A place of power is a vortex of energy. There are really two types of places of power.

One type is a personal place of power. It’s a physical locale—which is not simply physical—that has a special meaning for you. It’s specific to you, in other words.

Then there’s a universal place of power. That’s a place where just the currents of energy are very extraordinary. Anyone who goes to one of those places of power will be affected by it. Some will be conscious of it and some will not.

A place of power, a personal place of power, is a place where you’ve stored something. You’ve had moments there that were very, very important to you. I think all of us has at least one place like that. And when we go back there, we can access those moments. We can return to them.

For example, there was a place, when I went to the university as an undergraduate, where I used to go hiking and meditating. There was a river. And it was a place that I went to many, many times and I had many experiences in other planes of reality there, where I became more conscious.

And so that’s a place of power for me. It’s a place that I can go back to. I don’t have to go back there physically to return to it. It’s a place that one can just draw power from at any time.

ॐ

But most of us are concerned with universal places of power. These are inter-plane vortexes of energy. They are doorways to other worlds.

What makes a place of power what it is?

Well, no one knows precisely. We can perhaps look at it historically and say that it’s a place where great warriors, spiritual teachers, seekers have been in ages past and in ages present. They have gone and spoken words, and their words had power in them, and light. They changed levels of attention there, they moved in and out of other worlds at that spot.

Why did they pick that spot—if we trace it back further?

Well, sometimes it’s interesting to note that the actual mineral composition of a place of power is a little bit different. The ground usually has more metal in it. That’s not always the case, but frequently that’s the case.

But I don’t think that’s the sole determining factor. I think these are just reflections of something that’s really not something that we can explain, it just is, and we perceive it and utilize it.

When you go to a place of power—no matter what shape your field of attention is in—your consciousness is affected by it. Everything is amplified.

That’s why you have to be very, very careful when you go to a place of power. Because the higher thoughts and tendencies that you have—if they’re dominant in your consciousness at that time—will be increased.

But if you’re moving into a negative emotional state—if you’re depressed or frustrated, or just you’re not quite where you should be—that’s amplified, too.

Both are increased at a place of power.

Power is indifferent to action.

A place of power is a place where there are not just physical things, there are mysteries there which you have to unravel when you visit them.

Some people are drawn to places of power that they’ve been in other lifetimes, where they’ve stored power.

In other words, in another incarnation—in another life, in another dream—they went to a place and magnificent things happened to them. They had experiences there of the other worlds. And either at the time of their death or just during their life, they stored power there. And returning to those places brings something out in you.

It’s almost like that fellow in Close Encounters ¹² who had this vision, and he was drawn to a place of power, and something happened there that changed his existence. That’s kind of a metaphor for it.

So in the same sense, you can be drawn back to a place of power. Either something there draws you back, or something inside you draws you.

And when you return there, it will trigger something in you. Let’s just say that you’ll change. You’ll find something that you have forgotten. Perhaps your self, or one of your selves. And you’ll return a very different type of being.

To understand a place of power, you have to understand power a little bit.

Now again, we’re using the language of power tonight. We could speak about the same subject in Buddhist terms, terms of Zen, terms of yoga. Each is just a language, whether we use French, or Italian or German to discuss something, it ultimately doesn’t matter. Each language has it’s history, it’s literature, it’s nuances.

So, in the language of power, of course, we deal with luminosity, which is another way of saying power.

And essentially the study is very simple. Each one of us has a certain amount of luminosity, a certain energy. Throughout the course of our life, we tend to lose that energy. We’re born with quite a bit of it and we lose it as we grow older. Finally, when we lose it completely, you might say, death occurs.

Throughout the course of our life we lose energy, but we can also gain energy. We can also conduct it.

So, mysticism, or power—the study of power—is simply a sort of systems analysis in the world of power. What we’re doing is analyzing the movement of power. We’re learning how to store power, assess it, increase it and avoid losing it.

So a person who enters the study initially has to do some assessment. They have to try and find out where they’re losing power.

When you have enough power—not power in the sense that most people would mean it, but luminosity—your field of attention changes. Your consciousness expands.

And you begin to see and move into other levels of reality. The structure of your being will change, and you will reach, I suppose, what we call enlightenment, eventually, that way.

And also along the way, have many adventures in the other fields of attention.

To begin with there has to be an interest in the subject. And I don’t think that’s something that we personally generate. It just happens. If we believe in reincarnation, then we would say that it’s something to do perhaps with a past life. But then again, what’s the difference? This could be the first life for that.

Something happens in our being. We’re drawn to a higher level of attention. And so we become conscious of the fact that there are other layers of reality, other stratas of existence and that we’re not quite who or what we thought we were.

That we’re not one limited self, we’re a collection of selves.

We’re an aggregate of luminosity or of luminous fields of awareness and attention. That’s what the human being is actually constructed of, sort of like the DNA.

