Today is March 30th. It’s around 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I’m on the Big Island of Hawaii, and I’m pulled off to the side of the road at around three thousand feet. I’m going to roll up the window here ’cause it’s getting a little loud.

There’s a lot of traffic on this particular road, but it’s a power place. Beneath me I see the island stretching out. The sun will probably be setting in about an hour. I’m facing the direction of the volcano Mauna Kea. It’s obscured by a heavy cloud cover. Behind me is Mauna Loa—the twin peaks of the Big Island.

And today I’d like to talk to you about making yourself available to energy, to power.

You’ve decided to look for power, to look for light, to look for truth. So now you’ve started on your journey. But there are some things that you need to consider. The first is to be strategic. The second is to be earnest, and the third is not to give a damn. They really all go together.

What is power anyway? What is energy? What is light? What is the thing that we seek? It’s awareness.

Awareness is everything. Our awareness shapes the world. And if you control awareness, you control the world.

Awareness is not just the sense of seeing in time. Awareness is the very fabric that existence is made up of.

People have varying degrees of awareness depending upon their level of evolution—what they’ve done in their other lifetimes, how much of that has come forward, how much of that is still being held within. They have awareness of the world as it has been taught to them.

Everybody sees life in their own terms. Our awareness is colored, of course, by moods, mood swings, emotions, feelings—feeling good, feeling bad emotionally. The body colors our awareness, the body awareness—pleasure, pain, sickness, health, fatigue, feeling energetic. Awareness, of course, is very, very influenced by our desires. We desire to become something, we desire to have something or we desire to avoid something. Awareness is modified by all these things.

But what is awareness? Aside from all these modifications, what is it that is aware in us? Who is it who is listening to this tape? Who is it who is speaking these words? Does the world exist without us? What is the “us”? It’s awareness.

Awareness is really not a simple thing. It’s very, very complex. As we progress through life, we move through different states of attention, different states of awareness.

And we, in a sense, become those states of attention. When you were five or six or seven years old, you had a certain state of awareness or attention, and that for you was the whole world. That was your world. Everything that you experienced and felt was modified.

Awareness is the screen on which the movie of life is projected.

Awareness is also the viewer.

Now, here’s an interesting point. Awareness becomes aware of itself. Awareness perceives itself, but not always completely. Awareness can think of itself, feel itself, speculate about itself, correctly or incorrectly. It depends on what level or gradient of awareness we’re dealing with.

You’re aware. You’re aware that you’re seeking power, you’re seeking energy. And it’s been my experience as one who has sought awareness and continues to do so, that in the beginning, at least, awareness is something that appears to be outside of us.

We have the sense that we will be aware when we have traveled, when we have experienced something, when we’ve met someone, when we’ve interacted with something or someone.

But awareness really is within. Not within the body, certainly—it’s within itself. Awareness is itself. And the way into awareness, well, it’s the way into anything and everything, since anything and everything is awareness.

Did you know that everything has awareness? Rocks have awareness. Plants have awareness. Both sentient and insentient forms of beings, both living and what we would call non-living—everything is pulsing energy, pulsing life. But what we see is not all there is. There’s a curtain that needs to be parted, and that is the curtain of temporal awareness.

Temporal awareness is the awareness of time and space. Or we could say it’s the awareness that perceives that there is time and space, that there’s matter and that there’s energy, that there’s yesterday, today and tomorrow. That’s temporal awareness.

Eternal awareness is nirvana, of course.

Eternal awareness means nothing—no way to express it—that which would conceive or perceive of anything is washed away in the clear light of reality, in nirvana.

So nirvana really doesn’t have awareness as we know it.

Nirvana’s almost a misnomer in the sense that as soon as we hear a word, as soon as we name it, we get an idea as to what it must be like or not like. And that confuses everything.

The awareness that you have right now—how did it come to be? Where did it come from? Are you happy with it? Would you like to modify it, change it, shift it around? If you’re listening, I assume that you want to modify it and shift it—for variety, if nothing else, if not for truth, for power, to become what you’re capable of being, to be the sun and beyond the sun, to be the moon and beyond the moon. To be all. Yet all awareness is not really meant for human beings.

