No Value in Believing
So I’ve been asked by some old friends of mine to pull back the curtain on human history. To play Toto, as it were. And that’s what we’re going to do today. The first thing that I want to tell you about it is that belief is irrelevant to the situation. In most circumstances like this, I would be asking you to put aside your own judgment and just believe whatever I have to say. But that’s actually counterproductive this time and I think by the end of the presentation of this information you’ll understand why. Even if I was a 50-foot tall blue genie standing here you shouldn’t believe in me or believe what I have to say or believe any of the information because — it’s a little bit like if you’re working in your backyard, doing the gardening, and you see an ant hill. And the ants are all scurrying around and you’re watering the garden and suddenly the water is pouring into the anthill. And you save the ants by taking your heel and you dig a trench and the water goes in another direction and the ants all come out and say, “thank you for saving our lives. What is the meaning of life?” And of course whatever your belief is you’ll tell them. And there’s no point to them believing you simply because of power. So we’re going to try — one idea today is that power — or influence — should not be the measure of an idea’s usefulness — its reasonableness to yourself. Now — another step and another important step of this is — even if you think this is reasonable and makes sense you can still ignore it anyway. Like the valid information that smoking leads to cancer. A lot of people know that’s true and smoke anyway.
And so you can ignore it. This is free will. This is what life is — is a free will action. And what we’re trying to do — my friends and I — is share with you some information, a different way of looking at something, a different way of looking at life, which has been — sort of — organized by a committee meeting — a discussion that took place after Maharishi died.
So I’ll tell you that story in just a second. But it’s important — the people that I’m going to be talking about are extraordinary individuals. They’ve had an enormous influence on human history. And that does not mean that just because they believe this that you need to believe it either. Even there you need to pick your own way through the world.
But this advice is persuasive to them and you have found them very persuasive in the past. So it should be very interesting to hear what they have to say. But at the same time even these individuals now say that no one knows themself completely. So even though these individuals have followed the path of Know Thyself for thousands of years, they still don’t know yourself [Note: “themselves” is meant here] completely. There’s just too much information for anyone to grasp everything. And so that’s a very important part, before I start, is to say that this is a rational explanation of something and that rational explanation either resonates with you or doesn’t. You might be totally persuaded. You might be totally unpersuaded. Or you might be partially persuaded. And I will say again that out of the group of individuals who gave me this information most are fully persuaded. But some are only partially persuaded about a couple of ideas and I’ll make that clear. And therefore there — this is not unanimous on every point. But it’s unanimous on some very interesting things.
Mary’s Unexpected Death
And therefore I’ll tell you how this all got started. It’s a sad start. My sister Mary, the second in a family of 12 children, came to visit her son — her only son — and her two grandchildren for Christmas last year. And on Christmas Eve — Christmas night I should say — she developed pain in her heart, went into the hospital with her son. The next morning he called me up. She had been diagnosed with an aortic dissection, a very painful thing, and she was in very good health. Many of you may know her — her name is Mary Iber — so she had to undergo an operation. She underwent the operation. Four days later everything seemed to be going well. So she came to my house to recover and she was tired. But it seemed like the recovery was going to be fine and we put her to sleep and the next morning she didn’t wake up early and we let her sleep in. And then we discovered at about 3:00 in the afternoon that she had passed away during the night.
Now I know — especially with the age of a lot of people that are involved in the TM movement -plus everybody else that’s listening. This is an experience that everybody has with their family members. And we had to take care of all the details for the next couple of hours with the police coming and so on.
The Experience — First Part
And when that was all done I decided to take a shower. So I looked at the clock when I went in. It was about 6:10 in the evening. And I got into the shower. Within about two minutes after I was in the shower, she began talking to me. My sister who had passed away three hours earlier.
Now — I’m not particularly prejudiced against dead people. But I haven’t really carried on a lot of conversations with them in my life. I have had a few experiences. Conversations with living people are exotic enough at times, so I haven’t really pursued this. But I have had a few other goodbyes from other relatives. And I had one interesting experience with a high school classmate who was trying to reach her sister — 20 years ago. And so I have had a few experiences like this over the years. And I know a lot of you have too. A lot of you. Not everybody. But many people have gotten goodbyes from their relatives just before they left. And everybody is embarrassed to talk about this because it doesn’t seem rational. And I’m going to try, by the end of the lecture, to show how rational actually that is compared to the way we look at things. And so — that said — my sister talked to me and I recognized her. How did I recognize my sister? I recognized her by her voice. It was her voice in my ear, at first while I was taking the shower. And I’d just talked to her last night and of course I grew up with her. It’s unmistakable — unmistakable presence — unmistakable voice. And what she had to say.
So she talked to me for a while and when I realized that it was going to go on a long time, I got out of the shower and I lay down on the bed. And she talked to me for about 20 minutes. And she gave me a lot of different pieces of information that she wanted conveyed to different members of our family — this large family that I just described. My wife — not my wife, my sister — really liked to try to heal people, you know, where relationships had gone wrong and stuff like that. So she had little things to say about different experiences like that that she wanted me to convey. She also gave me certain information that proved to be accurate about things that she requested. She wanted to have her cremation done in a certain way and she gave me information about what the possibility was — that turned out to be accurate. A few things like that.
So after about 20 minutes she brought my parents into the conversation. And my parents died in — my father in the year 2000 and my mother in the year 2008 [Note: 2009 is the correct year for my mother]. And she brought them into the conversation and they talked to me for a little while also — conveying messages to family members. And while we were talking, my sister moved away. The easiest way to describe it — she moved away and out of the conversation. And I know — that the timing — because 6:35 — I looked at the watch — at the clock in the room — right at the time that my — right after my parents came — to see how long — so that I had an idea about the time that that had taken.
And after my parents were finishing up, and as they were finishing up, then my sister came back into the picture and she was holding Maharishi by the hand. And Maharishi was about this tall. And he had a big mischievous grin on his face. And he looked like a little boy actually and my sister was holding him by the hand and they walked into the picture. And then she let go of his hand and he walked towards me and as he walked towards me he grew up to his full height. And then he took my hand and we started talking.
Maharishi’s Explanation of his History and Personality
I’ll get back to more details about that experience. But Maharishi wanted me at this point to explain something about himself that he learned after he died. Now before I start explaining that, I think everyone here live probably knows who Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is. But this group of individuals who are giving this information assume that this information is going to spread widely and therefore they would like me to describe something about Maharishi to everybody. So Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — quite a famous teacher in the late 20th century in the United States and all around the world. He was a man with a really big heart and a big vision about what to do. And he compacted all that energy into just over five feet tall. And he went as a young man, a college student, to a lecture by one of the famous gurus of the time — a man named Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. And he immediately wanted to be with this man, as his guru, as is a habit and a tradition in India. And when he made that decision, he told his guru I want to stay with you. And his guru — who I will call Guru Dev — that’s exactly what Maharishi called him all the time — so I’ll call him Guru Dev. Guru Dev told him to finish college first and then come. So Maharishi finished college. He came and joined his guru. And a few months after that his guru, Guru Dev, was appointed the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math, which is the northern seat. A man named Shankara in India more than a thousand years ago established four seats of Vedantic wisdom in India and Maharishi’s teacher was appointed to one of those. Well, “appointed” isn’t the right word to use — talked into it over a long period of time — into becoming the Shankaracharya. So he took the post and Maharishi worked for him for many years. And after Guru Dev died, Maharishi withdrew from the world for a little while. And then came out and started teaching in the late 50s in India and by 1958, so, he started to travel outside India and then eventually traveled all around the world. And Maharishi was known for a lot of things. He was known for his infectious laugh. He was known for giving and receiving flowers all the time. And he was known for thousands and thousands of lectures on the process of transcending — which we’ll go into a little bit later — the higher states of consciousness which that’s supposed to lead to, and on several ideas in Vedic scriptures — the ancient scriptures that underlie Indian culture.
