Preface
George: Since there’s a deadline for the recording, we’ll get started and people can just come and go. And since I was late, it’s my responsibility. So we’ll just come — you can come and go, if you have to catch your flight, or anything like that, it’s no problem. Obviously, this will not be the only question-and-answer session about these ideas, I hope, so there’ll be plenty of time. As I said, you know, we have all the time in the world to talk about this.
The Movement’s New Mission Statement
But one thing that I forgot to mention is that the — that the Movement has a new mission statement. They like to be 21st century, up-to-date, yeah. So the Movement has a new mission statement. And it is:
To make reason as attractive in heaven as it is on earth.
That’s it. And that’s — and that’s — I think you can guess who came up with that one.
And the idea is — which I didn’t go into about heaven or between lifes — the idea is that actually this idea about the importance of being important, that people try to keep in a hierarchy and keep themselves above others, and so and so forth, and therefore behave cruelly — even though it’s not physical cruelty it’s a mental cruelty — this is something that’s actually a bigger problem on the other side than it is here. And not violence — but that hierarchy — because people want to be important. And it’s a little bit harder to convey on that side, because, you know, some people are brighter than others. And — and — and so people naturally think they must be ahead of them or whatever. But it’s — there is no way to judge another person’s consciousness, or where they are, or — and there’s no point to it, either, except for if you’re under the delusion that by knowing where they are, it puts you ahead of them, and therefore you’re more important than they are. So it’s a part of that whole attitude towards it and — this is a really deeply-ingrained habit. So no one’s expecting it to go away. But we think if we — if we get reason and the reasonableness towards explaining things, and so on, going on both sides, it will keep improving in both directions. And the interesting thing about that, that a lot of people talk about — I’m going to maybe talk a little bit more about — about that now, it’s just the same people, the same personalities, are there who were here, and then go there and then come back. And so that’s why people who say, well, you know, I’d like to go to heaven but not if my neighbor gets to go too. And our only solution is you go, and you find out your neighbor is there, you come back and try to avoid them that way. I mean, they — it’s not — it’s not, but — but it is, as I said in the lecture, it is set up in different rooms, so to speak, so that the people don’t overlap that don’t believe the other ones should be there. That way they can relax and not get mad that the other ones are there. I have a funny story I wrote about this in 1978 called Mark Twain’s Visit to Heaven. So — it turned out that that was the start — part of the start of my memories of in-between lives. So with that mission statement, we can — we can, you know, take questions. I think I covered most of the main points that — there’s plenty of others. And there’s mics up here, because this is all being recorded. So if you’d like to step up to the mic to ask questions — and as I said that we’re just getting started. One of the — one of the things I was going to say, [that] I didn’t, was that the truth shall set you free. And this is a good start. That’s it.
Questions: What about God and What about Parenting?
First Questions: So I have two questions that I’ll keep short. One is: what about God? And the second question is: what about parenting?
George: What about parenting?
First Questions: Yes. What about the decisions that the Holy Tradition — that everyone has come to? How should that affect how we are in this life towards children and towards the concept of parenting?
George: Okay, so about God — about God there is no consensus. But nobody’s seen him, so — and this — the definition of God in this sense — is the Absolute Mind that’s supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent and so on. Jehovah, of course, has been considered to be that. But he’s not. And many other people have been considered to be that. But they’re not. Everyone’s an individual with – with, you know, a tremendous amount of information relative to other people. But still personalities that are based upon their own experiences over time. So — there’s no real answer. But the semi-consensus, the — by the way, just because I mentioned the five characters as giving messages, that is, Shankara, Guru Dev, Maharishi, Jesus and Jehovah, it doesn’t mean that the other five or six members of the Holy Tradition that were part of this we’re not just as influential in the discussion and so on. There’s no hierarchy in the organization. Everybody makes a contribution, and it’s all priceless. But we thought there’s already too many names so — so that’s what was focused on. And also they each had a big influence on human culture, more than — more than others. So that was why that was done. But each of those five individual personalities thinks it’s a good way to move forward on the theory that life may be an eternal democracy. That means nobody was created. And nobody will ever be destroyed. And therefore you don’t need an original creator. You take Aristotle’s argument about first cause, and of course you need a first cause of the first cause of the first cause. And there are a lot of other arguments that are philosophically-detailed that we’re going to get into. But we decided, for the first start, that we wouldn’t put everyone to sleep with the philosophical arguments that persuaded people — persuaded, that is, Shankara, who’s known for this, and persuaded other people over a two-year discussion of how to deal with this. So it’s a theory. Not anything else. And not even — you know, it’s a well-reasoned theory. That’s where it is. It’s not anything more than that. But just like all the rest of us down here trying to do scientific theories, it’s persuasive because it — it also makes it clear that each individual person has their chance to do things their way and to have free will. There’s really no point to the free will if it then the whole purpose of the free will is to choose to get rid of your free will, you know. And — and that’s a very short version. I’m saying that you shouldn’t merge with the Absolute. But that is one of the logical conclusions from that. So that’s that and –
About parenting, I think all relationships are different. You can’t go into an organiz— an institution — there are going to be hierarchies at all times. Institutions need somebody to make decisions, committees to make decisions, and so on.
