Today is April the 25th, and it’s around twenty-five of six in the early evening. I’m at around 6,000 feet at Lake Tahoe, and today I’m going to talk to you about magic.

I’m parked here facing the lake on a small beach, and there’s some early evening commuter rush hour traffic behind me. Not too much, since this is an interesting time of year here, in-between the ski season and the beach season so it’s not very crowded—it’s a good time to come here.

In the distance I see the snow-covered mountain peaks, and on the other side of the lake the waves are rolling in. Tahoe is more like an ocean, I think, than a lake—an ocean that’s 6,000 feet above sea level.

Magic. What’s magic? Life is magic. Death is magic. Time is magic, space.

Magic is the ability to perceive beyond the surface. We say that something is magical because it’s not logical. It doesn’t fit into the ordered scheme of things, which is what makes it worthwhile, because we all know that everything that fits in the ordered scheme of things can drive us completely up the wall after a while. So magic really has nothing to do with that at all.

Magic is our awareness of the timelessness of time—real magic, that is. Oh, there is the magician who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, pulls rabbits out of hats, hats out of chipmunks [Rama laughs], does all kinds of great things through the sleight of hand, the quick blurred movement, through distraction.

But there’s another kind of magic, which is really a science. It is the ability to move awareness and to do literally anything with it.

What can you do with awareness? You can change yourself, you can change someone else, you can change the universe, anything.

But in order to really practice magic, you need to study in the school of awareness for a while.

The school of awareness is the school of mysticism.

Mysticism is the experience of eternity, of that which lies beyond the physical phenomenal experience. Not that that is even what it appears to be.

Taking a walk isn’t really taking a walk, taking a shower isn’t taking a shower, living isn’t living, dying isn’t dying. It only appears to be that way because of the centering of our awareness.

So the school of awareness is really perception. Everything is perception. And perception, as you know, is limited by the way that you think. When I say “think,” I don’t simply mean word thoughts—ideas that come through your mind in terms of language—I am speaking, and you’re hearing my voice.

But there’s also a language that takes place not only in the conscious mind but in the subconscious. It is a language of categorization—always trying to fit your experiences into a little box, to make everything work out, to make everything seem uniform.

Now, magic is not categorical. It is not really uniform. That’s what makes it interesting. It is beyond … logic. It is beyond time and space.

And in order to practice magic, of course, you need only one thing—awareness, what we might call power.

Now, everybody has a certain degree of awareness. Everyone is awareness. But people are aware of so little.

Within you there are thousands of rings of luminosity, bands, and each one is a universe of perception. In the average person’s lifetime, they might just open up two or three, maybe only four of those bands.

Those bands are keys to doorways that lead to other universes, other understandings of life, other experiences, other selves; we have other selves.

You see, that’s the magic, isn’t it now?

We have other selves that are not of this world, of this time, of this cycle.

We are ancient beings, evolving forward and backwards simultaneously. We are not structured in time. That only appears to be to the uneducated eye, or the over-educated eye.

We are eternal travelers, eternal voyagers—appearing to be here when in fact we are somewhere else.

Magic has a lot to do with parallel realities.

Parallel realities are everywhere. They are not necessarily parallel, sometimes they’re tandem. Sometimes they’re not in any uniform, geometrical progression. Something beyond that progression, that is the totality.

The totality is our existence. All magic comes from the totality. And your ability to peruse the halls of magic, let alone to participate in it, to use it, is really very much dependent upon your ability to experience or open yourself up to different aspects of the totality.

In this world, there are only aspects. Beyond this world then, there is something else.

Beyond all worlds and all conditions, we have the totality—nameless, formless, colorless, odorless, tasteless—complete being, beyond conception.

That’s why I use the word “totality,” not something finite. For me a totality is not finite. It is not a sum total. It is not the end product of the addition of a column of mathematical figures.

If we put five people together, are there really five people? I don’t think so, not in the world of magic.

In the world of magic, there is only one being, reflecting itself in countless forms, playing hide and seek with itself throughout the universes.

Why are those universes there? Why is there life? Why is there death? Search me! Maybe you’ll find an answer.

Magic doesn’t really give us answers. It gives us questions— questions about identity, about the movement of time and space, about the elementals—earth, water, fire, ether.

How are things constructed? How are they put together?

There is a form for everything, kind of a template that exists, not in this world, but in another universe, another world.

When you understand that form, when you’ve seen it, perhaps in dreaming, perhaps in kind of a supra-wakefulness, then you can use that form. You can create through that form, you can become it.

Everything that you see here, in other words, is a reflection of a higher reality.