Maharishi also wrote commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita and other Vedic scriptures. He approached this whole task with a great deal of energy and over a very long period of time. Because for more than 50 years he taught what he eventually called Transcendental Meditation — within the first five years of teaching. He taught it for years and years. He had organized the TM movement — I’ll just call it the TM movement — it had many names over the years. And he reorganized it and reorganized it. But he developed all that. But he also did something else in the middle of creating an organization that taught tens of thousands of people to teach TM and taught millions of people meditation. He individually paid attention to thousands of individuals and I’m sure almost everybody who’s in the room and many of you watching online are those individuals. And if you think of your own life at this point — how many individuals did you touch personally that much in your life? It’s very, very hard to count over 100 or 200 or 300. Maharishi touched thousands of individuals personally and that is almost his greatest legacy. That’s almost the thing that he prefers people to remember him by. Because of those individual relationships with lots of people. So that’s a little bit about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There’s lots of other information online. But that’s the man we’re talking about.
He died after this very productive life — on February 5th, 2008. And he immediately plunged into a spiritual crisis. He himself told me that’s what I want you to call it. It was not exactly the same kind of spiritual crisis that other people have. It was a slightly different level. But his crisis was caused by two things. And may I say too here that it’s not my habit to talk about other people’s personalities in public. Just like everybody else, we like talking about it in private — about other people’s personalities. It’s always enjoyable. But we don’t do it in public. And that’s my habit too. And so I want to make this very clear that the information about Maharishi and about several other individuals — they gave me personally, asking me to convey it. This is not my opinion about them.
So Maharishi, after this productive life, told me that he had this spiritual crisis. It was caused by two major factors. The first factor was that he did not merge with the Absolute — which according to Vedic teaching he had at least a 50/50 thought that he might do. He wasn’t sure but he thought it would happen. So that didn’t happen. That surprised him a little bit but not too much. But what came next surprised him even more. He decided to go around and look at the reaction to his death from all of the people that he had been teaching — all of his TM teachers — all the people he’d put in charge of his organization. And he found such a wide variety of reactions that he was really surprised — and a wide variety of behavior which he found unsettling.
And so he started doing something else. He started going around to the people that he had attracted early in the movement, who had not taught for a while, to see what those people were doing too. And he looked and he saw and he looked and he saw. And he said he spent almost two years doing this. And when it was done he thought to himself what a lot of people at the end of a very productive life sometimes think. What was that all about?
You know, I worked so hard to try to create something beautiful, something long-lasting, something great. I worked with really good information. I worked with great wisdom. And my results go from very good to good to poor to fair to awful. And what is it about that I’ve done that makes that happen? How come I can’t just have good results? So that was his reaction. That’s the basis. He was in a cheerful enough mood. But it was not, you know, it wasn’t a depressing spiritual crisis, I should say. But it was a very intriguing one. And what comes next, I think for all of you here, and many, many of you online, you should feel you are a part of this creation of this set of ideas. Because he looked over your shoulders. You may have noticed. You may not have noticed. But he contributed — you probably each contributed something to this. And I know of a few individuals who I’ve already conveyed that to. Maharishi wants that known. And also wants it known, that all the people that contributed to the TM movement — all have made a great contribution to what’s about to happen.
So what did Maharishi do? He was most upset about one thing. He was most upset because he realized that he had put the needs of the TM movement in front of the needs of his friends. He should have kept his friends in front of the movement. He gave me an analogy. He said, you know the TM movement was a little bit like going on a vacation. You’re going to have a lot of fun. It was going to be a great adventure. We’re going to go on this vacation together. And I was having a lot of fun. But somehow the car broke down and I got mad that the car broke down. And I ruined the vacation by being upset about the car having broken down, rather than just saying let’s all go play in the field here as long as the car broke down. And so his analogy for what happened over the 50 years of the TM movement is that.
So Maharishi went where he would always go before. He went to Guru Dev. His teacher — who also still exists. And said to him, this is what happened. This is my experience. I feel terrible because I feel that I put what I was working on ahead of my friendships and I should’ve put my friendships against — ahead — of what I was working on. And Guru Dev agreed with him. And said OK, let’s do what you want. Maharishi wanted to have a meeting of the Holy Tradition. The Holy Tradition — I’ll explain — are a large number of very important, very influential gurus in India that led up to Shankara and followed Shankara. Shankara is famous enough so I’m using his name. That doesn’t mean that he’s more important than the others in the Holy Tradition. It’s just the most obvious name. So Guru Dev and Maharishi called the meeting of the Holy Tradition. Now it sounds a little odd. But everybody was still there. And they got together and started talking. And when they talked, one of the things that they decided to do was to increase the discussion to what I’ll call the Movement — capital M Movement. It’s very ancient. Because there are, besides the Holy Tradition members, there was something larger than that. So I’ll say a little bit about this Movement. The Movement started somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. It started with a kind of un-thought-out idea — let’s improve the human race. Now the Movement has sometimes fallen for its own PR, and thought it was fine. But the actual idea about the Movement was pretty simple. They called it the Movement because any movement in the direction of humanity in what was preferred by the people in the Movement was good enough. So any movement was good enough. So it’s fairly modest, a fairly modest idea. But of course it didn’t keep modest because of the accomplishments of the people that were involved.
So that was the discussion. Other members that were not in the Holy Tradition, but other members of the Movement, were called into the discussion. And that discussion took place over a two-year period. So it was a very detailed discussion. And they compared notes. Comparing notes — meaning, as they called it — they compared notes about all their experiences. Now these individuals have a large amount of experience about enlightenment, states of enlightenment, states of consciousness, as Maharishi did, and talked about it as he described it. And they compared notes about what they accepted and what they didn’t. And in that group, of course, there are a large number of people who had had the experience Maharishi had — which was they were very surprised when they died and they did not merge with the Absolute. So these individuals had this discussion. And it is the result of that discussion that is going to be given today.
At the end of that discussion — it’s been about two years since they finished the discussion — they were looking for an opportunity to present this information. And it was unfortunately my sister’s death that opened the door for that opportunity — on January 2nd at the beginning of this year [2014].
The Experience — Second Part
So Maharishi asked me to tell you a little bit more about the experience so that you would have an idea of exactly what I experienced so that you can draw your own conclusions about that.
So when Maharishi came up to me, having left my sister’s hand, he held out his hand and I touched it and as I touched it Maharishi lost his mask. So I’m going to describe this a little bit. Everyone that I discussed was a being of light, as you’d call it. The discussion was very normal in many ways and it was abnormal in other ways. But the beings of light I can describe in several different ways. The beings of light looked mostly — when they were further away — a little bit like a frosted light bulb used to be — when covering the being of light — so that it was just a soft glow of light coming out from that being, from that person.
But there were also people who put a mask in front of them. That is — something that they knew you would identify with them. And that mask is something that’s very important because they -they can understand in your mind how you are going to find somebody that you know. How do you recognize them? For example, Maharishi’s mask — when I first saw him other than that he was a little boy — looked like about 50-55 year old version of Maharishi, because that’s when I spent my time with him. Other people who have experienced anything like that have seen him looking at different ages — usually the age at which you made your great attachment to that person because that’s what you’re going to do. My parents, for example, appeared to me as if they were 65 and 70 years old and not 85 as when they died. And so — that’s one element I wanted to talk about so that you had that idea.
