The Caretaker Personality. Today is the Fifth of November. It’s around 7:30 p.m. I’m sitting here in the middle of eternity, thinking about nirvana. Thinking about reality. Wondering how it all came to be this way.

Who are you? How do you think of yourself, do you think of yourself as a particular person, with a particular view on life? Certain things you believe in, other things you aren’t sure about, other things that you definitely don’t believe in.

How do you feel about sex, money, God, religion, politics, the president.

In other words, are you you because of what you feel and believe? Is that what makes you you? In other words, how do you differentiate yourself from someone else? I mean, what is uniquely you?

Let’s say, for example, that you believe and feel exactly the same way about everything that someone else does.

Are you them? Are they you? Well, you would say, “Probably not.” “No, of course, we just believe the same things, and think the same things, but I’m still me.” Well, what is it that makes you you? “Well, uh, I have a different body.” Well, how do you know that there isn’t one being with two different bodies? Sound ridiculous?

Well, isn’t the whole cosmos, all of eternity, all of the planets and universes and the beings the body of God? The body of existence?

What is it that is life in us? In psychic development, there is an explanation—in a way of speaking—for this.

Advanced perceivers have found that as they have dug deeper and deeper into that which we are, as you gradually take off the layers of clothing, you start with the overcoat which is the outer personality, then you come down to the shirt and pants, or skirt and blouse—which is just the way that you feel about things that are very deep and unspoken—then you get down to the underwear level.

Your deepest and most intimate feelings and intuitions, and then when we take even that off, there you are, naked as can be. What are you?

“Nothing in particular”—advanced perceivers say. You’re nothing in particular, that is to say, that you are composed of and part of all things.

You’re just made up of light, when you go in there all the way. You’re nothing but light.

And the thing that you think of as being yourself, that part of your being is just like clothing. It just comes on and off. Most people wear their clothing for a whole lifetime. And actually they add to their ensemble, and they start out—just like getting dressed.

When you’re very young, and you start out and you put on your first shell personalities, and then gradually they evolve and develop through experiences you have—through conditioning—all kinds of things gradually cause you to be or not be a certain way.

You’re molded by life and your experiences.

If you believe in reincarnation, of course, then you feel that your experiences are not necessarily limited to this lifetime, but that actually your personality or something about you that’s within you has been with you for longer than that. You’ve been you. Or formations of yourself for a long time.

And while no personality exactly repeats itself from one life into another, there are still certain carryovers that occur. Certain parts of us that definitely remain the same. Feelings, intuitions, emotional complexes that carry on from one lifetime to another.

And sometimes those tendencies will come forward more in one lifetime than another. In one lifetime, the shell personality—the personality that you pick up in that particular incarnation—may just dominate for the whole lifetime.

In another lifetime, that shell personality may be almost impossible to get through. The deeper tendencies, be they evolved or not, will just not assert themselves, or they will.

They’ll come through totally at a certain age.

The shell personality will literally burn away, and then the deeper and more complex selves, the structures of those selves from other lifetimes will reassert themselves.

Advanced seers believe that we are not just one type of being. Rather, they believe that we are composed of many different beings, we have many different selves within us.

In other words, when you scrape the surface down, and see what we really are, we’re nothing in particular.

Or you could say we all contain everything. There’s a basic substance that is eternity. It’s consciousness, knowledge, awareness.

You could call it God, or nirvana, or nothing, or anything you want to.

And that basic substance is the Universe.

That substance takes on different forms and formations.

That pure limitless awareness … segments itself into particular frequencies of energy and light and attention.

Psychic development is a process that an individual engages in, in which they gradually work their way through the shell or surface personality that they’ve developed in this life.

The reason that you would do this is because you feel that it’s a limited personality, as any personality is. There are deeper and more developed aspects of your being which this surface personality structure that you’ve evolved in this lifetime is blocking.

A surface personality structure is fine to start our life off with. It gives us a description of the world, we’re able to function as normal human beings in a civilization.

But gradually it has to fall away. So that the more advanced and developed essence of our being can come forward. That’s when we begin to become more knowledgeable, more aware and hopefully funnier! [Rama chuckles.]