Message to the TM Movement’s Leaders
And – and, as I — I said, I hope I said anyway, to the leaders of the TM movement, that Maharishi’s suggestion was that they get together as a committee and decide in reaction to this whether it’s persuasive, partially persuasive, whatever, and if they can’t come to a consensus that they should just do exactly what he said before he died. And go with that. And no one’s going to be upset about it. And that they should just continue the way they have done it. And that this is not designed to interrupt this institution or any other institution. But it’s designed to tell everyone what we’re thinking.
So — in parenting it is a semi-hierarchical situation. But you can make the assumption, as everyone who knows — I mean, in my family with eleven brothers and sisters it was always interesting — with eight of them are younger than I am — to see their personalities as children and to see how much of that personality was the same when they’re 50 or 60 as they are when they were two or three. And so your children — their personalities are already there. We don’t really believe in the blank slate theory of childhood. But as with all friendships, you can bring out the best in your friends or you can make them more miserable than they were before, for whatever your purposes are in the relationship. And there are people who like to be made more miserable by their friends – you know – but — but we’re going to try to talk all of them out of that. So — so parenting is still hierarchical. But if you use friendship as the basis of all your relationships, even with your boss, you know. But then, of course, when he tells you —stop being my friend and just do what I want. It’s just a business, no? It’s different.
Question: Isn’t This Description of Reincarnation Rather Depressing?
Second Question: I found your description of evolution — or reincarnation — down through the ages rather depressing from my particular perspective. And what I’ve understood all along is that we’re always growing to more and more. More and more happiness, more and more power, more and more energy, more and more fulfillment, more and more creativity and so on. And certainly somebody who had spent — had been a Vyasa or a Bhrigu or a Shankara or somebody, would — would then — if they were to come back on Earth — that would seem — would be something bigger than — even though Mark Twain was a fantastic fellow, one of our greatest American writers, probably — would be more than Mark Twain.
George: Yeah, well, you know, as time goes by the legends grow and lose detail and we are all much closer to being very similar to other people as — than — than people have thought of. You live a normal life, and if your life is edited down to 25 different events, it depends on who the editor is. You can look great or you can look terrible, right? And so I think one of the things that’s important to know is that all achievements so far in humanity have been done in the middle of a mess. And therefore we don’t have to make the world a mess in order to achieve something personally. I’m probably just a bad example. I — I have always felt, and I will explain this in detail because, as you know, I like to write about — my autobiographies — about how I think and how I developed and so on. And I will have a chance to do that, I hope, and my idea is that my personality developed in a certain way. But the main thing was that I really loved virtue and loved trying to make the world a better place, loved trying to understand it. But I was out in left field, out on a limb, choosing to do something against the grain, against everyone, even against my — my good friends — in order to try to come up with something new to some — some new explanation. And that makes you irritated and — and I’ve been irritated quite often. But I think if you read the details on my life you’ll see — on my lives — you’ll see that they’re very similar. People don’t identify Thomas More and Mark Twain, for example. But Thomas More was very funny. He almost got kicked out when he was a new member of Parliament at 27 for making too many jokes during his maiden speech when he was supposed to be serious. And Thomas More was very funny until he got very miserable about what Martin Luther was doing. And then, you know, his friend King Henry — they didn’t treat him too well either. So — it’s depressing only if you say I don’t have the confidence to make myself grow towards more and more and more and more and more. And you should have it, because anybody can do it. And we think if we clear the set of ideas that get in the way of that, that it will be even easier to do. And yes, it will take a long time for people to get used to the idea that one needs to enjoy — no, one doesn’t need to — but, one should enjoy life now, because that’s when we’re living life. We’re living life now. And even a thousand years from now, you’ll still be living life now. And it’s kind of up to you to decide how much more of everything you want. But I think it’s very valuable —
Our Imaginations/Bell Curve Distribution/Good and Evil
See — one analogy that I use is — say you’re Mother Divine, and you live, according to the scriptures — I don’t know whether this is true or not — I have no idea — but you live 164 quintillion years for every life. Right? Isn’t that the theory? Something like that. So — she’s living for 164 quintillion years and she’s in her 163rd quintillionth year and she says, you know, I’d be really better off if I could live 200 quintillion years. You could always, in every situation as an individual, find a reason to think that you should be better. Now, it’s an interesting part about that is it’s our imagination, each individual’s imagination, that gives us the path towards our better state of experience, right? Because our imagination is right where we are and looks forward. I have a — I have a — an idea about this in explaining how I came to some of my ideas, actually, and that is that humanity is like a — a distribution of humanity’s personalities is like — a bell curve, like this. So there’s one end of it are, say, the psychopaths, sociopaths, maybe even the high-functioning sociopaths. And