Think of it in terms of rings of power, rings of awareness.

The first ring of awareness is the ring of temporal awareness.

Now actually, when we’re born, this ring doesn’t exist yet.

When we first come into the world, we’re in a second ring, what I refer to as the second attention—a very fluid awareness that has no boundaries.

The baby isn’t aware of forward and back or inside and out. Yet it is awareness—pure, undifferentiated awareness, in a way.

But the baby’s awareness is conditioned by experience. Heat, cold, sensations, comfort, discomfort, love, anger, the energies it feels around different people modify that baby’s awareness.

Language, customs, traditions, social values, everything that we’re taught modifies the awareness and creates a second ring of awareness, which is the first attention.

That’s temporal awareness.

The first attention is intended to aid us in life. It protects us. It enables us to cross the street, make a business decision, pick out a card for somebody’s birthday, write a book, work at a job. It’s the awareness of interpretation, of judgment, decision, weighing, pondering.

The problem is that the first attention, as we grow older, becomes so strong that it blocks out the second attention.

That doesn’t really have to be. But it occurs in our world because the people of our world are scared to death … of life.

And they’re even more scared of death—death not simply meaning the cessation of physical life, but anything that lies beyond the boundary of what we would call the normal.

But what’s normal? I mean, what is sane, anyway? Sanity is just an agreement.

You and I are on an island together. And we’re going to sit down and we’re going to have a discussion and we’re going to come to terms, and we’re going to decide what is rational and what is irrational, what is sane and what is insane.

So for us, if someone spends hours gazing at the coconut tree that’s on the island and worshiping it, we would say they’re absolutely mishuganeh—they’re crazy. Someone else on another island, two other people, see that the coconut tree is God and they worship it. And anyone who doesn’t worship that tree is obviously crazy.

Sanity. Insanity. Well, I suppose we could say that sanity is the ability to function within a social structure or social group, and insanity is the inability to perceive and follow the rules of a particular group, to not agree with them or to be unaware of them.

Insanity simply really means that a person sees in other planes of consciousness.

There are no hallucinations.

There are only different forms of reality.

Some appear to be pleasant, some unpleasant, depending upon our values of interpretation. What does all this add up to? Well, if you get out your calculator for a second, we’ll figure it out. That’s the first attention. The first attention wants to add it up, divide it, multiply it.

I’m sitting up here now, looking in the direction of the volcano and the power is shifting. The luminous lines of energy that surround the Hawaiian Islands are moving and shifting now. I’m in the second attention.

From the point of view of the first attention, I couldn’t see this. I would just see land, water, sky.

But in the second attention I blend with that awareness. I move freely into the astral worlds.

In the first attention, Hawaii is a series of islands—little dots out in the middle of the South Pacific, categorically owned by the United States, a place where people live, vacation. It has a history. Another race once inhabited it, and now they’ve been mostly reduced to selling beads and trinkets, like the American Indians on the mainland.

I won’t see too much of Hawaii if I look with my first attention, will I? Resorts, a few houses, beaches, five or six islands.

Ah, but when I’m in the second attention, when I stop looking through eyes that have been formed for me by others, I see something else. I see power. I see one of the clearest spots on earth.

These islands are located around a series of inter-dimensional vortexes. Places of power. Places where it’s very easy to step from one world into another.

And just sitting here talking to you, I walk from one world into another. Within milliseconds I shift through thousands of planes of reality. Seeing and experiencing them? No, not really. Being each one. For a moment, I am that awareness. Then I am another awareness and then another awareness. It’s easier to do that here.

That’s why it’s good to visit Hawaii if you’re seeking power. You don’t really need to live here. Just to come over for a week is enough. Switzerland is another spot like this. It’s very similar. These are the two clearest spots—Switzerland and Hawaii. Each opens up into different worlds, different planes of existence.

The lines of luminosity here, if you could see them in the subtle physical, stretch from island to island.