The other element of the experience was that as soon as I touched Maharishi’s hand his mask dropped. And he was a being of light but not glowing luminous. He had many points which were brilliant — white light flowing out of him — and his hand when it was touching my hand felt a little bit like a sparkler. Maybe a Fourth of July sparkler. All kinds of energy flowing from my hand to his and back.
And then he said — another old friend of yours is here too. And I saw Jesus who came to join. He had been in the meeting as well. And he also did the same thing. He looked like 30 years old, slightly wispy beard — not that far off of some of the things [Note: abstract reference to famous images of Jesus]. But he also — as soon as he touched my hand — turned into a being where the light was a little bit like a skeleton. It sort of formed a skeleton — sort of formed arms and the light was pouring out of centers. I’m not going to try to identify those centers with any tradition. It’s just the way that the persons appeared. And so I held their hands and they held each other’s hands and we talked for 90 minutes.
And they conveyed the information to me that I’m going to convey to you. They conveyed to me large amounts of information. And it was done visually. It was done in words. It was done in a normal conversation. And it was done telepathically — all different forms. All those things were going on simultaneously.
And I want to tell you a couple jokes about it actually, because it was very funny. At one point Maharishi said something — which as you’ll hear these things — some of them are fairly outrageous. He said something fairly outrageous. And I said, “Maharishi! You know — the Holy Tradition will never stand for that!” And he said, “oh yes they will.” And I said, “How do you know?” He said, “they’re all here.” And so I looked up — as you can understand — as you can imagine, I’m sure — my attention was fairly localized to the — to the description of the conversation that I was having.
This was about 30 minutes into the conversation. And he said, “No, no. They’re all onboard. No — nothing to worry about.” And I said, “Really?” And he said, “yes. OK they’re here.” And then I looked over his shoulder and behind him were about eight to ten beings who I couldn’t identify. And one standing in front of them, the one standing in front of them was Guru Dev. And as all TM teachers know — I mean I had never met Guru Dev in person. Most of you I’m sure never did. I don’t think you could be alive if you’re still — if you had met him. So what image do we have of Guru Dev? We have it from the puja.
So Guru Dev is standing there in front of eight to ten other beings and he’s sitting cross-legged like this — up in the air with the rest of his being being light — he’s sitting cross-legged exactly like the picture. And he’s laughing. And then he says, “it’s ok,” he put his thumb up, and then he took his legs and uncrossed them and set them down and then his mask disappeared. Just like that. It was just an image to let me know who he was, because I couldn’t identify him. The only person I could identify in the group was Shankara. So he was there and there were only eight or ten people. So I said to Maharishi, “you said the whole Holy Tradition is behind this. There’s only ten people there. That’s not the whole Holy Tradition.” And Maharishi said, “yes it is. That’s everybody.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “yes. The ten of us have played all the roles in the Holy Tradition over the last 5,000 years.”
So — then I looked to Jesus and I said, “So — you know — you had a discussion — we were discussing the fact that he had been discussing these ideas with them as well — and I said, “So what about —.” He said, “yeah, he’s here too.” And I looked behind — over Jesus’s shoulder. And the other member of the Movement is somebody who not in anyone’s known history, or known memory, has taken human form.
We have a new nickname for him. It’s fairly recent. It’s “He who must not be named.” And he presented himself as a cloud — a cloud — a luminous cloud — very large — it was Jehovah. So the conversation started again. And we went on for the next 60 minutes and they conveyed this information to me.
Explanation of the Movement’s History
So now it’s my job, playing Toto and delivery boy here, to convey the decisions that were made by this group — and the way that the Movement will operate in the future. And to explain how it operated in the past. So the next thing I’m supposed to convey to you is the Movement’s history.
As — as we said in the invitation — this is about the Vedic tradition — the history of the Vedic tradition and the history of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Now don’t worry. I know that their discussions took two years. But I’m editing it down, as they edited it down. It’s not going to take two years to convey to you their conclusions. There’s a few things that we can say about what happened during — to give you an idea of the discussions — but I think one thing that’s really important is that they were very lighthearted, very lighthearted discussions, because progress was made so quickly. So the history of the Movement is, as I said, started 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. And it often has had about 20 to 50 core members who have been out to try to improve the human race. And the first thing that was decided — of course human civilization was completely different at that time — the first thing that was decided was that laziness needs to be taken care of. We need to get people out of being lazy. And so righteous anger, righteous fear, the stick and the carrot, were used in order to get people out of being lazy. We had a lot of problems with this.
But — that’s — that’s the way we started. As I said, it wasn’t really well-thought-out. If we’d only known what a little bit of greed could do, we would’ve just used a mild form of capitalism. And everybody wouldn’t be lazy. But we didn’t know. So — we tried this stick and carrot approach. Around the same time was created this theory of karma. The theory of enlightenment — dharma. This whole approach. Because it was thought — and this was all being done in India, by the way, from a — from a geographical point of view. Because it was thought that that would bring order to life. Because it was so chaotic. Lessen the violence. And that the idea of Dharma, the idea that you have something you must do in your life, would have people not be so anxious about what they had to do with their life in order to cut down on the anxiety. But there’s a problem with this approach to life. And that is, without realizing, without thinking it through of course, it implies that human life is sort of worthless. It implies that the only purpose of life is to get off the karmic wheel — is to merge back with the Absolute. And then you have to try to explain why the Absolute did this to us in the first place. And so this difficulty — which has lots and lots of answers over the thousands of years since that got started — the theory that everything is an illusion — Maya. There’s lots of different answers to try to explain that.
But there was something else that happened. Jehovah didn’t like what he was seeing. He didn’t like what he was seeing. What he was seeing was that people developed despair about their ongoing life. Because they developed mountains of bad karma. And they developed millions of years ahead of them of being perfect in order to try to merge. And the whole thing to him sounded like it was debilitating the people, making people less spiritual or less active, less happy in their lives. Now he didn’t tell anybody this — until this meeting — but he decided — even though he believed that that [Note: “that” refers back to the theory of karma, dharma and enlightenment] was the truth — he decided to lie. He decided to lie and experiment. And to try to explain to everyone else in the group that there might be another way to do this. And so he told everybody that he was going to do this experiment about 4,000 years ago. And so he went to a new location, in the Mesopotamian region, and he looked around for a new group of people in which to try an experiment on. And the first thing that he wanted to do was eliminate human sacrifice. He wanted to stop that — especially the babies and the children from being killed to the gods. And so his — his plan, his experiment — if you call it a divine plan, he wants me to make it clear he’s just another individual. But his plan was to make an experiment on this new group of human beings. So, as I said, he looked around. Lots of people failed his test and then — then he conversed with Abraham. Abram at the time. His name was changed as everyone knows in the tradition. And he found Abraham to be kind of obstinate. And he liked that. He liked it that he asked questions back to him. He liked it and he thought maybe I’ve got something here that I can work with. So he started working with him and he promised him a child, even though they were old. They weren’t as old as in the Bible. You know if you went to a fertility clinic now you could probably get the same operation taken care of. But his wife had a baby at a fairly ancient age — 45 or something — and therefore it was something that convinced Abraham that God, that Jehovah in this case, was working for him, was working with him.