then you have the big bulk in the middle which is sort of the average human being, average personality, and then out this end you have the — the gurus and the saints and Jesus and all the top artists and top scientists and all that kind of thing. The interesting thing in analyzing that, when I was trying to come up with definitions for different things that affected human life, was that the — the sociopaths look at human life and they say everybody is too good to be true, they don’t know it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and they behave way too nicely and the whole lot of them don’t know what the heck they’re doing. And the people in the middle say, you know, everyone’s kind of all right. They have a few faults, and stuff like that, but they’re okay to deal with. And the people at the high end can only think of ten-step, 12-step or, you know, other programs to improve — because it doesn’t seem like anybody knows what they’re doing. And the interesting thing is that the — in a way — the best — the people with the most imagination — would look back on humanity and describe it in one way, and the people that were the worst would look back and they had the finest description of humanity: too good to be true. And this is the perspective that you come at something for. It’s just like another idea — is good and evil. So we have this idea about good and evil, right? But good and evil are ideas — as concepts — that are not that useful to us because they’re too vague. They’re a little bit like hot and cold, right? So hot and cold are real ideas. There’s a real thing. It’s the internal temperature, right, of an object. And we are 98.6 degrees and so anything that’s like 120 or over seems hot to us and anything that’s under 30 or lower seems cold to us. But if our temperature was 30, our definitions of hot and cold would change. Okay? So good and evil are like that. There is a real reality to living better lives, to living more virtuous, more happy, more enjoyable lives. It’s not just — we’re flattening the hierarchy of the way we look at each other, but not the way you live life. You can live life so much better than somebody else. And you don’t have to apologize for that either. It’s everyone makes their own decisions. But you probably shouldn’t try to mislead other people into living more miserable lives so that you can feel better about yourself. That’s — that’s our transcending cruelty idea. But if you — if you take this that you can improve all the time, then instead of the concepts of good and evil, you are — your personality is somewhere on the — on the objective scale of effective in desiring intelligently and pursuing desires intelligently, fulfilling those desires intelligently, having high quality happiness or low quality. You’re somewhere on the objective scale. And those above you look good and those below you look evil. But that’s a — there’s an objective standard. But it’s all relative. And so that’s why we went from the good and evil idea to defining cruelty, which is a subset of evil, and just saying this cruelty is a desire to make other people — and this is the thing that makes us [all of us] the most mad. Who wants to have people around you who get their pleasure out of making you miserable? But it’s ironic because if you do it— if you’re cruel to other people — you’re surrounding yourself with more miserable people all the time too on purpose. Without really realizing it. So it doesn’t seem to us to be in anyone’s self-interest to be cruel — if we explain it clearly enough.
The Inherent Structure of Life
So — to go back to your main point, which was — is this depressing? We have expected that people will feel this isn’t the same. This doesn’t sound the same. It’s not inspiring. It’s not “move forward for this”. But what we’re trying to say is that there is an inherent structure to life, that if you understand it, you will most likely start desiring very intelligently all on your own, without anybody having to explain to you what it is, if you understand the structure. But the structure will take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more details to it. But the basic point we want to make here is that that structure is what’s inherent. It doesn’t change and nobody can manipulate it because it doesn’t change. And therefore there can be no bureaucracy, there can be no angels, there can be no karmic gods or anything like that that will try to even everything out because there’s nothing to even out. The only thing that’s eternal are rules — or inherent rules — that can’t be broken. And therefore you shouldn’t be rewarded for following them, and you shouldn’t be punished for not following them.
Why Maharishi Shared His Errors in Judgment
Because you can’t — you don’t have any choice. But you do have a choice about all the things about how you live your life, how — how you live your friendships, how important they are to you — which is why Maharishi brought that up. No. He wanted everybody to hear that he had made errors in judgment in the pursuit of something extremely noble. And we know that 80% of the benefit of what he did is tremendous. But we also all know, who were paying close attention, that there were things that happened that ought not to have happened. Or that, you know, went awry. But that happens with everything that we try to accomplish. But he tried to explain to — to every one of his teachers so that: one, they wouldn’t feel that somehow because they made a few errors in judgment in their life that somehow they ruined this whole life, and that therefore they didn’t get more power or more glory in this lifetime, and therefore they — they wasted this life. Or it was a miserable life, and so on. Because whatever information you took in, however much you knew yourself better, you can benefit by. And therefore you can make for yourself a better life. Now, if you want to make yourself into someone like Maharishi, it’s not millions of years away. It’s not millions of years away. It’s not like these long-term goals of enlightenment that was — now I know Maharishi said five to seven years — but it’s — who’s laughing — but who — but — but still it’s not that hard.