This particular world is not really a world, it’s a perception that you’re having at the moment. The alteration of your perception will create an alteration of the world. That’s magic.

You can actually alter the world through perception. I’m not saying this just in a subjective sense. Let me give you an example.

If your awareness was strong enough, you can change the fate of a whole world … without ever leaving your room.

The interactions you have with human beings, from now on until the day you die, all of those interactions are controlled by something.

You will meet one person and not another. You’ll shop in one store and have an experience there, and not another. You will feel love towards one person and fear towards another and indifference towards another.

What’s happening? Why is this all taking place?

There is an order—not order in the express sense of a uniformed army marching in perfect cadence, boots-polished order; balanced equations. No.

Celestial order is a perfect disarray. The idea of order, the very concept, is something that we’ve forced upon the universe. There is no such thing.

There is no such thing as mind or matter or spirit.

What exists is existence—undefinable, unapproachable, yet something that you can experience. That’s how you gain power—by experiencing life.

Different powers are gained by different experiences.

So the clever perceiver determines the power they wish to have and molds their experiences accordingly.

If you’re powerful enough you can even determine whom you will meet and whom you will avoid long before.

What will happen in those encounters? Who knows? It wouldn’t be much fun if you knew all of that—you’d just be watching an old video called your life.

Everything happens in dreams. Not the dreams that you have at night.

There is another type of dreaming. That’s the magic. There is another world where things are, if I can use the phrase—I’ll give myself permission, I can — more real than they are here.

More real. What does that mean?

It means flooded awareness—awareness so full that there’s no sense of the particular, where time doesn’t mean anything, where there is no space, individualized being.

There is a flux of existence someplace where everything is prefigured. All these forms, these apparently random forms we see, exist there.

The Earth is the fun house, the big giant mirrors that distort things. You stand in front of one mirror and you look bigger. You stand in front of another one, you look fat; another one, you look skinny; another one, you look like a shrimp.

That is what this world is—it’s a world of mirrors. It is only a world of reflections.

None of this exists.

All important decisions in the universe occur someplace else.

That is the place that you go to in your dreams. That is where your dreams come from, another world.

I’m here at Lake Tahoe. It’s the early evening, but the sunlight is still quite bright. There are shadows across the beach, and the sun is glistening off the snow on top of the peaks in the distance, the Sierras. I’m on the northern side of the lake in Nevada, and there’s magic at 6,000 feet.

You exist someplace else, and when you can contact yourself in that other place, when you can open up a kind of an inter-dimensional phone line between yourself and your various selves, when you become aware of that, that’s when magic begins.

The self that you have here is a kind of a cardboard self that has been colored in. It is only partial. But as you contact your other selves, then you become more real.

There is another world—a world of dreams.

It’s funny because we say that a dream is not real.

If I was to stop somebody, if I was to go stand in front of one of these cars, stop the car, and have the guy roll down the window and look at him with kind of a crazed look in my eye, like I’d just come down from the mountains where I’d been for too long, [Rama laughs] and I grab the guy, and I say, “Listen! I gotta know—I need to know, what’s real?” [Rama affects a crazed voice]

Meanwhile, the poor guy’s freaking out! But he figures, ”Maybe, maybe if I just pacify him, I’ll just be able to get out of here. What does he want?”

And I’ve got this gleam in my eye, and I say, “Now look, what—is this real around me, or are the dreams real? Is it real?” And he says, “Oh, of course it’s not real—a dream is not real. This is real. See, look around you. This is real. Dreams aren’t real!” And then I’d say, “Oh.” And then I’d disappear. And he’d be left wondering if it ever happened.

Well, it just happened, didn’t it, in the world of dreams.

Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts. That is how you know it’s the dream.

You’re confused, I can see. You’re confused. You have thought all your life that all this is —that this is a real world. And that when you sleep, and you dream, which is just one type of dreaming, you believe that’s not—I see, I understand. Oh, no wonder you’re confused. Gosh!

You see, what I’ve done is come into your dream. Your life is a dream, is what I’m saying. You just don’t realize it. You are asleep.

You are really someplace else, your body. And I’ve just stepped into your dream for a while.

Now, the funny thing is, there are all these other characters in your dream. The people you see in your life and you’ve known, they’re all in your dream. I realize that. And they don’t realize it’s a dream either.

I’m the only one, or one of a few anyway—the only one who’s talking to you at the moment. I know because I’m awake in the dream.

That’s the art of dreaming, you see, to be awake in the dream. But anyway, that’s the magic. If you’re awake in the dream and you know it’s a dream, you can do anything.

Let me explain it to you in another way.