And so he was happy. But he wanted to test Abraham. So when Isaac was a teenager he said we had had these discussions, Abraham and Jehovah, about how terrible he thought the gods were, being sacrificed children to, and so on. And he wanted to put an end to that. So he had had all those discussions with Abraham and Abraham was onboard. Yeah we’re all totally against that. Absolutely. That’s great.
So when he asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he was hoping Abraham would say, “no way. What about our discussions? You said that you don’t want human sacrifices. Now you’re asking me for one. What good was it for me to switch from my god to you? If that’s —.”
That was the answer that Jehovah wanted. That was the A plus answer. He didn’t get that answer. He got the B plus answer — which was: I’ll go up the mountain. I’ll be very reluctant. Can you can stop this from happening? And so on. And it did get stopped from happening, of course. And Jehovah decided — I can work with this. I can work with this. I got a B plus — didn’t get an A plus — but I got a B plus answer. I’m going to work with this group of people. And I’m going to make a covenant with them and I am going to do my experiment — see if I can eliminate this idea of merger with God. If I eliminate the idea of karma. And I eliminate some of these other ideas. And I just tell them to think a little bit more about their neighbors. To not only be self-centered, etc. So he came up with his own ideas about it. This is of course far before the Ten Commandments.
And so that’s the way it proceeded. Now — can’t tell the whole history. The history is fairly well known. But it was a very difficult thing to create belief in people about this. And, in addition, as I said, Jehovah knew he was lying the whole time about what he was doing. Or he really believed that he was lying about it, because he believed in the theory that he was trying to experiment against. And so he was under pressure — didn’t always behave himself as calmly as — as one would expect. But he decided to create more belief using a prophetic approach. Now the prophets were effective in creating more belief because the evidence was laid down, the markers were laid down in advance, and then team members were brought in.
So now I would tell you a little bit more about Maharishi. Because Maharishi, in those first two years, he also was able to discover his own past, his own past personalities, his own experience and why he is the way he is. So I’m going to tell you a little about that now. Maharishi found in uncovering his own memories that most of the time he was a religious reformer. He would take a set of ideas, clear out the detritus of the years that get in the way, and — and polish it up and hand it back to the people in a way that made them inspired to live better lives again, to be more virtuous in life. That’s the main thing he did.
But he didn’t only do that in the Vedic tradition. He also was both Elijah and John the Baptist, working for Jehovah. In addition to that he told me that he was a family man sometimes and that he really enjoyed being a family man, a husband and father. And he told me that there are dozens of you in this room who were his sons or his daughters or his parents. And that we often develop extremely strong attachments to people based on that and that that’s where our connection comes from. And that connection is the source of your feeling so quickly. So many people here quickly got involved when they heard that Maharishi was coming to town — or anything — didn’t even know it. Because there’s an ancient connection. But he did want me to point out that although our best friends come from family relationships, sometimes our worst enemies also come from family relationships. And therefore it’s not simply a straightforward “you were in my family, you were my best friend” kind of thing. Because our relationships in our own families are not perfect, are not just lighthearted. And so that also he wanted me to point out. So Maharishi had that experience about it. And I’ll tell you a little bit more detail about that later — how it happened. But in understanding himself — like that — that’s really what gave him the idea that he had put his friends not far enough forward versus the TM movement. Because he had done it to his own children in a way. I know there’s a Buddhist idea like this as well, that maybe you’ve been family members with everybody. Well you know even with a long period of time it won’t be everybody. But there’re definitely some connections that you develop over a long period of time.
So — to go back to the history of the Movement with Jehovah’s experiment. We call this the Jehovah project. That’s — that’s the way it’s discussed. And in the Jehovah project he turned to prophets putting markers down ahead of time with other ones, and then having someone come through and do exactly what he said was going to be done, in order to try to develop a system of beliefs in a more virtuous way of living. And as I said, Maharishi played the role of Elijah.
The next part of the project is the Jesus Project. The prophetic approach didn’t work as well as Jehovah’d hoped and so he wanted to have a very big project. And that big project is the Jesus Project. And Jesus was recruited — well-known to Jehovah already — and Maharishi was recruited to be John the Baptist. And this team was supposed to get an idea out. And the idea was a very simple idea. The idea was that you can overcome your fear of death through virtue. That you can become good enough, strong enough inside, that you will not be afraid of death. That was the basis of that project.
Of course that’s not how it turned out. And there are three reasons why it didn’t turn out that way. One of the reasons was that there was some misunderstanding between Maharishi, who in this case — John the Baptist, and Jesus. They had some misunderstanding about exactly how they were supposed to play their roles in leading this project for Jehovah. And whatever that misunderstanding was — is also something that has influenced Maharishi’s life. Because Maharishi’s personal experiences are influenced by two big emotional experiences. The first emotional experience that he explained — I’m going back to now Maharishi’s history — the first big emotional experience that he explained was that he was at the Mahasamadi of Bhrigu. Bhrigu is an ancient seer in India — about 5,000 years ago. And the day after [Note: that is, on January 3, 2014] Maharishi had discussed this with me the first time, he showed me a visual of Bhrighu’s Mahasamadi. A Mahasamadi is when a sage who is — theoretically anyway — enlightened dies. And should be the last moment of his individual life. And Bhrigu — Bhrighu’s Mahasamadi was done in public in front of maybe 10,000 people 5,000 years ago. He was on a stage. Maybe some of you were there. So on a stage with lots of people out in front. And on the stage with him were his wife and his four sons. His wife sat on the dias next to him and the first two sons were to the left — to the left — and the third and the fourth son were to the right. And Maharishi showed me this picture.
It’s a picture that I have known for many, many years as well. Because I remember this event as well. And Maharishi showed me the picture and he showed me several things all at once. He showed me that he was the third son of Bhrigu on that stage. And he showed me — as many of you in the TM movement know — that he got two ideas from this that sunk in very deeply. One was he liked to be on the dias in the middle with two — four people [total] — on either side of him. A lot. He often had pundits do it or whatever. But if you just think back of all the times you saw him. He liked to sit on stage on a dias in the middle with — he said that he was trying to be his father. That was the image in his own mind that he was trying to recreate.
And the other experience he told me was that he picked the name Maharishi — which there’s a lot of dispute about. He picked that name Maharishi because Bhrigu is called Maharishi Bhrigu often. And he liked that name. And he unconsciously picked that name, he said. But that was why he picked the name — because of his father.
Now go back to the John the Baptist experience. How that influenced Maharishi was — as — most of you know the story. John the Baptist was killed early on in that process. And he was wondering why Jesus hadn’t come to save him. And he felt deeply, unconsciously, this was helped to remember — Jesus helped him to remember this at the meeting — that he felt deeply in some unconscious way that he did not get credit for what he had done. And as a result of that feeling — that underlying feeling — and not just in the TM movement but many other organizations which Maharishi started as a religious reformer in the last 2,000 years — he had a tendency to sweep aside leaders who were too popular, who were too personally popular, because he felt in some way that he wouldn’t be able to keep control over his organization, over what he wanted to teach, if other strong individuals rose too high in the esteem of other people. And some of you have had that experience. And he wanted to explain that. That that was his unconscious reason for doing it — and, again, that he put the needs of his movement ahead of his friends and family members. So that’s what he wanted me to convey about his personal experiences.
The Jesus project — to get back to it. Besides the misunderstanding — by the way, during the two-year meeting Jesus and Maharishi had a long discussion, and whatever that misunderstanding was — because that was not conveyed to me — whatever the misunderstanding was is completely gone.