Yet each island’s lines are a different color, and they’re kind of unique. The energy moves in a circular form, usually counterclockwise around the islands, and then there are vortexes of energy above and below the islands.

And as you’re here on your stay, if you meditate without trying too hard, you’ll find it’s very easy to be pulled up into these vortexes.

And you’ll spin, you’ll dance in them.

It’s a dreaming vortex. A dreaming vortex is a place where it’s easy to change. Because as we all know life is just a dream, yes?

But sometimes we get in a dream and it goes on, and on, and on, and it’s not always a really exciting dream. So you’ve come to a dreaming vortex to step from one dream into another, from one world into another—to change, in other words.

If you’ve been living on the mainland or in Europe or Asia or wherever, and you’ve been leading a tight life—you’ve been meditating; gradually refining your life, tightening it up; eliminating the places, the people, the events that cause you to lose power; becoming more humble, friendlier; developing a sense of humor; learning to still the mind—then when you come to a place like this, you have built up a great deal of personal power, of energy.

Your kundalini is at a high point.

Then if you come here and you just let go—particularly, of course, in the late afternoon or in the evening, or the very early morning—then you’ll find it’s very easy to change.

You won’t go back to the mainland or Europe or Asia. Someone else will. Your old self will have just washed away. Effortlessly.

Well, I don’t know if it was effortless, in that all the time you spent preparing, the way you shaped your life, made it possible. But then when you come to a place of power like this, it appears to be effortless. And in fact, it is.

There are spirits here, forces. They’re very protective and very good and they watch over these islands.

And I must confess, they’re not entirely happy with what they see here, with the way the civilization is moving. But they’re patient. They’ve been here for a long time, and they’ll be here long after human beings have ceased to inhabit the islands.

What can we learn from these forces, from these spirits? What can we learn from Hawaii? Hawaii is not a place; it’s a state of attention.

Oh, if you’re down in Waikiki, on the beach, where the bikinis are hot and the sun is hotter, perhaps you won’t learn too much about power that you couldn’t learn any place else in any other beach.

But if you find a solitary beach, or you come up on top of a mountain, on top of the volcanoes and you sit for a while and you just still your mind, then awareness is all.

Then you can easily move from the first attention into the second attention. Then your being expands beyond the horizon of this world.

There’re so many worlds beyond this world.

And as I’ve said before, we have the first attention—which is the awareness, the functional awareness of the world, which should guide us through life but often asserts itself to such an extent that it cuts us off from what we truly are, from most of our being and our perceptions. The second attention, of course, is that fluid awareness that we slide in and out of, in which we feel and come to know the other dimensional planes. Beyond that is the totality. Enlightenment. We call it enlightenment; it’s a strange word for it. To enter the totality, to return into it, is beyond enlightenment.

So anyway, here I am in Hawaii. Cars are zipping by. There’s a golden streak of light as the sun is getting lower on the horizon now, moving across the water.

And I think of you, sitting there, feeling the power of the island. This is the newest of the islands. It’s still being formed. This is where the volcanoes still erupt.

You’re still being formed. You’re one of the newer islands. You’re still erupting. These eruptions are cataclysmic—smoke, fire, flame. Something spews forth—hot lava. And then it hardens and forms. First it’s just black and dark. Then, over a period of time, it softens. Things begin to grow there. Eventually it turns to white sand or soft earth.

The kundalini is a volcano. The kundalini energy shoots up your spine, and it’s an eruption in your life.

Everything changes. Everything seems to be cataclysmic. Things are in proportion, out of proportion. Your relationships change. Your understandings of life and the world change. Everything shifts.

It’s not something that you should try to control. It’s not something that you can control any more than we can control the volcanoes here.

We can simply watch with awe and admiration. It’s the process of life that’s working within us.

And work within us it does.

You’re looking for awareness. You’re looking for power. And a good search it is. Where will you find it?

You’ll find it first and foremost in your heart—in love. Love is the strongest power in the universe. Love is unity.

There are two forces at work, at play in the universe—unity and diversity. Unity is enlightenment. Diversity is illusion or maya, ignorance.