ॐ

So, we’re drawn into the study without knowing why, and what we learn is that we have to—first of all—start generating some power. That’s always the first step in the study.

Just think of it as a building. If you’re in a cold place and you go into a building for shelter, the first thing you have to do is start a fire. Even if there are a lot of leaks in the building, at least you have to get something going to begin with.

Now when you have some initial heat or warmth, at that point, then you can go and be warm enough, and well enough, to begin to find where the leaks are and fill them up. And you start with the biggest ones, and then work towards the more subtle ones.

Then, of course we try and increase the heat, too.

So what one does is analyze oneself. We begin to assess ourselves. And we try to determine where it is we’re losing power.

But that can only be done once we move into a level of attention that’s at least high enough to understand that. So we begin then, in some way, trying to increase our level of attention. To increase our power a little bit, to at least get the flame going a little bit, and there are many ways to do that, which we’ll be discussing this evening.

Then, as that increases, we begin to assess ourselves. Either by ourselves, or with the help of a teacher—someone who aids us, who has traveled that road before—and who can sometimes see us in a more impersonal way and give us a little structured advice. Or actually just imbue us with power and luminosity and increase our power tremendously. More so than we could ourselves.

Then, as we see our life changing and improving, or dissolving, or whatever happens to it, at that point, we become more conscious of the depth of the study. We begin to learn the ways of power, which involves dealing with two aspects of our lives.

One aspect, of course is the outer life, meaning the way we live, the way we talk, walk, eat, sleep, our career, the way we conduct our business affairs, our friendships. We assess every aspect of our being. Not once, but again and again, trying to bring bravery, and courage, and purity and luminosity into us. And trying to cut out those aspects of our lives which drain us, which neither make ourselves nor anyone else happy.

We reassess it constantly, because each time you move into a higher level of attention, you’ll have a new vantage point to view these things from. And what you considered perfection before, will not necessarily be perfection in the next level of attention. It’s kind of like going to school, and progressing, and just being more aware of a certain body or field of knowledge and its complexities, and mastering each step as we go.

So, on the one hand we have an extremely orderly, logical study. The study of power, how it’s gained, how it’s lost, how it’s increased. And we do this internal and external systems analysis. Looking not only at the stages of our outer life, but also at our emotional body, our feelings, our thoughts, things we dwell on.

The other side of the study, of course, is stepping beyond structure completely, and order and logic, and moving into the other levels of attention. Where the world as we know it dissolves and goes away, and we become something that really can’t be described in words.

We become a luminous field of energy moving through the cosmos. And we find that the cosmos is far different and far more wonderful than we had supposed. There’s level on level of attention, there are worlds upon worlds in existence. And one can enter into them, visit them, become part of them, go beyond them.

And so there’s another aspect of the study, which one usually does with a teacher, which involves the training of your being to move into those different levels of attention through actual exposure.

And what the teacher does, of course, is project the student into the other levels of attention, by virtue of the teacher’s power, or the power that passes through them. One can become very powerful in the study, and take not only one but many people into other levels of attention.

However, while you can expose someone to another level of attention—cause them to see things that most people don’t see and become aware of things, the mysteries that most people are neither aware of nor particularly interested in—while you can do that, it really relies a lot upon the student to change. To work with their life.

Because your movement into the inner worlds is very much linked to your level of togetherness in your career, in your lifestyle, in your friendships, in the way that you clean your house, in the way that you drive—everything is interrelated. And if you have a very loose life, if it’s not particularly tight, then you won’t do well with the study.

The study of mysticism is perhaps the most demanding of all the yogas, except perhaps for Jnana Yoga. The other yogas are much more forgiving. Mysticism is not forgiving.

Mysticism is the study of power, and power, while it can bring you to very high levels of attention, can also do just the opposite.

The study is not for people who are interested in entities, channeling, and you know, all this sort of stuff—witchcraft, all this stuff. That’s very, very, low level occultism. And such people are destroyed by what they study, eventually. Because they’re dealing with planes of attention, with beings, with realities, that are very, very powerful. It’s not a study for kids. It’s your “serious” spiritual study.

Other pathways you can walk along and there’s relatively little danger, but there’s definitely some danger in the study of mysticism. The study itself is not dangerous. But let me say that when people don’t approach it properly, with proper training, or if their motives are not pure, it can become quite dangerous. The study itself, when practiced correctly is not dangerous at all. But essentially, it’s like driving a car. It can take you where you want to go, or you can kill yourself or somebody else with it, if you’re sloppy.

So, one needs to assess one’s motives in the study constantly. And if you’re just learning the study so you can become more powerful, and manipulate and dominate others, get things that you might want, show off your mystical abilities to others, things like that, then you definitely shouldn’t be in the study because you’ll get damaged at some point.