So the second part that went wrong was that the simplicity of the idea that just you can overcome your fear of death through virtue was too simple to keep the focus on. And the people all wanted something else. They wanted Jesus to be king. They wanted this. They wanted that. And anybody who’s been in a position with a large number of people asking things of you different than what you want to give them — all you have to do is be parents — you’ll know what it would be like with thousands of people asking you the same thing. And so that clear focus of the project started to disintegrate.
But the worst part of that failure of that project — actually, because it’s considered a failure — is that Paul came along three years after Jesus died and he hijacked the entire emotional buildup. And created this idea of some kind of sacrifice that would make up for sins. I’d just like to tell people — and we’ll go into this a little bit later too — Jesus, three or four days before he died, went into the temple and said, “God doesn’t want any sacrifices. That doesn’t mean a thing.” So why would his death be a sacrifice? It doesn’t make any sense.
So — those were the three reasons. But Maharishi and Jesus both wanted me to explain something else about that project and also how deeply involved it was. First of all, many of the people here in this room and also online were involved at that time. And one of the things Maharishi has done this extraordinary thing of coming out and wanting to tell everybody is because he doesn’t want that repeated over and over and over again. As we do. We repeat this over and over again. The same group of people, the same idea, were repeated over and over again. And it’s not necessary to keep repeating that mistake.
But in the theory — or in the stories — one of the very charming parts of the story is that the Twelve Apostles were just fishermen — ignorant fishermen — that Jesus somehow turned into tremendous spiritual leaders. So they wanted me to tell you a few of the characters that were involved in that. Four of the Apostles I’ll explain.
The Apostle Nathaniel was Socrates before he was Nathaniel. And because he was in so much pain about how people reacted to him, both as Socrates and as Nathaniel — Nathaniel died violently as many of us did — he began to not really want to express himself to people anymore. But he found a different way to express his noble emotions — that’s in music. Those of you who know Ancient Greece, there was a way of expressing noble emotions in music — was a very big idea. And so Socrates-Nathaniel returned to that. And he was both Chopin and Rachmaninov.
Now, Apostle Thomas, doubting Thomas. He still doubts the way humans live their lives. But he was the Flemish humanist, Peter Gillis, who was a friend of Erasmus. And more recently he was Henry David Thoreau, the writer.
The Apostle Peter had been a high priest in Ancient Egypt. And he connected with one of the members of the Movement then. And became involved as a helper with the Movement. And he, with his particularly passionate, both political and military, leadership skills — after he was Peter, he was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was Richard the Lionhearted. And he was Frederick the Great and other leaders like that. Particularly passionate, particularly strong military — you remember the story about Peter chopping off the guard’s knife — off the guard’s ear — when they came to get Jesus. That’s the way — impulsive way — that he reacted to things.
The Apostle John was Benjamin, the youngest of the 12 sons of Jacob. There were other members who had been among the 12 original members of the Jewish tradition — of the Jewish tribes — who were among the twelve apostles. They weren’t — there was not an identical 12 for 12. But there were several that were involved. One was the youngest son Benjamin, who was the Apostle John, as I said. Particularly charming person, humorous, very intelligent. And he, in his gospel, says that “I’m the one that Jesus loved”. He gets a little flack from this sometimes. But it really was true. He — they had a long, enduring relationship and Jesus knew him well from before. And trusted him with all the matters that had to do with his — with Jesus’s own family. Because they had this strong relationship from before.
And one other thing, one other person, that we wanted to tell the story about. Because part of what we’re trying to explain is how our individual lives continue — continue — continue. And how we keep expressing ourselves. And sometimes going over the same ground over and over again. And the other one is Jesus’s brother, James. Jesus’s brother James, who ran the Jerusalem church afterwards, was the oldest son of Jacob — Reuben. That’s who he was before. Since then — he was Erasmus and he was Jonathan Swift. And he still identifies poverty too much with spirituality. But his penetrating sense of humor is erasing that over time.
Those are five of the characters that were involved. As you can tell from their contributions to human culture, these were not simple fishermen. These were people who had power on their own to help. And this was Jehovah’s plan. He wanted to have the prophetic portion of his attempts to be very successful. So he recruited lots of people.
Unfortunately, what happened was a dispersal of energies. Almost everybody didn’t really — although everyone loved talking about Jesus — almost everybody died violently. Almost everybody became a human sacrifice. And we were trying to end human sacrifice. And so everyone sort of gave up on the Jehovah project, which as I said was an experiment.
Except one — and that’s Mohammed. So the last phase when — when Gabriel told Mohammed that he was the last prophet of Jehovah. It’s absolutely true. He was the last person on the Jehovah project team that was working on those ideas. And that actually was an extremely successful project, because it took Arab culture, ignited it and gave it new ideals to work for. And that’s a movement in our direction. And that’s what we aim for. So that was actually a very successful project. And I will get back to that a little bit later.
So that’s a little bit of our history. Most of the history — most of the individuals stayed in the Vedic tradition. And taught and refined and wrote about this idea about enlightenment, ideas of yoga, ideas of karma, dharma. All those ideas were elucidated by this group of say about ten individuals. And Maharishi spent most of his time there. But he did, as I said, several other projects. So that’s a little bit about the history of the Movement.
The Movement’s New Consensus
Now Maharishi wanted me to give you the conclusions of the Movement. The first thing that the discussion concluded was that we tried so many different things that created more fear. And we were trying to get rid of fear. Lots of little things. It was very, very confusing because we would do something very simple and then people would run away with it in a totally different direction. And some of the simplest things created fear. Something as simple as “Love your neighbor as yourself”. You’d think this would not cause any problem. But many people start thinking — love my neighbor as my self? I can’t stand my neighbor. How am I going to do that? That’s too hard for me. Or — does that mean that I can’t stand myself too? So that I can love my neighbor as myself? Because as long as I can’t stand myself, I cannot — not stand my neighbor as well.
And so this taking the ideas and manipulating them in everybody’s individual mind was pretty confusing. But the committee comparing notes decided that one of the reasons for that is because first, it’s a fairly small group — and a self-referential group as they call it today — and everybody has certain kinds of experiences and not enough experiences outside of that. And we realized that what we were trying to do was to change people’s behavior. By trying to change people’s behavior we weren’t successful. We might have changed their behavior and actually we were very happy about a lot of the changes because they were socially productive. As a group things progressed. But individually people became more afraid. So their behavior improved. But their internal life became more fearful.
And this was a very difficult thing to realize. Difficult thing to get through. Because inside the group, people come back — they’re the disciple of one of their old friends. They see each other. They love each other right away. They have these wonderful experiences — mental experiences. Many of you who’ve meditated for a long time know some of those experiences. And how enticing they are. And how you can spend your whole life trying for more and more of them. And this — for people who live this all the time, of course it’s a wonderful experience and a wonderful way to live. But it does have a sort of small viewpoint on what human life is. So trying to change the behavior by causing those things, that’s another one.
So in looking at this from all the different angles — how are we going to be able to inspire people without causing unnecessary fears that we didn’t think of, but that they will think of? What can we do to do that? And there was long, long discussions about this. And in the end the conclusion was that we can’t do anything about that.
Everything that we do to inspire, to make people move forward, may turn out to cause more fear. And so the conclusion was reached to no longer try to inspire anybody, to no longer try to tell stories that aren’t accurate. And a very big part of this conversation was caused by Jehovah admitting that, at the meeting for the first time, that he had lied to everybody about his experiment. And that he’d tried to get rid of human sacrifice — true — but he was also trying to find out if a different set of ideas than this karma theory could work. And work better. Even though he thought it was a true idea. And when he admitted that it opened up the discussion tremendously.