The more unity a person sees, not simply abstractly conceptualizes, but the more unity that they actually perceive, [then] the more spiritually advanced they are. The less unity they perceive, of course, the more diversity, the less evolved their attention is.

You’ve been a seeker for many lives. You’ve meditated, but now you’re in a world of diversity. You see things through a glass darkly. There’s separation everywhere. You’re separate from your body. You’re separate from your emotions. You’re separate from the people around you. You’re separate from the things that you would like to be or have or achieve.

That’s because you’re in the first attention. You’re in the bardo of separativity.

Above that is the second attention, which is a plane of attention where we really don’t see that things are separate.

We see that everything is connected by luminous strands of light—that life is a matrix of energy, that everything is one, and beyond that, of course, is the totality, where even concepts like unity are a dime a dozen. [Rama laughs.]

So then, your journey is to unity. And you need to think more about unity and focus on it. Now, what is unity?

Unity means strength through oneness. United we stand, divided we’re in big trouble.

There aren’t that many evolved people on the Earth. They’ve got to stick together. If we don’t stick together, if we don’t make a ring of power, then it’s very easy for the forces of diversity to attack us, to keep us down.

When we’re united, no force can interfere with us—because that is the strength of enlightenment. Enlightenment exists in every plane, in every world, any car, any color! Enlightenment is all.

So we could say that, when you step out of enlightenment—you could say “out of grace,” if you’re religious—we step into the world of diversity. We see things as separate.

That’s what the Garden of Eden myth is all about—aside from a preoccupation with snakes that Adam had—he had trouble with snakes. Eve seemed to get along with them pretty well. Make of it what you will.

But there was unity in the garden. Everything was one, in other words. There was harmony.

The garden is the representation of the fruition—no death. You see, there’s no death in enlightenment. But diversity—when our consciousness descended, suddenly the garden wasn’t a garden. It wasn’t paradise.

Hawaii is supposed to be paradise. It’s only paradise if you see its unity. It’s easier to see the unity here. That’s why people call it paradise, not simply because it’s warmer.

They don’t realize that they’re moving through these vortexes of energy here. And it’s easier to see unity here than it is in New York City or in Chicago, L.A., Boston, Detroit, London, Paris, Tokyo, Bombay.

It’s easier to see unity here. The doorway is open. But that doesn’t mean that if you live here you will become enlightened more quickly. Not at all. Actually, it might be slower.

This is a place to come to remember—to remember what unity is.

You see, there’s a terrible tendency in spiritual people, people who meditate, to all want to do their own thing. No one likes groups. Everybody wants to be independent. Everybody wants to assert themselves. No one likes to listen anymore.

Of course, if we just look at nature, we’ll see what happens. We’ve got a big herd of gazelles. A couple of hunting lions, what do they hunt? The one that strays from the pack. It’s an easy one for them to get. That’s why human beings gather together in nations and city-states.

Why do we have trouble in the world? Because people don’t understand unity.

If they understood unity, if they saw that we were all brothers and sisters, that we were all one, there would be no wars, there’d be no violence. There’d be no poor; we’d all be rich [Rama laughs.]

But people are in the bardo. Do you see what I’m saying?

In other words, you will see life and existence according to the plane of attention that you’re in.

• And if you’re in the plane of attention of diversity, then no matter where you are, that’s what you’ll see.

• If you’re in the plane of attention of unity, then no matter where you are, that’s what you’ll see.

The first attention is diversity; the second attention is unity.

And beyond the second attention, of course, is the totality, which is beyond description but that which is most wonderful, most perfect.

Someday you may greet the totality in this lifetime. And if you do, even if you merge with that totality for a short time, then you’ll understand.

So it’s necessary for us to band together.

We’ve seen so much of diversity. In religions we see it. One religion proclaims itself to be the best, and all the others are supposed to be inferior. So religion obviously doesn’t create unity, even just the hierarchies within a singular religion.

So that means that people in religion are still in the first attention.

That’s why we practice what we call mysticism or higher spirituality. Where unity is the theme, rules and regulations really don’t matter. We have a strong first attention because it’s good to function in the world.