The Imagination’s Horizon
But you don’t — one other thing. You should like your own personality. You — you’ve been developing it for a long time. It’s your greatest work of art — is your own personality. And yes, you’re the one with the imagination to trim and to move yourself forward. But now I’ll go back to this imagination thing. If your imagination can move you forward, we often feel bad — just as I was saying with Mother Divine — we often feel bad if we can’t live at the edge of our imagination’s horizon. And you can — the gap between where you are on your imagination’s horizon can make you miserable for all eternity. Or it can make you happy for all eternity. That is a matter of understanding, because you’ll know that if you reach that horizon, your imagination will now be able to go this far, because it’s just like any other horizon on — on a sphere. You move forward and you’re going to move forward further. And so you can live depressingly about your life forever. Or you can live happily about your life forever. And if you live happily it’s much more likely that you will keep going from horizon to horizon. That’s what we’re hoping the ideas will work as. But we do expect it to take a long time because it’s not an obvious goal. It’s an inherent goal. It’s not like if you only made a million dollars, you know then you could do it. And somebody tells you exactly how to do it in real estate. You make the million dollars, and then you’ve satisfied that goal. Those are the kind of goals that we’re all used to and that’s why all these spiritual goals have been put in that form. Because that’s the way our minds work. But sometimes thinking out of that box is useful.
[slightly indistinct comment from Second Questioner: that there are other details to discuss, however, I’ll let somebody else ask another question]
Yeah. As I said, we’re going to be talking about this forever.
Question: What is this New Understanding of Enlightenment?
Third Question: Before I even come out with my question or two, I just want to say thanks for going through all that you went through to pull this information together and make it available to us. It really took —
George: My pleasure.
Third Question: I really appreciate it. A couple quick questions — just clarifications. I’m trying to understand what the — what the new understanding of enlightenment is or if there is one.
George: Yeah.
Third Question: So our understanding was that, you know, you turn within and eventually the samskaras or stresses are gone —
George: Right.
Third Question: And you have this state of witness and then from that point on you’re enlightened. And don’t need to reincarnate, so the other part of the question is, what is reincarnation —
George: Right, right, right. Reincarnation is for the ignorant. I can quote Maharishi on that one. Reincarnation is for the ignorant. But it turned out it’s for everybody. We’re all ignorant, maybe. I don’t know.
An Omniscient Mind is Logically Impossible
That’s one way of putting it. That there is no omniscient state of mind. And one of the logics behind that is, that if any one mind were omniscient it would have to, of course, know everything, right? And all of us are proof against that, because we all know something. Now you could say that the omniscient mind could look into your mind and know what it’s like to see your life through there. But he cannot know what it’s like to just be you and not him too. And that’s a limit on his knowledge. And there are many, many other limits — there are many, many other limits. There’s another limit. You — you can’t know what it’s like to know English and to not know English at the same time. And — and there are lots of other ones. And so this imagined state of mind was the imagination’s horizon that we had — looked like that was where the goal was, where we were headed.