And I’m supposed to tell you that although Maharishi instigated the conversation, along with Guru Dev’s help, the admission by Jehovah about this lie in his experiment, and Shankara’s very keen interest on [Note: “in” is meant] arguing with Jehovah about the ideas, is what led to the consensus that you’re about to hear. It’s really a pretty — and those of you who know Shankara — he’s well known for his love of these rational discussions and always winning them. And so — this is — this is the conversation that took place between these two individuals — and plus everybody else was involved. But they — they spearheaded from totally different viewpoints the consensus that has been reached.
So what are those consensuses? Well, the first conclusion, as I said, is to not inspire anybody any more, to not tell stories, to just explain things. And now that we are a little bit more mature, hopefully, an explanation is often — especially a very good one — is a better inspiration than an inspiration that is designed individually to lead you forward. An explanation that is universal and that everybody can say that probably makes some sense — or makes a lot of sense. And so that approach to explaining, rather than complaining or inspiring, is one of the major decisions that was made. And there are a lot of conclusions that follow from that.
So let’s try out one of the statements that’s a fact but is totally uninspiring. That statement is: no one has ever merged with the Absolute. No one in the Holy Tradition knows of anyone who has ever emerged with the Absolute. No Buddha. No Bodhisattva. It’s possible that there’s somebody that they don’t know of. But they wanted that conveyed — that that enticing goal has never been experienced by anyone. And that they themselves of course have been believed to be in this state. But that they never got there as well — in spite of the fact that they experienced exactly all the criteria that are laid out in the scriptures — which they wrote.
So this discussion took place, as I said, and that conclusion surprised them of course. And that enticing experience they had trouble with. But Maharishi actually was very instrumental in this part of the discussion. Because as I said he had looked over the shoulders of many, many of you. And he said, we think that the best experience has come from just certain types of living. But I found among my TM teachers that many of them do not live what we would call virtuous lives. But they experience extremely interesting spiritual experiences. And therefore this may not be a block to spiritual life after all. Now — it’s the experience of course of most teachers of meditation or an attempt for a spiritual experience — it’s the experience of most of those teachers that anybody who is too obsessed with sex, or too obsessed with making money — you know, as in Jesus saying, you know, it’s harder for a rich man to enter that kingdom of heaven than to go through the eye of a needle. These obsessions seem to get in the way of a simple approach to spiritual life because they aren’t our obsessions. They aren’t the Movement’s obsessions. But by thinking about it from the outside we can see that that really wasn’t the case. That almost every action and every desire is neutral — neutral — and it’s the emotional content you bring, the emotional content of the motives that you bring to your actions, that cause you to have a high quality of happiness or a less enjoyable form of happiness — or misery, in the case of desiring things that cause you misery.
So — so that was another element of the discussion. And that part of the discussion yielded something very unusual. And that was — no more rules. No more commandments. No more behavioral suggestions. It also yielded another explanation for the spiritual experiences. So the first experience that Maharishi, especially to those of you in the TM movement who’ve heard his explanations, wanted you to hear — but also to everybody else in the world — is about the process of transcending. Maharishi used an analogy that you [Note: meaning your thoughts] are like bubbles in water and you go down deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and then you transcend into the Absolute ocean, the Absolute mind that underlies everything. And there are many experiences that can be described that way in meditation. Many of you have had those experiences. But by having all the men in the Holy Tradition — they’re all men — by having all the men in the Holy Tradition — this is another reason why they didn’t have a full opinion of what was going on, because only 50 percent of the experience was being represented — but deep into the ocean, and then you come back out again refreshed.
In analyzing this and discussing this in detail, the gurus of the Holy Tradition came up with another explanation of this event. They think that transcending is caused by two different but fairly similar experiences.
Turning within is merely experiencing your own mind. It’s your own mind. We get very excited about seeing ourselves, about knowing ourselves. It’s a little narcissistic, we know, but that’s the way it is. And when you turn within, if you have any fears, you have what they called a light faint. In physical world if you get too afraid, you faint physically. Down. You’re out. You’re unconscious. Your mind will not accept the fear that it does not want to experience. And so you go unconscious. That’s a very common experience.
In meditation, an analogous situation is that you’re experiencing your mind and your thoughts and something comes up that you really don’t want to face clearly. And by not wanting to face it clearly, you do a light faint inside. So that you’re semi-aware, but not really aware. And so you have this experience of kind of being aware but not being aware at the same time. This experience is now going to be described as a light faint in reaction to your own internal fears.
And the other experience — that’s experienced — is when there’s not so much fear right then, or you sneak past the fears, and your mind is very alert. But you don’t have the usual torrent of thoughts. You don’t have the usual torrent of anxious thoughts. And so you’re feeling very calm and relaxed and your thoughts are very calm and very few and it feels like there’s no thoughts. But of course, if you’re having the thought that you’re having no thoughts, you’re having a thought. So — this sort of state of mind where the mind is clear. That’s another thing that will happen when you turn within successfully.
So those two different experiences are being pulled apart. Because it’s often thought that the semi-conscious experience was deeper than the being clear and aware without many thoughts. What they’re saying — that it’s the reverse. That the being very clear is where your mind is when your mind is yourself and that this light semi-aware faint takes place when you hit a cloud of fear you don’t want to deal with.
Now that goes to another experience and that is what about this enticing goal of merging with the Absolute Mind — if no one has done it. What is that? And they decided that it was three things. Not two things. And not one thing. Three things — that they had all experienced. One is the void. Space is a void. It’s nothing. And that’s why there’s an argument in Buddhism — is this nothingness or is this everythingness? And the discussion among philosophers in the Vedic tradition is the same thing. Is it nothingness? Is it everythingness? Is it all-knowingness? Or is it a state of knowingness? Or all those ideas to try to get around the idea that you never actually experience it but it’s there. And so three things are thought to be behind that.
One is the void of space — which is just the physical reality, and one that you can clearly see at times. On a starry night you look out into it. But in meditation there’s also the experience that you can feel that things go off forever. Without boundary. And that’s the void. The other element is that in your mind — when you are in that state of quiet mind that we were talking about just a little while ago — there’s a sort of clear vibrancy. Clear vibrancy. It’s transparent but it’s vibrant. And that has been called the warmed-up Absolute or the bubbles where everything first starts, or the first manifestations of Creation. Now lots of different explanations for that, but the explanation that was given to me to convey is that that is your mind. That is what your mind is like in its subtlest state. And it’s a clear transparency.
The other element that’s involved is there is some connection between all minds. Some way to convey information — thoughts, so and so forth — and that this conveyor belt of thoughts between minds is also a clear vibrancy. It looks like almost the same thing — not quite — and so on. It doesn’t contain all the information in the world. It has more information than the Internet perhaps. But it doesn’t contain everything. It’s not all-knowing. It’s not knowing. It’s no more knowing than computers. It’s just the conveyor of all of our interactions between our minds. But that has so much information in it that minds that access that information seem to know a lot more than everybody else. Just as our children seem to know a lot more than we did when we were 10 years old. Because any question you ask them they can find out in just a few minutes on the Internet. And so those three elements are the ideas behind why that’s being pulled apart. And as I said, those three things are involved.