But what matters is unity. Unity is the universe. Unity is the world.

How do you go about perceiving unity? I mean, it could just sound like another word to you.

Well, when you stop thought, that’s unity. Thought is diversity.

After you’ve been meditating for some time, you’ll find that you’ll think less, just during the day. You’ll be in more of a unified attention—unified in the sense that you will see and be able to flow freely through the second attention, through all those multiple planes.

Nothing will interfere with that. It’s not something you necessarily seek, it just happens because there’s no obstruction.

That’s unity.

Unity is the recognition of your tremendous power. If you could see how powerful you are, what you are like in other planes of awareness, then you’d realize there’s nothing that can stop you.

Who am I? I’m enlightenment.

I come from a place far, far from here. Far not so much in a geographical sense—it’s a sense of awareness. I come from the plane of unity and the plane of enlightenment.

And I’ve come into this world, into the world of diversity, to talk about unity. And I enjoy diversity. It’s fun. The world is fun.

But unity is eternal. Diversity is transitory. Diversity is the world of death. There’s no death in unity. There’s no death in enlightenment. There’s no suffering. There’s only perfection.

So it’s important to lead a unified life if you’re seeking power. Power is in unity.

And that’s why in the I Ching, the book that is about unity and diversity, we’re told to join an organic fellowship of beings, to unify ourselves with others, if you’re not capable of starting one.

In other words, if you’re not enlightened, if your attention fields don’t exist in all places at all times—of which there are naturally very few people on earth who are in that condition—then what you should do is join together with others who seek unity. That’s what they mean by an organic fellowship.

And you should be with each other, spend physical time with each other. Because that is a symbol of unity, just the fact that you’re spending time together, as opposed to everybody being off doing their own thing. Even on a physical level, that’s unity.

It’s fun to be alone. It’s fun to spend time by yourself because then you can experience a different type of unity—your unity with the cosmos, your unity with all of life—and in silence when you’re out walking in the woods or reading a book or meditating, strolling by the ocean or off on a mountain, whatever it is.

When there’s no one else around, no one else’s thought forms, the mind becomes quiet. No one to distract you. It’s very easy to feel the unity of life, that pulse flowing, and that’s a good thing to do.

But that’s only one type or experience of unity.

The other unity we experience is communal. It’s shared experience.

In other words, don’t think of us as separate beings.

Imagine that we were once one body and it’s been split into millions.

And when we get together, even on a physical level, even on the gross physical level, that suggests unity.

When we sit in the meditation hall together and meditate, when we take a trip together, when we go out to dinner together, whenever you get together with someone else who is drawn to unity, who seeks that eternal perfection, then that is unity itself in action, reflecting all the way down through the physical.

Unity, oneness, is a principle. It is enlightenment. Any movement in that direction is a movement towards enlightenment, and that’s why the heart is always recommended—and love.

Because love is the principle of unity. It’s the principle that unites. Love seeks to bring things together—the hexagram of “holding together.” Love unites and joins things.

And so, if you seek unity, if you meditate on the heart, if you meditate on love in other words, you’ll find that suddenly you’ll enter into a different attention field, an attention field in which you see oneness, in which you see unity in even the most simple things—household products, your friends, people who don’t love you, people who hate you.

You can see through the eyes of love. Unity. Love is a step on the way to enlightenment.

The greatest power in the universe is the power of unity, of oneness. All other powers are secondary because it is the only power that outlasts death. Death is the power of separativity; it separates us. But enlightenment is not affected by life or death. It is unity itself, incarnate and disincarnate.

Meditation is a celebration. When we meditate, we’re celebrating unity. We’re celebrating oneness.

And we’re unifying our attention field. When you sit down to meditate and you practice your exercises—gazing, concentration—and you move into meditation, just what are you doing?

Well, ultimately, you’re unifying yourself with the cosmos. That is to say, you’re dropping the first attention that sees everything in division.

It’s like a pair of sunglasses that colors everything. You’re taking them off and seeing life more clearly.

You’re seeing the unity in all of life and all of existence—the perfect oneness. It’s flowing through you.