The caretaker personality.

Well, if in fact we are all made up of … if you go all the way inside of yourself, past the personality of this life, and let’s say then even past the personalities of other lives which you’ve developed.

And we get all the way down in there. What will we find?

Again, I suggest you’ll find light. Energy. Essence of existence.

And within that essence of existence is everything that you’re looking for.

It’s birthless, it’s deathless, it just doesn’t take on any particular character, yet it has all characters, and contains all things.

It is life. That’s what we are, we are life. We are really all of life. All aspects of it. And it’s quite wonderful when you see and understand that. Not just as an idea, but as a living reality.

Almost all religions point to this ideal. They point to this idea that we are all things, all existence.

Some separate it. Some say, “Well, God is all of that and we can never be all of that.”

But the more advanced religions, more sophisticated religions—particularly the Far Eastern religions—suggest that we are all God.

We are all that substance. That universal attention. And at the moment, we’re not really aware of that.

And psychic development, vis-a-vis self-realization, is that process. But it’s a really complex process, because we’re not just discovering that we are that one undifferentiated substance which is God, or nirvana, or the totality.

Because that substance, on the one hand while being pure and infinite, and free of all conditions and limitations, yet at the same time it creates and houses endless universes, endless dimensional planes, realities beyond counting.

So the substance that is the universe, this universal essence, is not just consciousness.

But it also becomes manifest reality.

Planets, stars, people, flowers, dogs, cats, nonphysical beings, other universes, time, space, other dimensional realities that have nothing that resemble anything in these dimensional realities. Some in which time and space don’t even exist.

All of it. That’s all part of the universal reality too. We can’t separate the form from the formless. The spirit and matter are one. The body and the soul are one. The body may fall away from the soul—the soul being that essence, that substance of the universe—but it too is part of this dream of existence. Its molecules, its atoms are life also.

Life is an inexplicable mystery. God is a jigsaw.

Those individuals who have many, many past lives—uh, usually around 30,000–40,000 lives—are drawn into the study of psychic development and self-discovery.

Up until that point, we don’t know who we are, or what we are, or where we’re going, and gradually we’re drawn deeper and deeper.

We’re drawn to other people who are searching and questing also.

We’re drawn to teachers. But I must say that ultimately everything we do, we do ourselves. That is, a teacher is good, but a teacher cannot possibly bring you the deeper understandings of truth.

A teacher points the way. If you have a powerful teacher, the teacher can shift your attention field, because they have enough personal power to boost you temporarily into altered states of attention.

And when they boost you into these altered states of attention you can see and feel and experience them. That’s what I do.

But then eventually you will return to your normal, everyday attention unless you then practice the methods that the teacher shows you. If you employ those methods as the teacher did, him or herself, then over a period of time you will store enough personal power so you can access those higher dimensional planes, you can get to those deeper selves, or beyond them, to the totality.

That which is beyond explanation. The limitlessness freedom and perfection that is pure being.

Many people make a mistake. They go to a teacher, or guru, and expect that the teacher or guru can do it for them.

They want an authority figure to rebel against, they want someone to love them, to protect them, to answer every possible question, to do all the work for them. No one can do that.

No one can work out your liberation for you. It’s a nice idea. People can help, higher beings can help. But no one can cause you to see the truth, it’s something that you have to see yourself.

In the process of looking for the truth, you become stronger. And there isn’t just one truth. There’s countless smaller truths, eventually leading us up to what we call the truth with a Capital T.

Which is the same to say as, “What is the truth?” Well, it’s the totality, it’s nirvana. Again, we get into that nameless perfection. God, that infinite reality.

We talk about saints, and seers, and gurus, and enlightened beings.

Then we make kind of differentiations to say that, well, one is more evolved, one is less evolved.

I would simply say that the one who can reach all the way into the totality and merge with it is enlightened.

Some can do that for a few seconds, some just do it two or three times in their whole life and it changes them forever, and they talk about it forever. And they become saints and inspired beings who tell others.

Others can go into those realms for hours, days, weeks, months.

The more you step into that realm, every time you dive into the luminous attention fields in the inner worlds, the more you change and transform.