Jehovah’s Lie Set the Discussion Free
And now that we’re a little clearer about the whole thing, and the clarity has come because all of those great teachers told their sins — not “sins”, that’s the wrong word for it —but told the mistakes that they made or the — the things that they never told anybody else, because it was embarrassing and, as I said, Jehovah’s telling them all that he had lied about this idea for his project, was what set them all free. Nobody’s going to have as big a problem to discuss as that. And so that’s what set everybody free. And by having, so —it’s not that many people, but twelve minds, who all had so many experiences like that, discussing them all. That’s the new thing. So now — that’s how they came to a new consensus, because it freed them up to be themselves. And it said one of the suggestions is, in your own group — leaders of the TM movement — to sit around, have a consensus, discuss it, what it is. And their other thing, for building human civilization, people in different groups — I mean there’s all different groups, with different emotional loyalties and hatreds, and so on — and for us to move forward, to be a single group, which may or may not happen. There’s no guarantee of it. But we could do that — that will take people discussing and being honest with themselves. And it’s very hard for people to be honest. As Mark Twain I said, I discovered the other day that I’m only dishonest in 46 different ways. I don’t know how I got to become such an honest person. So — so enlightenment — to go back to your main — the main point, the concept about enlightenment is that the turning within part is extremely valuable, because you turn within, you know yourself, you get more familiar that you are a stable, not flighty, changing thing. Your personality is pretty stable, even that. But your existence is unshakable. Your individual existence. And so — your personality does change, based on your decisions and the attitudes you develop. Based on all that. And so the idea is not — enlightenment. We’re not going to use the word, okay. But — within is a world of light. Your mind is a world of light. That’s your thoughts. It’s not your — your — your identity, but your thoughts is a world of light. Just as it is after you die. You are — you are a mind, with a world of light in you. And those — that light is where enlightenment comes from, you know, that’s where the word comes from — that your light is turned on. Now the decision has been — it’s a theory, but they’re pretty good theorists and the theory is that the non-light — when people don’t experience light, that inner light, when they close their eyes, it’s because of fears —sort of like clouds of — gray clouds of fears putting you, you know, kind of in your mind. And so after you’ve spent a lot of time turning within, even though you don’t experience this Absolute Mind — you would only experience your self — but your self is good enough to eventually disperse those. Now the one thing that’s a little strange, but very interesting, is this theory about cosmic consciousness — the witnessing — to become dissociative from your — your thing. And that they think is because you have enough experience of your mind, but you are embarrassed that you have thoughts. Because of our theory about cosmic consciousness, you’re embarrassed that you have action, or that you’re responsible for decisions. You don’t want to be responsible because you don’t want to be rewarded or punished anymore. Well, you want to be rewarded, but you don’t want to be punished anymore. And therefore mentally you get an emotional block against that part of your life, and therefore your mind, since it is unchangeable, begins to see itself as different than this — which it is — but it sees itself different, as being outside of it. Whereas even in Unity, even when you progress, even in the theory of Enlightenment when you progressed, you — you reunited all those pieces again, right? Because you found out “it’s all that”, so it’s okay. You know, I can have my thoughts and and — and you kind of accept those thoughts which are less than perfect because you know that when you die it’s all gone anyway. Now we say it’s never going to go away and so you just get comfortable with it. Maharishi said, you know, just live your life well. There is no action or — this is something he told me, not something old — there is no perfection in either action or inaction, so just behave as you want to. Even behaving badly is okay, as long as it’s your self. But getting to know yourself — one of the reasons that I was able to cut through to my memories was a decision I made that I was a fool. That I have been a fool. That I’ve made a tremendous number of mistakes. But if I didn’t accept that, I would never be able to move forward on a platform of reality instead of delusion. And that decision in my early 20s was a major window opener to my past, because my past is full of folly. And that’s why Erasmus wrote that book, In Praise of Folly, about me.
Too Many Thank Yous Embarrass Us
Comment: Again, thank you so much for bringing all this forward —
George: Ah, I forgot to say that too — okay. So Guru Dev said — another thing that Guru Dev mentioned, and this is perfect — Guru Dev said, you know, saying thank you all the time makes you feel submissive — too submissive. He said, he doesn’t want anybody to say Jai Guru Dev all day, doesn’t want anybody to say thanks be to Jesus Christ all day. Because it embarrasses us. We feel a little guilty that we’ve given you a whole bunch of ideas that we’re now having to change. And so there’s a certain amount of saying — if our ideas have been useful to everybody, you know, a sincere thank you, and that was a very sincere thank you — thank you —
Comment: That was a Mark Twain comment —
George: — a very sincere thank you once every thousand years is more than enough. That’s what everybody in the Movement said. Enjoy your life, and whenever you say, oh that idea has really helped me, just think thank you and just don’t mention our names again. You know, everybody watches TV and everybody enjoys —almost everybody enjoys it. You know, nobody says who invented this and let’s go find him and thank him. And we’d rather actually be that deep underground. So, I’m sorry to have interrupted you after you’ve said something nice but —
Question: What about the TM—Sidhi Program?
Fourth Question: I’m curious about the role of Maharishi’s teaching about the TM-Sidhis, and — and what the —what Maharishi now feels, or the Holy Tradition, about the efficacy or usefulness of that in terms of going within and this like getting — getting the sense of light.