Whereas, if you’re just drawn to the study—like a moth to the flame [laughter]—and essentially you don’t know why, or simply you wish to move into the other levels of attention, or whatever it may be, then if you have proper training it is not a dangerous study at all.

The big danger of course, is obsession. That’s the problem with mysticism, is that people become obsessed with it—they get so into the experiential side, watching the world dissolve, moving into other levels of attention and so on—that they get too wrapped in it. And they destroy themselves, or they just lose their balance.

They don’t realize that it’s necessary … Mysticism is all about balance. And it’s about balancing your outer life and your other life too, and eventually, of course, seeing that there’s only one.

But in the study, as in all self-discovery, you change. You make major modifications of your being. You’re not the same person who started the study a year in, or two years in, or three years in. Your self dissolves.

It’s not an intellectual study whereby we’re going to go study History, or Philosophy or Mathematics and essentially we won’t change, we’ll just apprehend a body of knowledge.

In this study we actually do dissolve the finite self again and again, and become something other than human. While the body may appear to be intact—although even that shifts—nothing else remains.

I think a wonderful introduction to this study—I wouldn’t say it’s all inclusive at all, of course—are some of the books by Castaneda, particularly Journey to Ixtlan and Tales of Power.

The sense of humor and so on, and immensity, and poignancy that are conveyed in those books is remarkable. They’re detailed books on how to do it if you have a teacher. Naturally we’re dealing with the student’s point of view, as opposed to a teacher’s point of view. But I think he steps out of the way enough to show us something interesting—at times.

So, then, the other side, of course, is what Mr. Castaneda calls the nagual, what I call the other worlds—the other levels of attention—which you bound in and out of eventually. And places of power, and seeing and dreaming have all to do with these things.

Seeing is the art of being. When you can see, of course, we mean that you have the ability to shut off your thoughts. To stop all thought completely, which is seeing, or meditation. Synonymous words, synonyms.

When you can do that, the world changes. Reality is supported by your view. By your thoughts, by your belief systems. When thought stops, the world stops. Time stops. Life stops. Death stops.

In other words, everything that you construe as meaningful disappears. Because everything that you construe as meaningful is a field of attention that you have projected—which you have essentially created with some help from your parents, society, friends, teachers and so on—to give you some sense of meaning in life.

The universe without thought is a very different place.

The sense of order and logic, of history, of time, of value—all the things that we count on as being meaningful, that give our life a shape and a purpose—come from thought and thinking.

So when we stop that process, what we’re doing is erasing the blackboard. We’ve taken years and years to work out all the equations. And now what we’re going to do is, for a while, erase them and walk beyond them all, into something else—into something that no one ever told us about, perhaps—which is reality in its true form.

Your experiences in other levels of attention will not only change you, but they’ll change your view of this world.

You’ll see that everything is a dream, and that everyone is dreaming. We’re all dreamers. People dream their lives. They dream their relationships, they dream their value systems. They dream their lives, and they even dream their deaths.

That everything that happens to us ultimately has to do with power. That is to say, with luminosity. With our field of energy.

Some people have very weak fields of attention, some have very strong. Some people have very strong fields of attention, but the things that they aim their field of attention at are very unusual. Simply to have a strong field of attention doesn’t necessarily mean that one is advanced spiritually. You can be a very strong person and you can hurt people or you can help them. If you have a lot of physical strength.

So power itself is neither good nor bad. It depends upon its application.

ॐ

The key to all self-discovery is seeing.

Seeing in the sense of meditating and stopping thought, but also the abilities that meditation engenders.

Which is the ability to discriminate. To look beyond what is in front of you, to see what’s really in front of you.

• You can see a person, they can be smiling at you, and at the same time they can be thinking how they hate you.

• Now, if you rely upon your ability to perceive as you’ve been taught—the person’s body language might be very open, they may have a big smile, they may have dressed in a way that will please you—in other words, it’s possible for you to totally misunderstand their intention.

Just the opposite is true also. A person can have wonderful thoughts and feelings. And you might go right by them in life. Because they didn’t fit into your “ideal role model” of what such a person is supposed to look like.

We see this in teaching constantly. That the student has an image of what the teacher is supposed to be like. They’re supposed to dress a certain way, talk a certain way. Everybody has their idealized forms, which has nothing to do with reality.

So seeing then, aside from being something in itself—which is the stopping of thought, which brings us into other levels of attention—what comes out of that seeing is the ability to perceive beyond the physical. Meaning, not only to look into someone, but to look into yourself.

To look beyond the self. To perceive what’s going on thousands of miles away. Millions of miles away, billions of miles away, in other dimensional planes. To become conscious that there are other dimensional planes with other beings. To see that what most people call impossible and extraordinary is actually quite ordinary.

It’s possible to do things that people call miracles. They’re not particularly miracles. It’s just the application of power in a way which most human beings are not aware of.

These are very ancient studies.