Let’s say that you—after you listened to this—you put your head down on the pillow and you fall asleep. In your sleep, you’re in a dream. You are in some strange place. Maybe you’re here at Lake Tahoe, maybe you’re in Egypt, maybe you’re in a laundromat, who knows? You are someplace.

And suddenly you’re in a dream, and it’s the usual mish-mash. Suddenly you say to yourself, “By gosh, I’m in a dream.” You wake up and you say, “I know I’m asleep, and that this is a dream.”

Well, when you realize that, then you can do anything, can’t you? Because you can make anything happen in a dream. In a dream you can fly; you can go meet anybody that you want to.

You can create a civilization, a universe, anything you want to do because, of course, the material of the dream, the fabric of the dream world, is pliant. Imagination there, is reality, yes?

But of course if you don’t know that, then you’re just sort of subjected to whatever happens in the dream—not necessarily much fun.

So then, what I’m postulating is that this is a dream. This is the dream we’re in now. But you don’t realize that.

People wonder sometimes, well, why Rama, can you do certain things with energy and light and appearances? Why can you do those things and we can’t do them? Why can you take us out into the desert and make the mountains dissolve and shimmer and, you know, do all the little Rama-esque things that I do?

Why can you do—why can you change our awareness field?—all the so-called miracles, which are not miracles from my point of view.

My answer is obviously that I realize that this is a ridiculous dream I’m in, and since I realize it, I can probably do just about anything I’m in the mood to do.

Because it’s just a dream. The only reason I can do it and you can’t do it, is because I know I’m awake in this dream and I can do these things, but you don’t believe that you can because you’re bound by the dream.

Something like that. It’s a way of trying to explain something that’s basically inexplicable, of course.

That’s magic, you see. The magic is the realization of the dream.

Now, of course there is another plane that you’re not aware of at the moment—at least the part of you that I’m addressing is not aware of—and that is that which is real.

The reality.

And the reality isn’t in just one place or one experience or one time zone. It is not just one dimension.

But it’s a place where everything is real. Not that it’s a place—it could be a place.

Everything there is real. There is nothing but reality.

And that’s where the dream comes from. The dream is the reflection in an interestingly chaotic, yet perfectly harmonious, way of that.

Now, I can tell you’re interested in magic. If you want to know, “Well, how do I do it, how do I, how—?” Well, I’m telling you how, exactly.

Right now you’re standing on one shore. OK, here I am on Lake Tahoe. I’m looking out and I can see the water. Across the water there are these mountains, and there’s another shore. I’m here.

If a fog rolled in right now, I would not be able to see the mountains, and if this was my first experience here at Lake Tahoe, I would not know there were mountains over there, even though there are these huge 12,000 foot mountains over there.

I would be unaware of that. And then when the fog rolls back, I can see the mountains. Voila! They are there!

To practice magic you have to first get a sense that there’s something on the other side—that there is another side. So the first condition is learning how to see.

To see is to experience beyond the self-created shadows of doubt that you are immersed in—to look through time. To be clairvoyant, in other words. To see the other shore.

Now, with that seeing, a kind of magic has begun.

And that seeing occurs, of course, through stopping thought. Thought is the fog. When thought stops in meditation, at any point, when there’s no thought, we see the other shore.

Now, the funniest thing—I’ll tell you the funniest thing—when you see the other shore, if you were to take out a pair of binoculars—it would be very hard to see otherwise—if you’d look, you would see someone waving at you frantically, with a huge grin, on the other shore.

And it would be you. You are waving back at yourself. Finally you managed to get her to wake up a little bit, and you’re waving back at yourself. You managed to penetrate the dream mists, and she’s awake and she’s looking back at you.

I’m referring, of course, to the you on the other shore. This is the one who’s aware, who’s smiling. The one who is just becoming aware, who is looking through the binoculars and doesn’t really believe what she sees—that, I suppose, is the one you call yourself.

When thought stops, the world stops, life stops, death stops, time stops, space stops, and thoughts.

That’s the magic—stopping thought.

Well, I don’t know if it’s—nothing can happen. The dream is so thick. The maya is so thick. There’s no magic as long as there’s all this thought.

So the first condition for the practice of higher magic is the stopping of thought. And the stopping of thought, of course, comes about through practice, through love, self-giving, by learning how to increase awareness—the study, of course, of self-discovery.

Now, stopping thought is only the beginning.

As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked, “The inner life begins with samadhi.” This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person who meditates, that it can begin with samadhi. Because most people consider when they’ve reached samadhi that that’s the end.

Samadhi is the absorption in the Self, the self in the Self.

