.

Wave at them as they go by—go ahead, wave. Wish them well on their journey.

But know that you are not of them, and you are not in them.

They were just a ring that formed for a while, and after a while you believed that the ring was part of your own being, part of your own flesh. Let them go. A new ring will form. Then let that go—and so on and so forth.

Stepping from ring to ring, from wonder into wonder, existence opens.¹

Meditate. Don’t think too well of yourself nor too poorly. Help out those you can without thinking that you’re too helpful. Avoid the trap of goodness.

And avoid the trap of being trapped, of thinking that you’re trapped because that’s just an idea. You’re not trapped. You’re living energy.

You’re perpetual perfect being, you wonderful thing you! God, it’s disgusting. I can’t even be around you. You’re so ecstatic!

Let go more. Hold on less. What’s there to hold on to anyway? Remember when you hold on, you get thrown—an interesting experience.

Don’t tell everyone what you do, what you feel, what you think, what you wear.

Just be, and you will find what you’ve always known is there.

The light of eternity will be your constant companion. Perpetual being. Heck, you can do it. Of course you can. Others have done it before you without trying very hard.

It’s not necessarily hard to be enlightened. It’s just hard not to be a jerk, that’s all.

It’s hard not to get stuck in your ideas of how horrible you are or how wonderful you are. You’re not either. You’re neither horrible nor wonderful.

You’re a being of light composed of cells of light all joined together in a matrix.

And it’s neither good nor bad. These ideas that zip through your mind are just formations of energy, ways of seeing yourself—they’re rings. But they’re not you.

Come now. Let’s not be so unsophisticated. I mean spiritual chic is just knowing that you’re clear light, and of course you want to be chic.

To think that you’re good or bad, or moral or immoral, [Rama talks in the tone of a person whimpering] ”I’m a failure. I can’t do it. I can’t meditate.” [Rama talks in the tone of a happy person] “I’m so good.”

Or, [Rama returns to whimpering tone] ”I have to work so hard for others all the time because they just, they need me. They need me out there because I’m gonna save the world, and I’m good. I’m so good.”

[Back to normal voice.] This is trash in the sense that it’s boring. It’s not chic. It’s not hip.

Spiritual chic, [Rama laughs] what is it? It’s to be free, of course! It’s to be free! Who wants to be stuck in being religious and being spiritual either?

That’s not freedom. You’ve just exchanged handcuffs for leg irons—which doesn’t mean that you should avoid enlightenment.

Enlightenment has nothing to do with being spiritual.

Being spiritual is just an idea—it’s another ring.

So is being occult, being powerful. It’s all the same.

Frogs are jumping back and forth in the pond. It’s snowing. The sun is setting. The reeds are growing. People are dying. People are being born.

No way. I don’t believe it for a second.

There’s only freedom. Being alive.

Don’t worry about your future lives, past lives. Button your shirt. Stand up straight. Go out and do something. Go out and have some fun. Be alive, change, dissolve, explode. Touch life and be touched by it. But don’t grab it because you’ll be grabbed by it. And life can really grab you.

And when you die, at the moment of your death, remember that we once had a conversation. You had a friend—from another world—who dropped by to say that there is a pathway that does lead between the worlds.

Now as the sun goes over the mountain here and we enter that twilight time, there is a path that does lead beyond birth and death, and to go beyond birth and death, actually, you go through it.

It’s a very interesting path. It changes without any sense of it changing because there’s no such idea, I suppose. It just is. When the totality is the totality then there’s no totality.

And the friend, anyway, the friend came by and said, “Look, so you die, big deal. You’re not really dying. You’re just stepping out of the bound circle for a while. Just keep going and don’t look back.”

Just keep going. Don’t look back. Remember what happened to Orpheus. Don’t look back.

Once you get out of here, don’t look back. Don’t worry. Something will guide you. But if you look back, you’ll come back.

You know, as you leave Sodom and Gomorrah, right, don’t look back. Remember what happened to Lot’s wife? Salt city. [Rama laughs.]

Don’t look back. We’re told again and again in varying ways, don’t look back. Keep going. Keep going. I’ll see you there. I’ll be waiting for you at that big McDonald’s in the sky where all the burgers are made of soy and the fries are never greasy.

Nirvana. Never a cover charge.

See you there. Good luck.