So, seeing, then, is a very necessary thing—if you live in the world.

Mysticism is a very practical study. It’s practical in the sense that we increase our luminosity through the study. We’re able to live in the world more strongly, in a better way, in a happier way. We become free of our own thoughts, our own lack of seeing—be it something that was engendered by our own choices, or the choices others made as we were educated and taught about the world.

But also, we have this remarkable ability to cut through time and space and to go beyond dimension. In other words, the whole world goes away, and we go someplace else. And it’s a very nice place, much nicer than many of the places that most people spend their time.

But it’s a demanding study. In other words, the teacher in the study is not quite as kind. For example, I teach nine forms of self-discovery, one of which is mysticism. And when I work with my students out in the desert, when we bring them through the different levels of attention, and so on, I’m very demanding. I’m not a nice guy. I’m funny, sometimes, but I’m not nice.

Because to be nice is not to be nice at all. It’s as if you’re preparing someone for battle, and you say, “Well, guys, we’re going to learn self defense today, but let’s skip it, let’s go to the beach instead.” While everybody might like that initially, you’re doing them no favor, because the day they’re on the battlefield they may die, because you didn’t teach them what they needed to know.

So the study is demanding in the sense that it’s a serious study. It takes a great deal of power to move through the other levels of attention. And to not be truthful with someone is not to help them.

But that, of course, intensity is balanced by humor.

Humor is a wonderful part of the mystical study. Because it’s more important than—I think—any other yoga, because what we deal with is so amazing and incredible. As you move through the other levels of attention—as you deal with the beings and forms and forces and so on—it’s so awesome, that essentially, you have to balance it in some way.

And that’s what the humor is for. It creates a way not simply to let off steam, but to maintain that delicate balance that you need as a perceiver.

So seeing, then, is the art of perception. And initially when you begin to study it, it’s a way of looking at things. In other words, you have one language, you learn another language. But it’s much more complicated than that. That’s only the beginning.

Eventually one sees that one is a body of perception.

That it is not we who have perceptions,

• but we are perception itself.

• And that the body of perception is endless.

At the moment these may be just words, but one day they’re not. We can use that body of perception to do anything.

ॐ

A place of power is something that you have to see.

In other words, to go to a place of power, unless you can see, is a useless endeavor. You wouldn’t find it, to begin with, unless there were big arrows, “Place of power that way!” And when you get there, you wouldn’t know what was going on. You wouldn’t see very much.

Simply to go to a place of power is not a big deal. You have to have enough personal power. You’ll feel that the attention has to be expanded enough so that you can experience what is happening there.

And there’s quite a bit happening at these places. There are more beings, and there are doorways into other worlds and things like that.

Ultimately, every place is a place of power. You can open the doorway to the other worlds anyplace when you know how.

But initially, and even later, just because it’s fun, it’s nice to go to these places.

We are magical beings. We are capable of doing much, much, more than you realize at this time. We live everywhere and nowhere. We are beyond the known and beyond the unknown. And yet we find ourselves—at times—in time, in between.

ॐ

Life is a dream. It’s something that we create, and we experience. Each moment is a dream, a lifetime in existence. They’re all dreams, dreams of the self. We dream the self, but what is it that dreams the self?

Dreaming is the art of luminosity. There are different types of dreaming, yet they’re all the same.

In dreaming we make a puzzle, like one of those children’s puzzles, where we fit the little pieces together and make a picture.

They’re just pieces, that’s all the universe is. Little pieces, floating. Modules of existence in a giant ocean. There are all these little things floating, back and forth. These little pieces are out there.

We piece them together in different patterns, and we create something. A dream, a lifetime, a relationship, a feeling, an awareness, a life, a death.

We are that which glues all of those things together. We are the cement that binds the fragments of existence into something we call perception, and that which is perceivable.

When we go to sleep at night and we dream, we have an experience. We wake, it goes away.

That’s your life.

At the time it engulfs you completely, there is nothing else. Then we awaken, and death is an awakening, as is life, as is dreaming.

There are no hallucinations. There are just different levels of attention, different ways of seeing.

Life is a dream and you’ve accepted a specific type of dream. But in the middle of the dream you can switch dreams. You can move into nicer dreams. Most people live in nightmares.

And you can have a beautiful dream, or you can go beyond the dreamer and the dreamed to nirvana. This is the power of a luminous perceiver.

Most people are bound by their own creations, they’re bound by the dream. It’s like having a house that you work for and you fix it up. You’re paying the mortgage, and then you want to move, but you won’t because you put so much into it, that you can’t leave it. You’re trapped by your own creation, by its perfection.

So the dream of our lives is like that. We dream a life. And then we get trapped in our own dream.

Dreaming is the art of shifting levels of attention. At a place of power we increase our power, it’s easier to move into other levels of attention, we can find stored power. We can get a terrific boost.