George: All right. So Maharishi said that — he used the word dabbled in all kinds of other things besides TM. But he dabbled in them. He dabbled in them to give something to people who were — who had that in their past, who were thrilled by those things, in order to keep them interested and keep them on the path to Enlightenment — that was his motivation for doing that. There may be a few of you who were on the six-month course before the six-month course where the Sidhis were first taught — where he experimented with the Sidhi program and — and everyone who was there knows how — what an experiment it was. So I’m not going to go into that detail, but it was an experiment that he dabbled in, that he then turned into the Sidhi program. I am not — I have no knowledge about any of this stuff. I am a philosopher and not this — this — I don’t have the experiences that the Holy Tradition has in their life. But Maharishi told me that 95% is turning within, and there’s all kinds of subtle things that you can do that yoga — yogis have figured out over the years — to perform this thing or that thing. But it’s a skill. It’s a localized skill like anything else. And he’s admitting that a large number of those skills are actually there so that you feel more important than the other people around you who can’t do them. How useful are they, other than that? If you — one of the examples that was given to me for how to understand the members of the Movement by everyone else was that we are a lot like everybody else except for we have this extreme focus on virtue and high, you know, spiritual experiences. So that’s very similar to the extreme focus that an Olympic ice skater has on performing her triple lutz. And it’s that focus on just those things that have not only helped us succeed in those areas, but have kind of cut us off from normal — not cut us off — but that normal human life was not really that understandable by them. Just like an Olympic skater who’s going to succeed in the Olympics has probably not had the same childhood as everybody else, has worked ten hours a day to get there. And so the underlying goal being inherent — that is our experience of happiness and the quality of our happiness — it’s a totally different approach. And you know, as those of you who, when the Sidhis came out, I mean, I’m sure you heard a lot about it was — one of the teachers in the Philadelphia area, where I was the chairman at the time, came up to me. He said this is really exciting. He said I can’t wait until I can do that floating thing. He said I’m going to be at a — he was a lawyer — so I’m going to be at a bar, and with all the other lawyers, and I’m going to pick up my drink and I’m going to float over to the other part of the room and then join a conversation. That’s what he wanted to do with it. And now we can all understand, given the importance of being important that I explain, where that comes from. But other than that skill — being able to turn your mind on with that importance — it depends. We live in the physical world. I think a lot of it has to do with our trying to feel the lightness that we do when we don’t have a body. But that’s, you know, as another friend of mine said —who got, you know, this is way back when the — when the yogic flying started. He said to me, well, he said, in 20 years — and this was 40 years ago — he said in 20 years we’re either all going to be flying and levitating or we’re going to have really bad knees. One or the other.
Question: What about Love?
Fifth Question: I noticed that there’s a use of a four-letter word that begins with f — fear.
George: Fear, yeah.
Fifth Question: And I noticed by omission that the other four-letter word, the one that begins with the L — the love word —
George: Love, yeah.
Fifth Question: — was omitted in your presentation —
George: Yes!
Fifth Question: And I also noticed that in terms of the polarization of the team, you know, the Movement, you said it was masculine, as opposed to feminine, and I’m not talking about gender. And I was just wondering is there a reason for the — there seems to be a connection, in my mind anyway, and I’m asking —
George: Why love wasn’t mentioned? Okay. Well, I — I will —I will cover that. That’s a great question. First fear. And this is — this is from the life is an eternal democracy theory. There is an explanation and definition for each emotion and where it comes from. And of course lots of people say love is — and it’s some object. Or God is love, and so and so forth. Our definition for love is that love is the emotion caused by the perception of beauty. And beauty is the promise of happiness that we see in something. And so it’s really an emotional reaction to the perception of the promise of happiness. And so if we like flowers, then you have an emotional attraction to it. If you like individuals who have a certain personality, you’re emotionally attracted. But love can be an attraction towards whatever you consider a source of happiness. And therefore it can be, you know, a ‘67 Chevy. Or it can be someone who wants to be put in pain — a masochist — because you are a sadomasochist, because you like to inflict pain on somebody else. You need to find somebody who enjoys that pain in order to — so you can love somebody. That’s a —people love all kinds of different personalities depending on their personality. And so love is an emotion in each of our minds. Now we can feel that experience. Why do we want to be loved? Because it means that the other person finds us a source of happiness. And that, of course, is what friendship is all about. True love — if you’d say there’s all kinds of love. True love is when somebody just is happy that your personality is there — just the way it is — because that’s what we all want. We all want to be loved for our own personality. Ironically we don’t do it to ourselves too often. And that’s why we want it so badly from other people — to give us the opportunity to give ourselves true love. But, you know, most relationships are made up of a large variety of love. Now that’s — gets very philosophical. And we didn’t want in the original discussion to cover a large number of things that require a great deal of analysis about things that people already have their ideas completely made up. Not that — not that the other ones weren’t like that. But we wanted to cover the issues that we did. But there is a whole series of explanations of how our personalities are structured that will — they’ll come along. It’s already there. And so the reason that love isn’t mentioned had nothing to do with the masculinity — although that’s a good observation — but the messages about women came because the men in the Holy Tradition realized that because of their sheer focus they had not given enough weight to the validity and — and — and actually value of — I mean women are the same as men in most things. But they make slightly different choices. And those slightly different choices may not always make men, especially men like that, understand them. It’s not understandable. They — they — they make different compromises and so on. And they — and they do treat certain relationships as more important than men do. Now that’s just an average. I don’t want to make this statement about men and women because to me all personalities are on the bell curve and they overlap, you know. If you — if you tried to separate men’s personalities from women’s personalities and put them on a bell curve, you know, they would almost totally overlap.