And the more unified your consciousness is, meaning the less separativity, the more you drop the first attention, [then] the more enlightened you are, the more aware you are.

I’m in Hawaii at 3,000 feet, yet I’m with you. Unity.

And what flows through my heart flows through the hearts of all beings who love—[in] this world and all worlds.

But more than our love of the separate, the worlds in which we see the unity, is our love of the totality—the oneness—which is not a concept but an actual experience.

So when you could be angry with someone and separate yourself from them, don’t do that.

If you have people who are difficult to deal with, be neither attracted nor repulsed.

Go a step higher. Don’t even think about it, and just feel the unity of the cosmos. The cosmos is perfectly united, and the higher the plane of attention, the more you’ll perceive unity.

And one day, of course, as I’ve said before, you’ll go beyond high. You’ll go even beyond what I could call unity and you’ll greet the totality of your being—your everything-ness, your nothingness.

Practice love in little ways. In other words, feel it, live it, let it flow through you. Give yourself a break. Give everybody else a break.

It doesn’t matter. All hell can be breaking loose all around you and inside you. Just be still inside yourself and love.

You don’t even have to love anyone in particular. Just love. Just feel that.

Sit down and meditate in the evening, when you do your evening meditation, and meditate on love. Just let it flow through you until you start to smile.

And your smile grows larger and larger until it’s so big that you don’t even feel it anymore—you don’t feel the body—till all the thoughts stop and there’s nothing but unity, there’s nothing but oneness.

Feel your unity in nature. Take walks in nature. It’s so easy to feel there because the green world is unified.

Feel your unity with members of your own sex. It’s so easy to do.

Women need to feel that more. Men feel that, but women need to feel that more. They’re so competitive with each other because of the way men have structured the world. Men have turned one woman against another because they set up a situation where women have to compete for men, and so sister can’t trust sister.

Forget all that nonsense. Unite with other women.

There’s strength in unity.

Think of the Earth as your body, the sky as your mind, the totality as your soul. Walk in that all day and all night long. Live in that perfect unity of being. Experience it. That’s truth, freedom and perfection.

There’s really nothing else worth living for, is there?

Everything else, the moments in diversity or moments of unhappiness and frustration—unhappy not even because we experience or don’t experience anything in particular, but simply because we know we’re not in that unified condition, which is what we really are and who we really are.

My name is Rama. And I love you. Not just on an individual basis but the totality which you represent, and which I serve, which I owe my allegiance to, and which all things are part of.

Join together with those you love, and love more, and add more to the circle. Let the circle grow larger and larger. Unify yourself with beings of like mind.

Don’t be concerned with those who are in diversity.

That’s the experience of the cosmos that the cosmos is having, in and through itself.

Let it happen. Don’t be concerned.

You can see the unity in that if you’re in a high level of attention.

The sun is just about to reach the water now. The clouds are very thick, and there’s a stillness here. I look down and there are no houses, just rolling lava fields, some covered with grass that are older and have worn down a little bit, some in the distance that are black, closer to the shore.

I’m on the Kona Coast and yet I’m with you, and I’m in your heart, and I’m in all places at all times.

I’m always easy to find. Enlightenment is easy to find.

Look within yourself. Look within the things that make you high. Look towards unity, and you’ll always find me there.

I am unity. The oneness of all life. Beyond life and death. Beckoning to you!

So meditate on the oneness. Become it.

And lighten up a little bit and give us all a break. Self-importance, ego, separativity—that’s a yuck!

It’s more fun to be in the circle of power. And when you make a circle of power with those you love, then that circle of power will protect you.

But if you find fault with each other and criticize each other instead of helping each other, well then, now you’ve gone to the consciousness of diversity, and now you’re easy. The lions can pick you off—the lions of diversity.

But if you join together, then you are that principle of unity, you are the principle of enlightenment.

So join together with those who seek eternity, and see the unity in them. Watch the principles of unity acting through them.

Serve them, help them, but look beyond them too, to that which they really are, which is not a human being but the cosmos expressing itself.

Unity. Never leave the body without it.