There are different types of samadhi—Salvikalpa samadhi, Nirvikalpa—different designations of fields of attention far beyond this world.

The average individual spends many, many lifetimes meditating and seeking and chewing bubblegum and doing things like that to attain the experience of samadhi. And so people feel, “Phew! Oh! I’ve made it to samadhi! Boy, this is it! Graduation day!”

Well, then you have to go out and get a job. Or go to graduate school.

So stopping thought is really wonderful [Rama laughs], ecstatic, perfect.

There is nothing to worry about. You spend much too much time worrying. There’s nothing to lose and there’s nothing to gain in a dream—because the dream changes so quickly. Why bother to get stuck in it?

There are just endless reflections in the mirror. Various forms—everything you see around you is yourself. Everyone you see is an extension of yourself—every caterpillar, every butterfly, every metamorphosis is yourself.

You are changing infinitely, and that part of you which is aware of all of this, which gives it life and form, will only be for a while. Metamorphosis, change—something old, something new, something timeless.

So the magic begins just beyond the realm of thought, in that perpetual silence of the void, where all the forms that have ever been or will ever be are there, kind of in a huge bank, a flux.

They float there—everything, all eternities, all possibilities—just float there, in a perfect sea of awareness.

So the art of magic, then, is the transformation of the self. It’s the ability to go into that flux, the totality. To enter into it consciously, and when you’ve entered into it consciously, you reorder.

You see, we’re like an atomic structure.

We’ve got a causal body that’s linked together. The energy strands and bands of our being are linked in a certain way—makes us what we are. It causes us to perceive a certain level of the dream of life.

But you can reorder those. That’s magic, you see.

The being you are now can’t practice a lot of magic, or a lot of the magic that you practice is kind of black magic, a rough magic, an unhappy magic.

But when you throw yourself into the totality, you reorder yourself. This happens when you die.

When you die, your being dissolves and it reorders. It goes back into the totality. And then it comes back again as something new, another form, a more evolved form.

But it’s not necessary to die to do this. You just have to enter into the flux again. That’s the magic because then you will become being and becoming, metamorphosis—the caterpillar or butterfly—is it the same? Is the butterfly an extension of…? No, it’s not.

The butterfly has nothing to do with that caterpillar. Metamorphosis, change in the cocoon—one thing becomes another.

Two dreams come together in a dreaming vortex.

There is a transition from one dream to another.

That’s the interesting point, of course, for the advanced student of existence. Not one form or the other, neither the caterpillar nor the butterfly, but the moment of transformation.

Because at that moment, oh nobly born one, the clear light of reality presents itself—it is possible to slip between the worlds.

The art, I will admit, for the beginner and the intermediate magician, is simply to be able to transform, to change the self at will into something other. And when you understand the body of perception, when you’ve stored enough energy and light and power, you can transform yourself into anything.

The consummate magician is not interested in simply becoming something else, having done that—that’s just changing horses in midstream—but rather to slip through between dreams and to become everything, to merge with the totality.

That’s the consummate art of self-discovery.

Between the dreamer and the dream, there is something. There is no way to describe it. I could refer to it as an opening, but an opening into what?

Lao Tzu says, “From wonder into wonder, existence opens.”

So magic, then. There are different types of magic, aren’t there? It all has to do with perception—the miracle of perception, the miracle of awareness. How aware are you? How aware would you like to be? Would you like to wake in this dream? Would you like to change into other things? To possess powers, to change, to be everything, to be nothing?

There are beings on the other side who will help you. There are beings in between who will attempt to thwart you. There are beings who are completely indifferent. Powerful beings.

Because there are various levels of dream, there are various levels of creation. And some levels of creation are very aware of other levels, and some are oblivious.

Most of the people on our Earth are totally oblivious to the other levels of creation, to the different dimensional planes and the beings that inhabit them.

But you should know that this world is but a fish bowl for some, and you are a fish swimming.

There are beings that look into this world and other worlds and see clearly. Some of those beings are what you would call good, and some are what you would call harmful, negative, evil, and some are indifferent.

They exist in planes of light and fields of perfect attention, and they are relatively unaware of the objective world as you know it, of this dream. They can penetrate it if they choose to, and doubtlessly, in their evolution they have experienced it. But now they just exist in fields of light and fields of perfection, perfect awareness, perfect attention.

How do you tell the good beings from the harmful ones? Well, usually by the kind of hat they wear. Seriously?

By how you feel when you encounter them.

When you encounter a higher being, you’ll feel wonderful. Not just during but afterwards.

Always trust your feelings.