So this leads to a different explanation of states of consciousness as well. Maharishi talked about the process of going from transcending to pure consciousness and then building that up as a dipping a cloth into that over and over and over again. And eventually you will be able to live it all the time. And that was called Cosmic Consciousness. And that was conveyed to people in many different ways and not just in Maharishi’s organization. Lots of people talk about cosmic consciousness or witnessing — that experience. And then Maharishi talked about that once you’ve had that long enough, you will find that you can be in God Consciousness. It’s an expression for where you can see what’s called celestial perception. You see the light that emanates from all beings, among other things. And then there’s this Unity Consciousness which is where you identify — that you say “I am that. Thou art that. All this is that.” And that is that clear vibrancy that was being talked about. Because you can see it behind the celestial perception.
And your intellect, because you’ve been told by Shankara and everyone who has discussed this before, that if your mind can wrap its intellect around that and see that and understand that, then you can see that everything is made of this one thing. But the explanations now are slightly different. For cosmic consciousness to be witnessing, the idea is that you have now established yourself in that clear quiet state of mind, but that you still have a lot of fear. And very unfortunately — which is why this information was desired to get out quickly — very unfortunately, one of those fears is caused by this theory.
And that is that somehow your human life, your thoughts, your actions, are in your way to achieving the goal of life: which is merger with the divine. And because they’re in your way, you are afraid of them. And because you are afraid of them, once you’ve identified enough with your mind, you dissociate from those things. And by dissociating, you step back from them and you just watch this. That’s not me doing that. That’s not me doing that. That’s somebody else. And so that idea is considered based on fear. And that that’s maybe not the thing to go for.
Now celestial perception and God Consciousness can either be good or bad. It’s just another perception. It’s no different than perceiving the bright lights around here. Every single one of you is a being of light as well. And so whether I see you in physical form or as light — it really doesn’t make any difference in how I relate to you. I can either relate to you badly or relate to you well. So — and in addition to that, everyone who has died is a being of light and has celestial perception. And therefore it doesn’t really say anything about the personality of the person who has it. What it says, for those who are very good at it, is that they have one foot in both worlds. Now again, that can be good. And that can be bad. It can be that you are grounded. And that you love living in both worlds and you’re not afraid of moving between the worlds. That’s a very good thing because it’s courageous and it’s — there’s no fear. But many people react to this experience with fear. What’s that all about? So and so forth. I don’t want to have to deal with that.
And so that’s the explanation of those experiences — these are very short explanations because long explanations would be way too long. But as I said, the unity experience I just described. Now what does that leave? That leaves something very interesting, and that is that individually we are eternal. I’ll explain that a little bit later in the lecture — what the conclusion was on that. But if individually we’re eternal, then if life is eternal, then there can be no goal that has a time limit on it. There can be no “this is the goal of life.” The goal of life cannot be something like Unity Consciousness, or like divine merger with the Lord, or even being richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Because if there’s any goal like that to life, if that’s the goal of life, then once you get to the goal and somebody asks you, “what is the goal of life?”, you’ll have no answer. Because you’ve already reached the goal and therefore your life is now worthless.
But if your life is eternal, then the goal has to be inherent. It has to be in the structure of our everyday experience. And that is the inherent pursuit of happiness. So that was a major shift — as you can all understand — in understanding that was reached by this committee. And there were other conclusions. As I said before, there are no rules. No rules period. That includes sex. There’s no rules about sex. We won’t ask — won’t lay down any rules about it, because sex is neutral like anything else. You can bring to it whatever value you want.
And of course we have preferences about the values you bring to things. And this is not to imply — again — that human society will not make rules. No — you will not be punished for anything you do or anything you’ve ever done. Either with somebody else or by yourself. Not in a spiritual way. Your ex might punish you. But that’s a social function. And this is not a spiritual function. And if you have a lot of exes so — and I want to make this clear. Just in case anybody has just fallen asleep. They wanted me to repeat that there are no more rules about sex. Sex is neutral. It’s what you do with it that makes a difference. And you should have no fears or anxieties that anything you ever did, for however long it has been, will ever get you punished. Or rewarded. It’s neutral and the pleasure you get out of it is yours. That means, of course, that if you want to you, you could have 100 wives. Or 100 husbands. Good luck with that.
So one of the things that the discussion has come to, is to say we have to make a decision, a difference between what’s socially useful and what’s spiritually useful. It’s a very — when you try to improve the human race you often think in terms of big groups instead of individuals. And — and when you think of individuals it’s a different story. When you think of groups it’s you want to get some more cohesiveness, you want people to behave a little bit better, you want — you want people not to kill each other so much. I mean, we’re talking about 5,000 years ago.
Now — there are plenty of studies that have been done today in sociology that say, you know, we worry about the 20th century and how much violence was engaged in. But in the 20th century you only had a one out of 100 chance of dying violently. And if you go back 5,000 years it was, you know, one out of five chance. Something like that. And so a lot of progress has been made and Jehovah wanted me to say that — in spite of the fact he made this experiment — that there were [Note: “was” was meant] a great deal of progress made — in spite of the fact that he knew he was lying — and so on and so forth.
So the role that was taken here was a kind of parental role. And it was requested that you try to understand, being in a parental role, that adjustments were tried, behavioral modifications were tried. And they asked that you don’t get too angry with them for making this attempt and that you don’t cast the first stone. And then if you feel like casting the first stone, and say why didn’t you tell me that 5,000 years ago, then you should think of your own parenting life. And how you have tried to adjust your children, in order to make life livable in a group of four or five. Or in our case 14. And therefore that’s the way to understand it. If you don’t have any parenting experience, and you’re thinking I’m always honest, just go back to your online dating site. And how accurately did you do that? And that will be one way for you to understand that we all do this. Maybe not as many for as noble a purpose as that. But that’s — that’s what we tried. And this idea, this set of ideas, leads to these conclusions — leads to a large number of other conclusions as well.
Who am I?
And Maharishi asked me at this point to explain who I am before I get to the important stuff. He asked me that because first, he thought it would be entertaining. But second, he thought that the Messages — those are our Explanations — the Messages that are about to be conveyed are very, very important. And they want it to be heard loudly and clearly. So — before I get to that, I think it’s more important to answer two other questions.
Why him? And why not me? — for conveying this information.
Now — we know what many of you are thinking. You’re thinking I’m much better looking than George is. And many of you are also thinking I’m certainly more spiritual than George is. And so Maharishi wanted me to convey to everybody that in both cases this is probably true. I laughed, though, I said, “you know, it’s no problem.” I said the task was very philosophical. Socrates set such a low standard for physical beauty for philosophers that almost anything is OK. And you can be a philosopher. And so that issue is just fine.
One of the reasons that I was picked to play Toto is that I complained very bitterly in my last lifetime that nobody ever comes back and tells us that they came back. That would be awfully useful if they would. Especially if they could make any sense out of it. And also my friends thought that it would be fun for me to test my theory — also from my last life — that laughter is the best way to destroy a humbug. So we’re going to give those a test. But personally I am suspicious that I was chosen because a big theme of today’s ideas is the impossibility of perfection. And I’m such a good example of that.
And my friends said to me, you know George, this is going to be difficult. We know. But you’ve made such a fool of yourself, so often and so publicly, and almost everybody knows these stories about you, that it’ll be all right. This won’t be so hard. Thanks guys.
So I have known for decades my past because I was very lucky. I learned Transcendental Meditation — my teacher actually is here — back when I was 18 years old in college. And within three years I started having memories. There was a particular reason why my memories opened up — my own personal emotional need, which doesn’t need to be gone into. But I have an intense emotional need to understand both myself and everything else. And that helped. And there was an experience that I had with Maharishi that I really needed to understand. And that’s what really blew the doors open wide. So I have known for more than 35 years the past that I’m going to reveal to you at Maharishi’s insistence. And I’ve written about it a little bit without revealing it. And I want to thank my siblings and my closest friends who have known about this the whole time for not revealing this information because I wanted to test my theories for decades to see whether this was of any use to anybody else, because it’s so radical, so different.
