Cosmic awareness—or cosmic consciousness as it’s sometimes called—is the realization that we’re light. That each one of us is light.

In the early stages of our cosmic awareness, we see ourselves as beings of light. There’s still a sense of separativity. When we meditate and we’re able to stop all thought, suddenly we’re suffused with light. We get a sense of being outside of the body, or beyond the body. Our consciousness expands and we see ourselves as beings of light. And that’s certainly true.

As we progress in our inundation with light, as we make friends with light, and we come to know it better, we come to know our substance and our essence, then we find that we’re not really separate beings of light. That that’s a dream that we’re having. The dream of multiplicity.

Each one of us dreams that we’re a separate individual with a history, a future, with a moment, with something to do or nothing to do.

Meditation takes us beyond the moment to eternal awareness. Cosmic consciousness. Nirvana. These states of awareness are open to everyone. It’s just a question of where we focus our time and energy.

To become conscious is like swimming up from the bottom of a lake. We’re down at the bottom of the lake, and we’re swimming around, and everything is murky and dark. And all we have to do is swim towards the light, towards the surface. And as we go higher it will get brighter and brighter and suddenly we’ll break through the surface and there’ll be nothing but light. The murkiness will fade away.

In our day-to-day life, we’re swimming below the surface—planning, making decisions, revisions, schedules to keep, people to meet, people to forget. [Laughter.]

We see ourselves changing, aging. Maybe we’re conscious of it, maybe it’s better that we’re not. We experience pleasure, pain, freeways, which are a mixture of both, depending upon the time of day.

And people promise us enlightenment, instant satisfaction, in one form or another. But it’s a very rare individual who realizes that they’re not an individual. It’s a very rare person who goes beyond their personality.

Now, of these there are two types—the lucky and the unlucky.

The lucky are those souls, those beings, those persons who meditate, who seek, who experience the divinity of all things, and then they go away. One day they climb on top of a mountain and they’re gone. Life just takes them away. Oh, they may have died, but they couldn’t have really died since they had left long before death came.

They merged with the All. They reached the end of the cycle of birth and death. The lucky. The few. The proud. [Laughter.]

Then there are those who follow a different path. They perhaps went to a good private school also.

They attained liberation, or liberation attained them, but they chose to—were forced to, were brow beaten by God into—working in the world with people. The unlucky. We call these people “heroes.” After they’ve been dead for a long, long time.

During their lives we call them fools usually, put them in exile, make political prisoners out of them, assassinate them, crucify them. Emulate them occasionally. But rarely deal with who and what they are.

And even more than who and what they are—since that’s actually not that important—simply what they have to say. Their expression.

The expression of an enlightened person is not what they say with words. There is nothing you can say about the Superconscious. You can paint a gradual picture.

I don’t know if you remember, when you were a kid, they had this thing, the Etch-a-Sketch.

It was a great device they brought out and it was this little square screen, and it had two little knobs on it, and you could draw lines with it. And these perfect lines would appear on the screen. And if you did the right one you’d get a vertical line, and the left one, a horizontal line.

And you could make intricate little mazes and designs, and if you were clever, you could do both at once, and kind of get curves.

And that’s what life is like for most people. [Laughter.]

But for someone who’s enlightened, it’s not like that at all!

For someone who’s enlightened, there is nothing but light. That’s why we use that phrase. Nothing appears to be solid anymore, because it isn’t.

They have the ability to pass through countless dreams of existence. To see the past, the present, the future, and beyond. They can be in thousands of places at once. Experience all tonalities of emotion.

And then go beyond the human to the superhuman. To become God, to be the awareness of truth itself.

To transmit that—to try and bring that across—it’s hard to do in words. You can do parables, analogies, exhortations, beg, plead. But the way the truth is manifested, really—by a person who’s attained truth—is probably in their expression.

Maybe in the way they answer a question, not so much in what they say. Perhaps a gesture.

A way of being that’s so fluid that there’s no perception of being as we know it.

Everyone likes flash. I do too. Everyone likes excitement, the brighter horizon. But there’s a certain simplicity and subtlety that suggests depth which is necessary to have as a perceiver if you follow the pathway to truth.

I can’t tell you where truth lies, or what it is, because I have no words for such things. When I meditate there’s nothing but that, and that’s all there is now for me, is meditation.

And one day it will be the same way for you. I’m not an example of anything, I’m not a particularly virtuous person. But something has occurred to me in the process of living and dying and living and dying which has put an end to that process.