An enlightened person is a place of power. They’re a mobile field of attention.

Seeing is the art of perception, of becoming perception.

Dreaming is a creative art.

When we dream, we create different worlds. Just like dreaming at night. You can dream any world, anything. You’re an artist with a palette and a brush, you can paint any type of picture, be it Salvador Dali, other worlds, be it a reflection of this world.

All things exist. Time exists, place, condition, and then beyond that.

So dreaming, then, means that we change realities. We change levels of attention. In order to do that, it’s first necessary to remove ourself from the level of attention that we’re in.

In other words, you’re in one of those Cineplexes where they have five or ten movies going. All little theaters. You’re in watching one, and you’ve become so absorbed in the movie that you’ve forgotten it’s a movie and that you can stand up and walk outside and not be in the movie for a while, or go into another one. That’s dreaming, essentially, it’s a Cineplex.

So, first it’s necessary to become aware that you’re in a dream.

Sometimes, shock does that for a person.

• Someone dies that they love. They find out that they have some terrible disease.

• In other words, a tragedy, what most people would call a tragedy, occurs. [Rama claps his hands very sharply.]

It wakes them up, for a moment. There’s a shift. Something changes. We’ve been going along in life assuming that the consumer mentality really matters.

This is what Buddha used to do, he used to wake them up. He’d bring them down and see the corpse, and say “15 days of decomposition. This is what you will look like not too long from now.”

And suddenly Flashdance doesn’t matter as much. [Laughter.] Or it matters in a different way.

So that’s one method.

Sometimes, it’s simply because we realize it’s time to change. Something in us wants to. It doesn’t take a tragedy, it doesn’t take a shock. It takes love.

Our love of God—of truth, of the Earth—impels us to move to a higher level of love, which we can’t find in this world. This world not being this world, but being this world, if you know what I mean. [Laughter.]

In other words, many worlds exist in this world. The world that you call this world, exists in this world, for you, and maybe for someone else who shares a similar dream.

But other films are projected on the screen. You’re just projecting yours. But that doesn’t mean that that’s all that’s possible.

There are countless worlds in this world. You can walk through it and not see them, because your level of attention is so fixated on one particular dream, that you don’t perceive it.

So dreaming, then, involves stepping back from our field of attention, from our current dream, viewing other possible dreams. It’s sort of like seeing the trailers, and seeing what other movies are around, and we can try them on for size.

And there are lots of them, reality has countless films for us to see.

Or sometimes we go beyond the dreamer and the dream to something else, which is beyond words, which we call nirvana, enlightenment, satori, the fourth level of attention. There are different names which we ascribe to something that is essentially nameless, the tao, to that absolute perception which is beyond perception.

So, back to basics. Back to basic dreaming.

Well, in order to dream, you have to see. Everything always comes back to seeing. Because if you can’t see, if you can’t stop thought, or relinquish it to some extent, you can’t get out of the movie you’re in.

• You’re stuck in the theater. What’s sticking you?

• It’s like there was a lot of bubble gum—it’s a disgusting analogy, I know—but there was a lot of bubble gum on your seat, and oooohhh! You just can’t get away from it.

And those are your thoughts. Your thoughts are so fixed, they’re so formed, and you can’t break out of them.

Some people have used drugs to do this. I don’t recommend it. But for some people that’s been a way. Because some of the power plants, they’re so powerful, they just literally blast you out of your mind. But they can also do structural damage to your being. I think there are gentler ways of achieving the same result. If one has gone through that route, that’s fine. What’s done is done. And that was the way one was supposed to go.

But for a person beginning the path to enlightenment, I would not recommend it. There are other things that I think work even more effectively, that don’t do any damage to the subtle physical body, to the luminosity.

So dreaming means, then, of course, that we step back, we increase our personal power by meditating, we look at the things in our life that drain our power, that make us unhappy, our attachments, problems, anxieties, limited ways of seeing, we gradually eliminate those things.

Another world is posited by the teacher, which is the world of luminosity and power, of being together, successful in the finite and the infinite, letting go of our lives, and yet holding on, each at the appropriate moment.

A whole other way of living. We try it on for size. If it works, if we feel better, stronger, freer, whatever it is, we continue along that pathway as long as we choose to.

And then we begin to dream.

Now, there’s of course, the dreaming that we do when we sleep, meaning that it’s possible when you go to sleep at night to become conscious, to wake up within a dream and to create the etheric double, and to dream.

So, in other words, you go to bed at night, and you wake up in your dream, and you can see your body there. You can travel, have experiences, sometimes you can manifest the etheric double so perfectly that it’s actually, literally, a second body.

It can go have conversations with people, people can see it and so on, and all the while you were elsewhere, your physical body was elsewhere. That’s harder to do.

We can go into other people’s dreams with the etheric double and visit them in their dreaming. Go to other worlds, all kinds of possibilities for the etheric double.