So psychic development is really the technical study of how you do that. And how you deal with the changes that are taking place.

There’s a big swimming pool out in the back yard. It’s like the swimming pool in Cocoon. It’s filled with some wonderful substance. First you just put your toe in. It changes you a little bit. You feel different. Next day, maybe your foot. Eventually you jump in just for a second. When you come out, you’ve changed. You feel better. Everything is clearer.

Life is shinier. You’re seeing more. You begin to realize that you weren’t seeing most of life. You can step back from fear and pain.

You jump in again and you stay in longer and you see that there’s no death. There’s never anything to fear.

Because you see that what you are is something that doesn’t die. It’s not just an idea. But when you move into other dimensional planes, you can actually see your essence, see that it’s eternal, and know that this body is just like clothing that comes and goes.

Naturally, as you progress in psychic development, your lifestyle changes.

You learn that there are things that you can do that cause you to save more energy, so that you can sustain yourself in more levels of attention simultaneously. You can be more of what you are.

There are ways you can lead your life that cause you to lose power. In which case your attention field is very low and limited to the physical.

You learn that there are people who use powers and forces against you.

Some people don’t want to deal with that. They just like to live in a fairytale reality where no one hurts anyone else. But you know, and I know, if you looked around the planet, that’s not true. Visit a prison. Visit a mental institution. Visit a war.

No one ultimately kills anyone, and that luminous, infinite self lives on forever, yes, it’s true. But it can sure crimp your style.

So there are people who can use the powers in other dimensions to limit you. I’m not talking heavy paranoia here. It’s true! Actually, almost everyone uses the power of attention to manipulate each other.

So as you become more aware and more conscious, as you rise up into higher and higher levels and strata of being, as you jump in and out of that pool more frequently, you find that you can see that.

You can see what they’re doing. You can see into those dimensions and prevent anyone from injuring you.

You can also stop yourself from injuring others.

Harmlessness? It saves energy. The energy used to manipulate and dominate others.

The energy used in hating and being jealous, being angry and judging, and all these things is a waste of attention. You need all the attention you have, all the energy, all the consciousness, to open yourself up to those luminous worlds and merge into them.

So that at the end of this life you will merge with the realities and shift yourself significantly so that you can stay in those luminous realities forever.

Or go anywhere you want to, any world. If you have enough power, you can do that. Or come back and be what you’d like.

So the study of psychic development opens us up to worlds that most people don’t even dream exist. They don’t understand life out there. They just live in the senses, in the maya, in the illusion.

You may decide to be different, you may become a voyager.

Again, no one can do it for you. As much as you’d like some all-powerful father or mother figure to come by and just say, “Hey, I’m gonna take care of it for you,” anybody that tells you that is just taking you on a journey that’s not very good.

It’s fun to do things for yourself. That’s independence and freedom.

Yet, associating with beings who are enlightened, or just advanced, will help you. They vibrate at a higher rate. A luminous energy comes forth from them, particularly from someone who’s “way up there” so to speak.

When you meditate with them, you absorb the energy. You feel what it’s like and it helps you in your own journey. And they can teach you a great deal.

But then you have to go put those teachings into effect.

I cannot stress that enough.

I’ve been a teacher for many years, many lifetimes. Even in this lifetime, I’ve taught for 15 years.

And so frequently people have heard what I’ve said, and they’ve watched me use the siddhas, meditate, change their lives, their attention fields, but they have not applied what I have taught. Because there’s just so much energy around me. They ride that energy.

But naturally if I disappear, the energy goes away, and they’re back where they started.

Not exactly, they’ve changed. They’ve seen something, but they don’t know how to get back to it themselves. So it is most important—I’m not a guru—I’m a teacher. Someone who points the way, and can sometimes give you a boost with energy to help get you there.

But you must do it yourself.

The caretaker personality.

In the process of doing it yourself—with help of course, from the Earth, from plants, from higher beings, hey, take help any place you can—but still remember, you have to do it. That’s the fun, that’s what defines you, is the struggle.

You realize that you aren’t anything in particular.