Now, I don’t usually talk too much about it. Usually I lecture on meditation and self-discovery and methods, or I try and make people laugh and have a nice time. All the time meditating and suffusing them with the kundalini, the light that creates liberation, or beckons it in any case.

But from my point of view—self-realization, liberation—these big words indicate a very simplified state of being. Something that’s so subtle, yet so all-encompassing that we’re apt to miss it in our search for liberation and self-realization. Everybody wants to be in the program. “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” ¹⁹ But sometimes it’s nice to walk.

Going fast is just an idea that someone created who thought it would be better to look at life that way. But there’s no such thing as anything unless you think there is. As Shakespeare said it, through the voice of one of his characters, “Nothing is good nor bad, only thinking makes it so.”

But if we consider that statement in its depth and all of its implications—we’ll probably go stark raving mad.

Because we’ll realize that nothing is the way that it appears to be. Everything is an illusion in the sense that we have constructed reality, by dreaming it into a certain form.

And that there’s nothing that you can count on. Everything that appears to be real is transitory. Even your ideas about truth, and love, and self-giving. All these things are transitory. And many people become very bitter at this stage in their spiritual evolution. They reach a point where they see that life in a sense is a fabrication.

That the simplistic dreams of heaven, and good conduct, and these sort of things that we’re told, aren’t exactly relevant.

What’s a mother to do? [Laughter.] Get out the soy Hamburger Helper and stretch it. [Laughter.] When times get tough, that’s what you do. For the soy burger.

So, in the same sense you learn to stretch reality. And you can stretch reality a long way if you’re talented. Take it from me.

By stretching reality I mean that to develop the despondent existential point of view—as manifested by Camus and Faulkner and others—is interesting. It’s an artistic experience. But it’s not a place to really live.

Walking around in that desert of the mind, with myriad strange disconnected objects appearing and disappearing without sequence. A sense of order is necessary. That’s what the British brought to the world. [Laughter.]

People like order. It’s an illusion that you can count on. [Laughter.]

But when the illusion of order goes away, what do you have? The illusion of disorder. If the illusion of God goes away then what do we have. Well, the illusion that there’s no God, no one cares. The mechanistic universe of the 18th Century. The big machine that no one’s running. Gone out of control.

So, philosophers dealt with these ideas, I don’t bother.

Because when you meditate there’s nothing but light. All ideas, all notions of self, of importance, love, hate, joy, gratitude, all these things go away.

All the dreams cease. And what is, is so complete and so perfect. The radiance of the light of existence, the pure knowledge, the experience of … bliss?

There are really no words. That one experiences in samadhi, in nirvana.

When you return to that source which you are, is beyond any expression, any experience.

If you were to take all the wonderful moments that have ever been, or will ever be in any world, at any time, in any location, that you can imagine, and beyond your imagining, put them together—if you were absorbed in nirvana, you wouldn’t notice. It would be a candle held up to a supernova. It would melt quickly.

So, what I’m suggesting is then, that life is far more perfect and precious than people realize.

Particularly people who seek perfection.

It seems to me that people become so caught up in the rut of spiritual seeking that they forget the moment. It’s always, “I want to get to the next stage, the next plane, I want to get through this experience, because then it will all be better.”

Never realizing that all they have to do at any given moment is stop all their thought, enter into sublime meditation and that’s it. It won’t happen mañana. It already is. There’s nothing that you have to do.

Now, naturally, to do that, to stop all your thought— to enter into samadhi, that transcendental state of awareness and experience truth—is difficult.

Because it means you have to accept and embrace every aspect of your self. Be it in your definition wonderful or horrible. Because everything is God.

That means that you have to accept every part of yourself as being perfect, even when you know that it’s not. And even that sense of knowing that it’s not—that incompletion, that question mark—has to be erased.

Gradually as you shift through the fields of attention—as you meditate—each aspect of the self dissolves. And then finally that consciousness of dissolution, that illusion that there was a self to dissolve—or there was a self or there wasn’t—dissolves.

And then there’s silence and stillness. And if the wind blows who’s there to hear it?

People don’t like that. It’s too perfect. Human beings can’t stand very much reality. That’s why if you wish to traverse the snowy ranges of self-realization and enlightened consciousness you can no longer be a human being as you define human being.

You have an idea. This is a person. This is what they can do, this is what they can’t do. Birds fly, people don’t. People fill out tax forms, birds don’t.

But in my world birds are CPAs. [Audience laughs.] And you see people flying around all the time. Now admittedly I live in a very strange world. I agree.

So eternal consciousness is very available, but it’s necessary for a little bit of housecleaning to occur.