Question: What about Analytical versus Direct Perceptions?
Fifth Question Restated: Yeah. I wasn’t actually — I specifically said it’s not about gender.
George: Yeah. OK.
Fifth Question Restated: It’s about polarity.
George: Polarity, yeah.
Fifth Question Restated: And — we’ll just keep it simple. Masculine is more analytical and we would say that feminine is more able — so it’s a way of perceiving that isn’t about the analytical mind —
George: Right.
Fifth Question Restated: — and this seemed to be a lack of, I don’t know, pointing to or saying —
George: Pointing to the emotions —
Fifth Question Restated: Well, not the emotions. No — no — no, it’s about perception.
George: Perception.
Fifth Question Restated: — without the analytical part of the mind.
George: Okay, well, so I don’t want to be — to be too direct about this, but dead white males are highly represented, you know, in — in — in the discussion.
Fifth Question Restated: Right.
George: And — and that — most of them were brown, I should say. But — but dead males. And so the — the idea that women had actually — the idea that women had that pushed forward saying, you know, all you — I hate this overhang of all these ideas of these dead white males. And that was listened to, and that was tried to be understood. In what way — or did we not listen — to that idea? And that was influential in the decisions. But, you know, still the attempt here is to explain analytically what the idea is — what the idea shift is. And therefore it might sound that way. But the hope is for everyone’s emotions — especially for the fear to be decreased. Because of fear — the definition of fear that we have is that fear is the emotion caused by the anticipation of unhappiness. So you anticipate unhappiness is coming your way, and that’s why you’re afraid of it. If it’s extreme unhappiness, you have extreme fear and you — you go unconscious or whatever. You faint because you just can’t deal with it. And that passion is the emotion caused by the anticipation of happiness. That’s — and so you actually can tell a tremendous amount about every person’s personality by their passions and their fears, because it gives away exactly what they think will make them happy and what they think will make them unhappy. And a lot of sales managers, and everything, unconsciously manipulate this all the time, because they have a gut feeling for that and play with it. But — the passions are more valuable than the fears. We’re trying to get rid of the fears. The passions wouldn’t, you know, go away. At least minimize the fears. There’s no way to get rid of them all, probably, but that we — we — we’ve scared ourselves silly for so long with these ideas, especially the idea that there will be some punishment or reward. Or — or, you know, in the case of karma that there are these mountains of karmas you have to — bad karma you have to go through. Now you can cut through them all with this enlightenment theory. But that’s — it’s a little like cheating, you know. It’s like it takes away the theory of karma because it says it really is avoidable anyway and therefore it really can be gotten around. It’s a little bit like the idea that if you read all of the Buddhist sutras that you’ll become enlightened. And so people say that’s great, but I don’t have time. So enlightenment isn’t that important, I have got to do something else, and therefore what should I do? Well, some smart monk said, well, if we put all of the sutras in a drum and we go around that drum 108 times, you can also get rid of all your thing and become enlightened. It’s — it’s — there’s always a way around the theory for people, because the analysis is — is too difficult, is too long, too realistic. In this case we’re saying it looks likely that there is no end, and therefore if you’re going to enjoy yourself, why not now? And why not do it intelligently? Why not? You know, we’re not saying just throw all caution to the wind and do whatever you want to. Because lots of things people desire don’t prove to be enjoyable. And it all depends on your personality whether they’re enjoyable or not. And so we don’t have a set of serious suggestions about this.
Question: Is This the Same Concept as Personal Sovereignty?
Sixth Question: Could you also speak to personal sovereignty?
George: Yeah.
Sixth Question: The idea that we are sovereign beings.
George: Right.
Sixth Question: Because it seems that you didn’t use the word, but it seems like it was a thread that ran through everything that you were talking about.
George: Didn’t use the word, but absolutely. You’re in charge — no matter who you submit to and obey or do anything like that. The conclusion is that obedience is probably a vice and that virtue — and that voluntary cooperation is a virtue. Okay. So Jesus said, actually, in the discussion — he said, you know, I don’t think that the people will be able to tell the difference between obedience and voluntary cooperation. And the difference obviously is do you just obey somebody else’s will or do they persuade you to cooperate. And so he was in the discussions — Jesus told me that he was complaining about that — and Maharishi said, well Jesus — 2,000 years ago, Good Shepherd, people did follow like sheep. But today it’s like herding cats. I think that they can tell the difference between voluntary cooperation and — and obedience. So the — the time has run out. But I will take one more question, I think, right? And then we’ll have more later. Go ahead.
Question: Why No Female Perspective?
Seventh Question: An observation. And it’s a follow-on to the other gentleman’s question. Because in the whole discussion about the committee meeting, it really stood out to me — there is no woman’s voice there.