Being not anything in particular is fine, but then again, how do you fill out the form for your next job if you’re no one in particular? How do you talk to people, how do you exist, if you’re just luminous energy?

So in advanced psychic practice, you learn about the caretaker personality.

The caretaker personality is like shopping for clothing.

You were born without a personality. It’s not something that’s intrinsic. You developed one, step by step, and you can also dismantle the one that you have, step by step, and choose another, or choose several—my recommendation.

There are different caretaker personalities for different occasions.

Just as you’ll dress one way to go to work—another way to go to a party, another way if you’re going to go out and work in the back yard, another way if you’re going to go swimming—so there are different ways to appear in the world, and we call these caretaker personalities.

The caretaker personality is a personality that we actually develop and utilize, since the realization is that we aren’t anything in particular. So if I’m not anything in particular, I can therefore take on any personality I want. Use it for as long as it is necessary, and then discard it. Or file it for future use.

Everyone already does that to some extent. You do that. You know that you shift your personality around. At work, you’re a little bit different than you are with your family, than you are with your friends, than you are when you’re alone.

You already do that, but you’re more—at this time—probably modifying the basic personality structure that you have. You’re not just totally changing personalities.

It takes a lot of power to do that, it takes a lot of energy. So if you meditate, and you set up your life properly, so that you draw more energy into yourself, you can do that. You can shift personality structures whenever you want to.

Now this is a little different than schizophrenia, in which you have no control, uh, sort of the multiple personalities, you change back and forth.

Actually what schizophrenia is, are different selves fighting. You know, we have all those selves from all those other lives in there, different personalities. And sometimes a little war goes on between them as they try and get control. Or sometimes a person can be possessed by an entity or a force, and it struggles with the personal form.

So that’s what we call schizophrenia.

And that’s not what I’m speaking of at all.

Rather, a very advanced Tibetan psychology, in which we realize that we are not anything in particular. Therefore, we can be anything. Many different things.

Since we are intrinsically one with all of the universe, we can use any part of the universe, since it is us.

Some basic caretaker personalities are:

The child is a caretaker personality that’s very lovely to use when you deal with meditation. In other words, you become a little child: happy, spontaneous, a good kid.

When you deal with life, the caretaker personality of the warrior is good. You develop a warrior’s personality.

The student is a good caretaker personality to develop.

The sage, the knowledgeable one. This is a caretaker personality that you use after you’ve dwelled in the house of enlightenment for some time.

The caretaker personality.

How do you construct a caretaker personality? A little at a time.

First, a good thing to do is sit down, take out a pen and a piece of paper, and write down: the ways that you are.

Make a list to begin with. Perhaps try it after this tape is over, or when you get a chance, sit down, a little formal writing is always fun, just a list. I’m a great believer in lists, a lot of power in lists.

And write down all the ways you are.

Well, what would those be? How about trying: things that you like and things that you don’t like. Attractions and aversions.

Make a list of things that you like and list them. If they’re foods, types of people, places, all those things—then put down fears, things you don’t like.

Make another list—after your attraction and aversion list—of things that you want to do.

Not so much just things that you’re generally attracted to, but things that you definitely want to experience, before you die. Between now and death.

What is it that you really want to experience? Write it down! Places you might like to go on the planet, experiences you might like to have, list them.

You might even list them, if you want to get techy, in order of preference, those things that are most important, those things that are least.

Write down, now do another category—category four—a percentage of happiness.

Let’s say, how happy are you? Give us a percentage figure. To start with, just generally. How much of the time are you happy, content, at peace, having a good time? 10% of the time? 20, 30, 40, 90? List it. Be honest, it’s just between you and your selves. [Rama chuckles.]

Now, write down the times of day that you are happy.

In other words, let’s do a chart. Morning, afternoon, evening, early morning—if you stay up late, or get up real early. And let’s see what percentage of the time you’re happy or unhappy, during those times.

Does it vary? You might be surprised by what you see.

Make a list of things that you regret having done. And once you’ve made the list, throw it away.

Never regret having done anything.

Life is acting in you and through you at all times, and any experience that you’ve had was definitely on your journey, and you can use that experience if you know how.