It’s necessary to let go of your attachments. Now that’s when everybody gets very nervous. Because they all know they have attachments. There are closets that have not been cleaned out. There are papers that are not in order. There are things that haven’t been mailed. There are clothes that haven’t been mended.

There are two approaches. One is conservative, the other is radical. The conservative approach is to go through gradually through every part of the house, mending the clothing, cleaning out the closet and just to do this continually.

The other approach is to burn the house. [Laughter.] Collect the insurance and go some place else.

You can follow either approach. I personally like a combination. I like to clean up the house, get everything in order, make it all perfect … then burn it. I think it makes for a better fire. [Audience laughs.]

Now the conservative approach involves going through every aspect of your being and perfecting it. It means gradually bringing light and love, dedication, selflessness and humility and purity into everything you do.

Not being afraid of making mistakes, realizing that through meditation and selfless giving, through time and patience, through inspiration of others, this will occur.

To find someone who has reached enlightenment, shows you—if nothing else—that if that turkey could do it so could you.

It’s very inspiring when you see the people who have reached enlightenment by and large are very silly people.

And it seems to me that anyone who has their act half way together could easily do it. I think that’s why God does that. God has the silly people obtain enlightenment first, just to inspire everybody. [Audience laughs.]

Now the other approach of course is very radical. That’s just to burn it right away. Just do it. The problem is though sometimes in our haste to burn down the house we burn ourselves.

It’s riskier. That’s the short path in Tibetan yoga. Very fast evolution.

But the danger is that sometimes the result is counterproductive to the very thing that we sought. We go so fast we speed ourselves up—our evolution—to such a point that we reject the entire experience. It’s just too much to handle, and we leave it behind.

So for most persons it’s best to follow the gradual path to enlightenment. The gradual path is not at all slow. There is no slow and there is no fast. Or if you are interested in speed, the fastest is the one that works.

So we perfect every aspect of our being. This is the gentle approach. Where we’re not afraid, over a period of time—of lifetimes perhaps—to come to know ourselves, to know that we’re not single, that we’re not individuals. That we’re not bodies of light but that we are light itself.

The actual transmission of light—to make this not theoretical but actual in your being, not have it be another nice talk that we’ll listen to tonight and then we’ll pass on into oblivion—if I could transmit an essence it would take two forms.

Both are meditative. Because without meditation there is really no realization.

Selfless giving in karma yoga is good as long as one meditates.

I’ve seen people practice selfless giving—karma yoga, working endlessly for others—who are in a terrible state of consciousness. Who were in a good state of consciousness. And then when they did too much selfless giving they were in a lower state of awareness.

Because they did not have the ability to maintain a high level of awareness, and remember why they were doing it, in the action.

This is the “spiritual burnout syndrome” that you see sometimes in ashrams and spiritual gathering places. They got so into helping others that they forgot to meditate. Which was only because they really didn’t want to meditate at all. It was an excuse to avoid development.

“I’m gonna work so hard for others that I don’t have to deal with myself.” Kind of a nifty approach.

So I think that it’s better always first to learn to meditate and to practice selfless giving as you are inspired to do so.

And you’ll find your capacity to do more for others will increase, but never to forget the source—meditation. To always come back to stillness, to silence.

You don’t have to think of what you can do. How you should change. What decision to make to make your life into what you want it to be. Because if you’re still thinking about those things, the knowledge that you’re gaining is coming from the relative mind, and it’s subject to much delusion.

But if you meditate deeply several times a day, if that is the center of your practice, then in that meditation you will become light. You will transform and change and you will find that you don’t have to inspire yourself to do what’s right. Because you’ve already become what’s right.

I respect self-giving and I’ve tried to lead my life with that as the ideal.

But real self-giving is when we take our self—our being—that which is most precious to us. Our ego, our bodies, our minds, our values, our past, our present and our futures—and we sit in meditation and we throw that all into eternity.

There’s just a sense of total offering to that larger infinite self. To God. To the supreme reality. Our whole being. We just let it go. Without worrying about whether we’ll come back or not or how we’ll change. Because there’s no trust there.

The trust must be total.

And this trust develops a little bit each time you meditate. When you see that each time you meditate, life is brighter. Things are better.

The objective world will not change! The objective world is the objective world.

You will change.

And you’ll see that the objective world is not objective, but subjective. You can dream it into any form that you like, or just go simply beyond it or get into it. Whatever suits you.

So meditation then comes in two forms. One form is when you meditate by yourself. Each morning when you meditate. Each evening when you meditate.