That’s one type of dreaming. But the highest type of dreaming is not that.

The highest type of dreaming of course, is not simply the creation of the etheric double—which is like having a second car—but it’s moving into other fields of attention, exploring other worlds, seeing other movies.

And we have to break that fixation that we have.

The way that a fixation is broken, usually, is through a type of gazing. That’s how we build up power.

Gazing can be done in many different ways. Essentially when we gaze, we’re looking at something but not really seeing it. It’s a type of meditation, you might say.

But it’s the type of meditation that we do in the beginning with our eyes open, or partially open, and we observe something. You might sit for twenty minutes and practice gazing.

And, as you do, you’ll disassociate yourself from your thoughts, and you’ll actually enter into the essence of the thing that you’re gazing at and then of course, beyond it. Doing this will cause you to break the fixation you have with the movie that you’ve been seeing. It’ll just sort of go away.

And it also causes you to accrue and increase power by doing this, because you’re drawing from other levels of attention.

With my own students, I have them gaze—at least for now, until they get to be a little bit more advanced—on yantras. These are geometric designs that have symbolic and actual value. There are many different yantras. And normally before they begin their meditation each day, I ask them to gaze for ten or fifteen minutes at a yantra, which is a way of changing levels of attention.

You can gaze on all kinds of things. Everything has an energy, a different luminosity. You can gaze at rocks, clouds, all kinds of things, and you can learn.

You see, mysticism is the study of the Earth. It’s funny, because while in the study we go beyond the Earth, we go beyond the Earth through the Earth. One must have a tremendous reverence for life and love of this Earth.

It’s not a study for people who hate the world, who hate nature. It won’t work. Because it’s the study of power, and we study the elementals, the essential power that exists in finite things, which are not simply finite things.

We learn about water, air, all the elements, the Earth, the power of plants, of clouds, of stars, of the Sun. You know, the kundalini exists in all these things in various degrees.

And we learn to access those things, to make friends with the fog, with the rain, and so on. Because they’re not simply the fog and the rain. In this world, in your dream you defined them in one way, because that’s what you were taught.

In other words, when you see the fog, you see these billowing, you know, when fog rolls in down at the ocean, you see the old fog billowing in, and the land is getting obscure.

Well, that’s not what I see when I see the fog, at all. I can travel through the fog, and use it. It’s a medium. The fog is filled with all kinds of things.

And you make friends with each one. You make friends with the fog, you make friends with the desert, with places of power, with the rain, and so on.

When you dream, there are some worlds you go into where there are all kinds of beings, other than physical beings. And you can make friends with those, or sometimes you have to fight them, it depends. It’s like this world, it’s not so different.

So then to dream, then, you need to break free of gravity. You see, this gravity is holding you and you need a certain amount of thrust, of energy.

So you gain that, of course, through gazing, through changing your life, through self-analysis, all the conventional means and methods that are adopted in the various forms of spiritual study.

But also, the teacher is a key element in this study, as in any study I think.

Because what the teacher does essentially, is inundate you with different levels and strands of luminosity and power.

• You can have a house and if you’re not hooked up to the power lines, it’s pretty difficult to light the lights at night. You use some candles.

So essentially, when you study with a teacher, if the teacher’s any good, the teacher has moved through the luminous fields of attention and is no longer human, in the normal sense of the term.

And what they do essentially with their students—particularly with their close students—is not simply expose them to the other worlds, but they provide them with a continuous stream of luminosity. Which is something that’s there to eventually aid the individual in becoming independent, in producing their own luminosity or accessing it. But for a while we lift them up into the other fields of attention. It makes it easier for them.

One of the fun parts about being a teacher of the art of mysticism is cracking the cosmic egg ¹³ and making an omelette.

In other words, an individual comes along. You know, when you look for students, it’s a tough business, because there are all kinds of people who claim to be students.

And I always love Don Genaro’s story in Journey to Ixtlan where he’s talking about how, when he tries to go back to Ixtlan, he meets all these shadows, which were actual people, if that’s what they are. I’m not sure some days.

And so, it’s necessary to find a student, although it’s probably like soul mates, you’re better off if you don’t find them. A lot of trouble.

But the fun part, anyway, is once you’ve found one, if they’re any good at all, if they have a little spunk, what you do, is you destroy their lives completely [laughter.] This is a technical process which they teach you in Spiritual Teaching School, which is in another world, of course. They teach you very definite devices and ways of completely ruining someone’s existence.

And the way you do it is by causing them to be happy. Nothing will louse up a person’s plans faster than happiness. It’s a guaranteed way. Everybody’s worked out a specific plan—each one of you has—to make yourself miserable. And you’ll find that your misery will increase as you get older. Unless your plans don’t work out. [Laughter.]

No, really, you’ve set yourself up for it. It’s amazing how people do it.