You can draw energy from that experience and use it to free yourself from limitations.

There are no bad experiences. There are only poorly handled experiences.

And even if something is poorly handled, if you look back on it, you can learn from it and grow from it. If you have an understanding and patient attitude with yourself.

Now, now that you’ve made that list, let’s take out another piece of paper and make another list.

And that’s of your darker side.

You are interested now in writing down the tendencies and thoughts and feelings that you don’t really like to deal with.

Do you manipulate others? If so, write down who. Whether you do directly or psychically.

Do you hate? Are you angry with others?

What is it that you really want?

Power, domination, control, don’t be afraid to put it down, no one’s going to know but you, and you already know. But you’re trying to draw things out of the psyche from the deeper selves.

Write down the dark side, and write down the light side. Don’t be afraid of either. We’re all a mixture of both.

In psychic development, you simply learn to control the dark side, it has to be controlled, you know. Why? Because it’s sloppy. The dark side wastes energy. It needs to be channeled.

It’s the part of your personality that every once in a while goes on a binge and spends all the money that you’ve worked so hard for, and you have no money.

Those tendencies—when controlled and directed—are good. The energy of the dark side isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, dark [or] light is just a way of talking.

I define the dark side of our being as the inefficient part, the part that wastes energy. I don’t necessarily have a moral or religious point of view here.

And the part that conserves and utilizes energy to extend your awareness, or the awareness of others, I consider the light side.

I’m not doing yin and yang here, by the way. It’s a little more basic.

Now that we’ve listed all that out, OK, that’s who you are, Yay! Now you know! [Rama laughs.] That was easy wasn’t it? Now let’s try something a little bit different.

Let’s think of some different people we could be.

Write down on another piece of paper the kind of person you’d really like to be. List the things that that kind of person would like or wouldn’t like; would do or not do.

That’s one kind of person you can be.

But if that’s the only caretaker personality you evolve, you’ll probably be pretty miserable, because there are other parts of your being that will think that your description is much too idealistic, and they really don’t want to be like that.

So now, let’s do some variance. Let’s write down another personality.

Try the warrior.

If you were to be a real warrior, and just deal with life effectively, let’s list your characteristics—efficiency, courageous.

Write down some situations in your life. Take a situation: going out and looking for a new job. And let’s think of how the warrior would approach that, as opposed to the person you listed before when you wrote down all of your current qualities.

You have to start by visualizing what you want to become. Imagination is a wonderful thing. It’s not just a little creation of the mind that’s hallucinatoric. Of course there are no hallucinations, are there, there are only visions of different realities. Surprise!

But with imagination, one creates all things.

If a person couldn’t imagine a house, it would never be built.

If a person couldn’t imagine anything, nothing would happen, so imagination is a direct power in the inner world.

It takes more than just imagination, then you have to make it work.

But it starts with imagination. Imagination is creating a psychic attention field and focusing on something.

Now, there are those who take these little mind control courses out there who just figure …

[Rama adopts an “aw shucks” voice]

[Normal voice]

Unlikely it will ever happen.

No, instead, it’s necessary to begin with visualization, and then move from visualization to action. But our visualization helps us store the power to then go into action.

So if you want to make a structural change to a new personality, write down the kind of personality you would like to be.

But give yourself a couple of variants. Because otherwise you’ll get too idealistic, and you won’t do it all at once. You’ll get frustrated and give up.

Let’s start with maybe several stages of the evolution of a new caretaker personality: gradual improvements in who you’d like to become, finally working up to some kind of ultimate something or other, which isn’t very ultimate, that’s just the way you see the ultimate at the moment. Once you get up there, you’ll see there are many levels beyond that one.

Then, each day, think of that person. Each morning you should, of course, always meditate and practice some visualizations to clear your mind before the day and store power. And at that time, ponder, or look at that piece of paper and read over the qualities.

And even if you do that for a month or so, every day, just spending a minute or two each morning going over that, without doing anything about it, it’ll start something.

Then you have to do it, then you have to act, and start to make those changes.

If you’re meditating each day, and practicing gazing and visualization exercises, you’ll store more power that will enable you to make these changes.