Or at any other time of the day. You sit by yourself, to go beyond the idea that you’re by yourself. There is no aloneness in meditation. There is no want for company. Your companion is eternity.

When the light is so complete, when your being is so pure and perfect that there is no separation between yourself and that effulgent ecstasy of being—who could want? Who could need? When you’ve become the limitless.

And this we try and do when we meditate.

On the other hand, we go to a teacher. We find someone who has merged with the limitless. Who’s a reflection of the limitless in their meditation.

They’ll still have a personal form. A personality of some type. A physical body.

But their consciousness is no longer human, as we know human. It’s light. They broke down the barriers. The big wave came and washed everything away, and now there’s nothing but ocean.

When you meditate with such a person, you change.

Because the dynamic force of eternity manifests through them in such a way, so powerfully, that it inundates all whom are present, physically.

With the power that we call the kundalini—prana, shakti—different names for this essential life force.

And one who is receptive to that, one who meditates, travels. Far beyond what they might have been capable of themself.

Or we could say their awareness is stretched.

And once its been stretched, it’s easier for them to stretch it themself. Different terms to explain that which is an inexplicable mystery.

This is why people have gone to study with holy persons, teachers, enlightened beings, or they just travel to places of pilgrimages.

To physical locales where the vibratory energy is high and pure, because for thousands of years spirituality has been practiced there. The aura of a mountain—of a place—becomes so powerful that if one is sensitized, when you go to a place of power, it has a transformative effect on your being so that you don’t leave. Someone else does. Your real self.

The problems, the delusions, the frustrations are there, but we go to the Grand Canyon, and we look into the infinite. And suddenly in that complete silence we remember something that can’t be put in words.

That silence is not in that place, it’s within ourselves. It is our self.

There is no death. Death is an idea in the mind of people who still have ideas.

I experience death many times a day. Every time I am fully absorbed, that’s death. The same as the physical, and it’s wonderful. You just return to the source.

People who fear death, it’s so unfortunate. Death is never anything to fear.

It’s just the emergence of your transcendental form.

So we try and combine the two, if that seems suitable to us. We find the person we feel in all this vast world—who we have access to—who knows the least. And we go to them to unlearn.

With the knowledge that what they’re trying to teach us is a gesture—a way of being—not a philosophy. Philosophers teach us philosophy. From the enlightened we learn a way of being which they convey by their actions. By their conscious awareness.

There’s a certain naturalness that we learn from their physical beings or their personality. But even more so, we study their awareness.

Because if we can see their awareness, soon we’ll discover that awareness within ourselves. That’s the transmission of light. That’s the self-giving. That’s the love. To give light to others. To give our very substance.

To our very substance.

So meditation for me has been that, and is that. It takes countless forms. It’s like a symphony. Different movements, tonalities, instruments playing, crescendos.

It takes all the form of human personality and then goes beyond anything that we’ve known as human, or even our ideas of the superhuman.

Every aspect of existence is yourself. You experience them all, and then you go beyond them all into the emergence and light.

And then you find yourself back on the planet, walking out on the street, driving in your car down the freeway.

The same yet very different. Aware, watching this dream that we’re in now. But you’re free. In the dream you can be free. In a jail cell you can be free.

That’s the freedom of a perceiver, of consciousness.

So in our journey, we shouldn’t go too far. We shouldn’t go farther than stillness. And stillness is something that accompanies action. It’s the silence between the words that gives the words their power. Otherwise there would just be endless sound. One sound would not be distinguishable from the next.

So we don’t sit simply absorbed in meditation all of the time. We meditate and we become eternity, consciously. Then eternity changes form. And we are in the field of action. We’re busy. We’re laughing, we’re crying, we’re experiencing.

It’s not necessary to kill your human nature to realize God. Because the human nature is God. There’s just an addition. Of eternity. That awareness.

Gestures are important. It’s the subtlety in my estimation, that has power.

Silence has tremendous power.

And if you can give yourself enough room … to be emphatic, to be excited, to be confused, to be deluded … and then to step beyond that … through that golden door to eternity … to perfection—and not see that the two are different, not even think about it or worry about it—is to lead a complete life.

Beyond life and death.

So these words that I’ve said, have been said for thousands of years. Millions. Billions. In different ages, in different cycles, in different places, on different planes of being. By the Self to the Self.

And I don’t feel that these words can change anything, nor should they. They just are, as we all are.

But let’s just say that they’re a gesture. A reaching out.

Kind of like when a flower blossoms in a field, and no one will ever see it. There’s an integrity to that. And then it passes away. And no one ever knew.

That makes for a happy flower.