And as evidence of that, as I was speaking those lines, two beautiful geese just flew by in tandem. As you know, the goose is a sign, at least in the I Ching, it’s a symbol of seeking, of the powerful seeker who flies into the infinite and attains different levels of attention.

Who’s doing all this attaining, anyway? Who is the you who is having this experience? Who is dreaming all of this?

That is who you want to get to. Whom you wish to find.

The destructive beings will come to you in your sleep. Sometimes they’ll come to you in the guise of another person. Sometimes they’ll come to you in the guise of a sandwich. No? Well, it could happen. [Rama laughs.]

Why do they want to thwart you? Well, I don’t know. It gets them through the day. Don’t worry about it—just avoid them.

How do you avoid them? I would say, essentially, that inwardly we solicit what we experience.

If something in you wants what they represent, then they will come to you. They will feel a call.

If you only want light, if you only want love, if you only want to experience the limitless awareness of the totality or to practice the happy magic, then they don’t come, really. Or if they do, they don’t stay.

But if there’s some part of you that wants to experience the darker side, then they come. Then they stay.

Even so, it is true that there are beings who come and interfere.

But when you realize who and what you are, they can’t possibly interfere. They only interfere because you think that they’re strong and that you’re weak. When you realize that you are limitless and endless light, then how can they affect you?

How can the little fish swimming in the ocean affect the ocean? They aren’t even noticed. So the trick then is to get into, of course, very high levels of attention, and then they just bounce right off.

How can you cultivate higher beings that exist on the other shore and get them to aid you? Well, the same way that you cultivate the interest of a teacher of self-discovery.

Not by the fact that you have a perfect smile but by the fact that your intent is pure, or that you’ve just stored a tremendous amount of energy. In other words, if you lead a tight life, if you evolve, then you have to draw the higher beings to you. It’s the law of the universe.

So if you put your time into improving yourself instead of proving yourself, if you put your time and energy into meditation, into feeling eternity and to reaching for that other shore, then you’re less and less concerned with the world.

Meaning not that you don’t work or don’t participate in society, but rather, just that your attention is elsewhere. If that’s what matters, and if you practice the practices which I and others describe, or you just learn on your own, to increase your level of awareness—if you keep changing and growing, then they will come.

That’s the promise of eternity to those who seek knowledge—a wonderful promise that’s always fulfilled. Not simply will they come, but knowledge itself will come.

So magic, this rough magic, is the universe that is our lives. We exist unaware of what we are—until the magic comes.

The magic is awareness, and awareness frees us from the dream of life. It brings us to the reality. And there are so many different types of magic. There are so many levels of creation, of evolution.

But the important thing for you is to solidify your life, to play with it—to lose the ego, to become flexible and free, to learn to stop thought, to have compassion for all other beings—because all other beings are you.

To learn to trust life itself because that’s all there is, is life. And to ignore these shadows, these self-important shadows in the dreamscape.

The people and places and events in this world are not real. This is a dream.

The dreamtime is the reality. That’s elsewhere. That is the other shore. And you’re dancing and singing and playing there already.

No matter what tragedy befalls you and no matter what hardship, don’t be concerned with it. It is only a dream. You’re already someplace else, thoroughly enjoying yourself in the cosmos.

And once you connect with that part of yourself, in the stillness, then you’ll be free. Then you can assume any form of creation, no forms, or perhaps slip in between them to the totality.

The sun is almost set, and the shadows are consuming the mountains, as the shadow of our death some day will consume us.

Then a new day will come, and the mountains will be there again, but they won’t be the same mountains—as we won’t be the same. And yet at each moment, if you could be aware of it—there is life and death within us.

And we are being reborn and transformed at every second.

It’s time to step outside of time—by willing it, by loving it, by reaching for it. You are the shadow of your own dreams, and your dreams are real. And I’ve come into your dream to remind you of that.

I, awake in the dream, to remind you to play and rejoice and to celebrate life, and to not fear death. Because all this is more wonderful than it seems. And life is real, and it is eternal. And dreams are real, and dreams come true. So have good dreams.

And if you don’t, they’ll pass. And if you do, they’ll pass.

If you seek knowledge, the promise of knowledge is that you will reach the totality one day.

That will happen to you.

And the greatest wonder of wonders will befall you, to see and dance with your own perfect being—beyond form, beyond body, beyond attention, beyond all of this.

Reality.

So dream wonderful dreams. They’ll come true.

So this is Rama, at 6,000 feet, on a lake that isn’t a lake, in a Tahoe—that is the name of the model, curiously enough—four-wheel-drive Chevy mini-Blazer, that isn’t really a truck, talking without a voice to people that don’t exist.