So the person who just imagines—wants to make the change, and may even know what the change is—but they don’t have enough personal power …

whereas the person who practices psychic development

So that suddenly, and basically, without endless effort, you can make major structural changes—well, that came about because you learned the science of the conservation and creation of energy.

The caretaker personality.

Create a new you. Not just one, but many. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman once said. We are all things.

It’s not necessarily hard to do, to step into those other worlds, those other dimensional planes.

In each dimension, did you know that you’re someone else or something else? Did you know that you exist in multiple levels of attention, as multiple beings?

On this tape, of course, I’m just scratching the surface. The first few levels of psychic development. But you need to go through those before we can get to the next ones.

To see your totality, your infinite selves, stretched across the universe, yet all present.

So many things to be, and yet we’re nothing.

What a riddle, yet how true.

Another favorite way to evolve caretaker personalities, is to watch others. Look at other people and how they set up their lives. Decide which are successful and which are not, according to your definition of success.

And you will find that you will begin—in a good way—to emulate those individuals. If you want to learn how to make a million dollars, spend time around people who have done it.

Not only do you learn the methodology, but you learn the vibrational pitch necessary to do so.

If you want to be a saint, be around the saints and study the lives of the saints.

If you want to develop your attention and learn how to be in multiple dimensions, then observe those who do that.

On a daily basis, our life brings us into contact with many, many beings, all of whom have had countless lifetimes, and they’re not just necessarily the way they appear to be.

Start to probe into people.

As you meditate and practice your gazing exercises, you’ll become more and more psychic and you’ll be able to see beyond the surface, within people.

And you’ll start to understand, on deeper levels, how they work. Examine their personality structures.

In other words, everybody has evolved one—if not more—caretaker personalities already.

There are nothing but caretaker personalities, there is no real personality.

And once you realize that, it’s easy to change; from one personality form to another. It’s fun.

So begin to look at the caretaker personality structures. In other words, don’t view another person as just a person.

They are just a caretaker personality that they have woven in this lifetime, or has been woven for them, that they wear. They may have several.

And inside, there’s something else entirely, it’s just a cover.

And probe even deeper beyond the caretaker personality into that absolute reality within.

That is your essence and your substance, from which all things come forth and to which all things return. That’s what we really are. The luminous totality, nirvana.

Meditate on that. And you will be free!

There is a particular meditation technique that will help you do all of this, and I’d like to describe it to you. It’s pretty simple, and if you practice it once in a while, I think it will help.

When you’re sitting down to meditate, relax, sit up nice and straight, in a chair or on the floor, and any way that you’re comfortable—the back should be straight.

And start your meditation.

Needless to say, this is not just a visualization, you’re actually doing it.

And as you go through each one, more and more—of the self that you’ve been—is going to fall away, and your being will get clearer and clearer.

As you go through these dimensional planes, the parts of you that are from them will go back to them.

Finally, you’ll get above all the dimensional planes, and you’ll enter into a flux, a kind of a gold and luminous light that doesn’t really move nor is it still. There’s no direction, no dimension.

And you’re going to go right into that. It’s like going into the heart of the sun, and merge with that, and be that.

Feel yourself in that, get lost in it.

Study it, be it. Stop your thoughts, be still.

Just hold yourself in it with your whole psyche and all your power as long as you can, and then gradually feel you’re coming back down—after a couple of minutes, or a few seconds—as long as you can be in that totality. Just imagine it.

Come back through those dimensional planes, and as you do, you’re going to come back shiny and clear.

As you pass through each color and each dimensional plane you’re going to take on new qualities, new hope, new belief, new power, finally down through the stars and onto the Earth, a strong new radiant self.

The right self will come back with you. The right caretaker personality. Don’t worry about what it is, it’ll just be from then.

Visualize that, practice that. It really works. Spends about ten minutes on it, fifteen minutes each time you do it.

Five minutes going up, maybe, five minutes there, five coming down. Or whatever, you don’t have to time it.

Maybe even just a minute or two to start with and increase the time. Eventually it will become timelessness. Good luck! Have fun!

The caretaker personality.