So, what a teacher does, is they ruin your life, they ruin your plans. Because they work with you and after a while—in spite of yourself, and no matter how hard you try—if you have a little spunk, you begin to become happy. And that destroys your life completely. All your plans are shattered.

So, there are two ways of doing that when you work with someone. On the one hand, you have to appeal to their reason, to a certain extent. Because we’re all reasonable beings. [Laughter.]

So you work with reason. In other words, you speak the language that’s currently being spoken. No matter what age you find yourself in, or what planet you’re on, wherever they send you.

You know, they just send you places. There’s an agency. [Laughter.] And they just send you on assignment. So you find yourself in a certain world, and you kind of adapt. It’s all the same, essentially. But you have to speak the language of the times.

So you appeal to the reason.

You say, “Well if you do this, this will happen, and this will happen.” Or sometimes you impress people with miracles. Because people like that. It’s sort of like HBO. So you impress, you know, do a few flashy things that aren’t supposed to be possible, and they’ll go “Whoa!” That’s a good one.

There are different ways. In other words, you have to break through, they’re in the dream, they’re watching this movie, and they’re so fixated that you know, it’s maybe The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Something horrible, people running around with chain saws, cutting each other up, terrible nightmares people are in, in their lives, their lives are nightmares.

It’s what Buddha called “the nightmare of the day.” They’re the best kind. [Rama laughs heartily. The audience doesn’t get it.] Well, anyway. [Now the audience laughs.] What do you want for five bucks, huh? [Laughter.] “More than this!” So …

So then you have to appeal to the reason. But at the same time, really, what you’re doing, has nothing to do with the reason at all. In other words, that’s what a person sees in their current level of perception. You’re sitting there, you have a discussion, you present information, that sort of thing. The TM approach. Reason. [Laughter.] Make more money, that sort of thing.

It’s great. I love the stories in The Second Ring of Power where they tell about how they met Don Juan and Don Genaro. Marvelous stories. How they got Pablito to be a student. You know, they promised him that they had a secret potion which if he, you know, learned how to make it, he could cause anyone to love him. You know, stuff like that. [Laughter.]

Great, great stories! And of course, eventually, they showed him something else instead, which was eternity.

But human beings aren’t interested in eternity. They don’t care. So, in mysticism, the idea is that you have to hook the apprentice. You have to—in some way—shatter their world. You have to get through to them. You know, they’re, “Oh, it’s so good to be asleep! Oh, no, don’t wake me up, it’s nice,” so you have to in some way wake them up.

So you do that with reason. You say, “Did you know your house was on fire?” [Laughter.] That’s a good one. That’s what Buddha did, that was his method. “Did you know that you’re dying? Have you thought about it lately?” That’s one method.

And, of course another method of presentation is to show them the positive side. And that’s “You could be happier, make more money, have more lovers.” You know, that sort of side. Appeal to what interests people. Neither of which has anything to do with what you’re actually trying to show them. But you have to get their attention somehow.

That’s like advertising. You don’t need a new deodorant. It’s not necessary.

But they have to get your attention, so they’re going to put this completely sexy person on, you know, who’s just sort of walking through a field or something, and they’re going to work on your responses, your system responses, and suddenly …

You know, if they just put the deodorant on, you’re going to go, “Oh, pft!”

So what they do, is they bring an image on which is going to catch your attention—“Ahh!”

And then you look, and once you’re hooked, you’ll listen to what they have to say. They’ll get their message across.

Well, in spiritual teaching, it’s a little bit different because the message is that you can be perfect, and enlightened and happy, and complete and luminous.

It’s a very progressive message. But you still have to get somebody’s attention.

Because they’re so fixated in making themselves and everyone else miserable.

But what you’re really doing is approaching a person on two levels at once, that’s what I’m doing tonight. In other words, I’m talking to you, we’re having some “reasonable discussions.”

But on the other hand, of course, all the time, sort of sneaking around behind you with all these fields of luminosity and changing your attention, most of which you won’t be conscious of until you get home, and you go, “My God, what happened?” [Audience laughs. Rama laughs.]

Except for those who are into heavy denial.

• “No, no! No, I didn’t see anything, it was the lights, it was the lights! Nothing happened, no, didn’t feel anything. No, no! Waste of time. Yeah!”

So, whatever. People select themselves. I’m convinced.

There’s a basic law of life that you learn in self-discovery after a while, and I’ll teach it to you.

This is the ultimate truth on the Earth: people do what they want to. Never forget that. You can understand people. It’s the Dale Carnegie ¹⁴ quick course. [Laughter.]

People do … human beings do exactly what they want to, always. And if you don’t stand in their way, it works out OK. If you stand in your way, they walk all over you.

Once in a while it’s possible to find a special one, who is capable of standing outside of themselves for a little while, and considering other possibilities. Even then, simply because they consider it doesn’t mean they’ll do it.