George: Right.
Seventh Question: And if you ever happen to be privy to one of these meetings, I would like that question asked. Because I think especially now in the 21st century the — a woman’s voice from wisdom and from power from the heart would really open up the discussion and — and change the dynamic of it. And I think that that is our historical time now — to speak up as women. Not in contradiction to men, but to add fullness to the discussion, so that there’s more of the heart value coupled with the spirituality and the understanding of that. And I think that the whole conversation at those levels, if it does in fact take place as you experienced, would — would change. And I think that it would be much fuller and broader if — if there were actual voices of women present, not through interpretation, but actually being there.
George: Absolutely. And that’s completely on the Movement’s schedule. I mean, obviously, after 5,000 years, everybody being men that’s in the Movement — it’s, you know, it’s time for the club to open up its doors.
Contradicting Us Is Highly Useful
So — but I don’t think you should say “not in contradiction to men”. The people who have contradicted us have actually done us more favors than the people who have just said great. It’s nice — it’s nice to have support. But intelligent, constructive criticism of these ideas — even sometimes violently-worded constructive criticism of our ideas — has actually proved far more useful than anything else. In the Middle Ages there was a whole long discussion about how Aristotle and Plato didn’t get along, and everything like that. If you had a student like Aristotle, you wouldn’t say — no matter what he did and what he said, he was extremely instrumental in making a different viewpoint and bringing things more down to earth — extremely valuable, and there was no fight. It was — it was wonderful. And so — contradictions, constructive criticisms, even violent outbursts that have at least some semblance of sense — all helped the conversation. And everybody’s hoping that the conversation opens up to everyone.
Seventh Question: Well, it would be a different conversation, you know, with the voice of women.
George: Yeah.
Seventh Question: It would — it would change the dynamic of it. But it wouldn’t necessarily lead to an argument, per se. It wouldn’t necessarily be an intellectual dialogue, or an intellectual debate, but it would just be a completely different dynamic. And I just really feel from women that I’ve known, especially in the generation after mine, there’s — it’s amazing how full some of these women are. And I think that that’s an expression of the time. That it really is time for —
George: Yeah. It’s way past —
Seventh Question: — for there to be like number 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 — so it’s — it’s a bigger group.
George: It’s way, way past the time. Way, way past the time. But one of the conclusions is that some women understand happiness intuitively better than we have. And experience happiness — and experience a more — an attractive — a more attractive emotional life than we have had. And that’s intrigued us very much. And that’s all part of the observation. And we’re looking forward to the conversation — and we’re looking forward to more conversations. Thank you very much. We’re going to — oh —
Question: Why Any Gender Identity?
Eighth Question: This’ll be the last question. What she said brought to mind something that confused me when you first mentioned it.
George: Yeah.
Eighth Question: And that is — why are beings of light gendered? How can you say we’re all men? Haven’t you been both men and women? And masculine —
George: I have been a woman.
Eighth Question Continued: So what does it mean to say all these — these group on this committee are all men?
George: Yeah, well, you’re right. That’s a very good way to put it. But everyone on the committee has been male for the last 5,000 years that I know of, and that they know of. That doesn’t mean anything about this, because, as you said, beings of light are neither male nor female. But your personality leans towards one or the other — or both. You might experience this enjoyably one time. You — there — there’s an — a whole range of experience in sex as well. And the whole issue about our sexual behavior and where that comes from is all related. And it’s not that people are — if they’re gay — that they’re confused that they used to be a woman — or a man and want to be that again, or anything like that. It is that they enjoyed this experience and that they make this a lot. I mean, that’s not to say that there isn’t some of that. I mean people are confused about everything. But it’s not to say that. But everyone has experience. Where do they get pleasure from? What relationships do they get the most pleasure from? And it was Maharishi’s — Maharishi came back having looked over the shoulders of many people, and said, we don’t understand this. We don’t understand this. Because some people have the most fantastic spiritual experiences even during sex. And that that is something we have to understand. It’s all about how they approach the experience, how valuable that other person is to them, how they are habitually reacting to those other people. That that is what creates the experience. And not — this is wrong and this is right. That’s difficult to convey, because it can’t be conveyed as a set of rules. But you’re — you’re — you’re absolutely right that the spiritual beings are neither female nor male — that there’s —they say, you know, yeah, we won’t bring him up. I was just going to say — a lot of people say that Satan made me do it. But, you know, Satan has no interest. He has, you know — he has no male- or femaleness. You know, if he exists he’s a being of light. But he’s a miserable one, and we’re gonna take care of him too — thank you very much.
[Note: This transcript was created for the 5th Anniversary of the 30thNovember talk at Jerry Jarvis’s request.]