Once in a while you’ll find one that cannot only stand outside of those possibilities, but make the requisite changes necessary to accept them, and move into them.

So on the one hand you work with the person’s reason, but then on the other side, what you’re doing is really working with the other levels of reality. The powers that you have at your disposal.

But a person can be so stuck in their dreams. You can do the most magnificent things in front of them, and they won’t even see it. Their eyes are stuck closed. They’re just going to, “No, I’m not gonna look, no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter, I’m gonna keep, I’m gonna close them harder, and harder, and harder.”

You know, you can be standing there, you know bringing allies forth, luminous strands of existence, everything, oh God, it’s unbelievable what you can do, and, “Nope, nope, nothing, nothing, I’m not gonna see it.”

Everybody sees. You just have to become conscious of what you see. But everybody sees already. But we’re so stuck on our description of the world that we refuse to accept our own experiences, it’s great. But I think this is good. I’ve come to think this now.

Because what it does, it eliminates a lot of people from the study. And that’s good. That’s the Tibetan way. The Tibetan Secret Doctrine approach. The idea is that the secret doctrine is not something you hide, it’s simply most people won’t understand it.

It’s like the “sorcerer’s explanation” in Castaneda. It’s a magnificent piece of knowledge which people will hear, but they won’t know what you’re talking about. They’ll just hear the words, they won’t see the realities. So I don’t think it’s such a bad system after all.

God knows what She’s doing.

But in any case, back in this world. So the other thing you do, is you approach a person on their other side. And what you do, is you just literally shoot them with luminosity, with kundalini, with energy. You have the ability to do that. One person at a time, a thousand persons at a time, you know, it depends on your own personal access, I suppose.

Now, a person isn’t conscious of that, but what do we mean by “conscious”? See, that’s the thing you come down to, after a while in the study. What does it mean to be conscious?

I believe everyone is conscious of everything. In other words, “Gee, I didn’t know I was hurting you, Alice.” Oh yes you did! Who are you trying to do kid? Some part of you knew. Don’t try and tell us you didn’t know.

“Well, I wasn’t conscious.” Well, what does conscious mean? Does conscious mean just what goes on in the little mind?

It’s like a very, very, very slow computer. It’s got the old style chip. It just doesn’t turn it very fast, that’s just the mind. But that’s not to be conscious.

To be conscious means a million things at once. No, we’re all conscious. We’re all too conscious. That’s why people suffer, is because they know.

And in spite of what they know, they don’t do what they should.

So you have to approach someone on two levels. You approach them through the intellect. Dazzle them, amaze them, be sensible, be funny, whatever works. But at the same time, what you’re really doing, essentially, with people as a teacher, is taking all this energy and luminosity and pushing it through their beings.

And what you do is you lift them up for a moment into another world, another field of attention, which they’ll forget, later, or rationalize away, if they want to, it’s their business.

And they change.

The part of the teacher is fascinating. It means that you’re an infant. It takes a great deal of humility to study this particular path. Mysticism. Because you have to realize that you really can’t do a whole lot on your own.

That the teacher is a very important part of the study. In some studies, the teacher is not so important. It’s just sort of you and God, and the teacher is just a friend who gives you a little advice from time to time.

But in the study of mysticism, the teacher is the one with the power. You might say it flows through them. They would never claim to have it, because they all say and feel that they’re no one. Which is true. We are no one. We’re nothing. The thin air, at best.

But yet, this power comes through that you can change people’s lives with, which doesn’t make you remarkable, it just is an operative fact. You’re past the point where you want to be remarkable.

And so what you can do is rearrange the aggregate of a person’s being.

But only if that’s what they want, and even then it’s hard, because one part of them wants it, and another doesn’t.

In other words, what I’m suggesting, in a very round about way, here, is that in the study of mysticism you reorder the totality of yourself again and again and again.

It’s as if you’re one DNA structure, you’re one form, you’re a group of aggregate awarenesses that are linked together, and what you do is you take them and you throw them into the Sun, and they melt down and change and come back in another pattern.

In order to do that, a person has to work with you for some time and just learn how to tighten up their life, conserve their power, learn a new language—in essence—before they go into that new country. Otherwise, in the new country they’ll be confounded.

But then, once they’ve reached that point, the art of the teacher then, of course, is to get them to that point—they have to do it themselves—but you sort of show them around a little bit, teach them the language, but they still have to memorize it and practice it.

But then you actually lead them into the other country. You take them there, and you acquaint them with it. Then one day they’re alone. They don’t need you anymore. But you were never anyone anyway, so what was the difference?

So that’s dreaming. Dreaming is that process.

It’s learning a new language and going to other countries. It’s exploring the totality of our self.

These aren’t abstractions or metaphors, they’re realities. Which one can choose, or disregard, or just enjoy from a distance. Depends on your mood, of course.