So Maharishi persuaded me that the Messages were important enough — and everyone else persuaded me that the Messages were important enough — that I should get — step out of the shadows of the privacy of my cave and out into the sunshine of public curiosity — the glare.
Some of you know me because I was in the TM movement. I was at SIMS-Dartmouth. I was at the Humboldt course. I was in La Antilla. I was in Seelisberg. I taught in Hong Kong for a while. I was on the World Peace Project in Zambia. I was in Wilderswil. And other things. I taught in Philadelphia, plus New Hampshire. So some of you may know me from that.
Some of you may have been there in the Hotel Eden in Arosa when something funny happened. And that’s why I want to tell this story. Maharishi came down to talk to us. And there were about 75 of us there. And it was 74 — 76 — 74 or 76 — can’t remember. It’s kind of funny, you know. You can remember way back but you still can’t get the dates right from 15 or 20 years ago. But in the hotel Maharishi was giving a talk and suddenly he wanted something from Neil Patterson. And so he turned to James Hawley, who was his assistant at the time, and he said “Neil, Neil”. And James knew that this meant that he should go out and get Neil Patterson. And Kelvin and I were on that course together and as they went past — as James went past to get Neil — we said a couple of things to him about something else that was going on. And we turned back around to see that all other 73 guys on the course were kneeling down. And we talked to some of them afterwards, and they were saying, “Yeah — finally he asked us to kneel.”
And Maharishi had left within a minute or two after everybody was kneeling and left without any explanation and walked out. And we knew that he was upset because he didn’t want people to kneel to him. So we talked to James and said, “you know, this was the misunderstanding. Maharishi was calling for Neil Patterson. And everybody knelt down.” So those of you who were there — it’s a very memorable experience.
Some people might know me from 25 years as a corporate lawyer. In both New York, Frankfurt or San Francisco. And a few people in San Francisco know me as a philosopher. That’s basically who knows me. Not very many people. Most people don’t know me from a hole in the ground. But that’s the background. And those of you who might have been with Kelvin and I [Note: “me” is meant] and others learning the siddhis program when it first started — 76 — might have heard me say the following:
Ahum Bhrigu. Ahum Bhrigu. And that’s my experience. I am Bhrigu. Maharishi wanted me to explain at this point that I was a bad father. Because I didn’t explain to him what happened to me after I died. Because after my Mahasamadi — which I already described — and which I had remembered — it was my experience that I did not merge with the Absolute. And I did not find that interesting — or I found it confusing — because that was totally expected by the experiences that I had had. And so — Maharishi asked me to make up for my lack of having told him by taking this risk and standing in front of everybody and telling you now — and telling you now before you get too old — and I — so that you know this experience that we’ve all had. And you can adjust the way you approach spirituality — if you want to — based on that information.
Maharishi asked me to say to all the parents out there that this complaint he has about my parenting should make them feel good. If their 45 year old children ever come home and complain about inadequate parenting, he wants this complaint about my parenting of 5,000 years ago to be the oldest parenting complaint on record. And he himself is proving that this is not something he wants to repeat, by asking me to do this.
So that was what I did. I had been in the Movement before that for a couple thousand years at the beginning. And I was — well — I didn’t tell you that. I’m going to tell you that now.
So the Movement — one of the things I didn’t explain about the Movement is that we are not that cohesive an organization. I’m saying that because I’m not that cohesive with the organization. The cohesiveness of the Movement is somewhere between a law firm partnership, where everybody is in it for the money, who work together well most of the time, and an academic department, where people are in it for the education of the young, but their sort of competition with each other for intellectual brilliance gets in the way. So we’re somewhere in between those two groups as a committee — the 20 to 50 people that are involved. We often work together. It’s a team project. Everybody has made priceless contributions to the work. Everyone. Everyone. And it’s tough for us to even splice out who did what. Now, that said, no one is taking responsibility for the theory of karma and dharma that was created — because nobody wants to. But the cohesiveness of our group is about like that.
So I was very uncohesive at this time. After that I left and I went to Mesopotamia and Greece. I lived life in ancient Greece a little bit. And about 4,000 years ago Jehovah recruited me — was somebody that I knew obviously — he recruited me to join his project.
And I was Joseph the dreamer, the first son of Rachel and Jacob. That went well — in many ways. Then I did some other things. I left the reservation again. Did some other things. And then Jehovah asked me to come back for the prophetic part of it. And I was Jeremiah. That did not go so well. I was not so happy, as is recorded. I had a lot of fights with Jehovah. Jehovah was not feeling too good either and it just wasn’t fun to give pessimistic predictions about what was going to happen that nobody listened to. But that happened anyway. It’s not that interesting. It’s not that much fun. And you know people didn’t treat me all that well several times. And it ended extremely badly because I was — I left Jerusalem, went to Egypt right at the end, with my brothers and other people, because I was not taken to Babylon. And I was stabbed in the back by my own brother because he was mad at me for something which we won’t go into.
And I can still feel that right here.
So after Jeremiah I quit again. And I was really, really in need of my own explanations — to try to explain this myself some other way. And I was Pythagoras and I focused on something that really made me happy. And that was — it’s called the Pythagorean theorem now. But what it was was an already known relationship between triangles — that the three sides of a triangle — the squares of those three sides — equal each — the largest one equals the other two. But what I noticed, though, is completely different — was that this is a provable statement. There is an inherent structure to reality. And you can prove it and you can hold onto it. And it’s eternal. So I’ll say a little bit about what’s eternal now. We have a new definition of what’s eternal.
The continuum of change, of course, goes on all the time. We think of time and time really gives us a bad idea about how to understand things. Because our memories are visual. When we go back in our memories, we remember our childhood. We remember our childhood home. We think we can go back to that home. And actually sometimes the home is still there. But it’s still not the same home. It’s not the same physical matter. Matter — all physical reality — is always in the present. But because of our visual memories we think there’s lots of matter in the past, there’ll be lots of matter in the future. But it’s much more like one of those globes from Christmas — and Christmas gifts — crystal globes with all the snow in it. And you turn it over. All the snow changes. But it’s all inside the globe. All the matter is just always in the present. And we, as minds, are always manipulating that matter to try to make it come out the way we want it to.
In that continuum of change there’s always change, always change, but there’s still something that doesn’t change. And what doesn’t change is the fact that change exists.
There are other things that don’t change. The fact that matter exists. And this is Democritus’s theory, which has proved so valuable as an underlying portion of scientific advances in the last twenty-five hundred years. That in order for the material world to be discrete, there must be indestructible atoms. Now the 20th century has decided that the atom was the level of organization beneath a molecule, and said we found the indestructible atom that Democritus predicted. And then of course we split it open, and said, “oop, Democritus was wrong.”
Nope — Democritus was not wrong. The indestructible atom is quadrillions of times smaller than the one we called an atom. Right, so — the atom, from theoretical knowledge or just analyzing it philosophically, you know that for there to be discreteness in the world, there must be indestructable, discrete particles. I won’t spend any more time on that now. But that — the existence of those particles is also eternal.
Now the interesting thing about that is, if something is eternal, it can’t either be created or destroyed. Because otherwise it’s not eternal. There’s lots of beliefs about being created and then becoming eternal and so on. It doesn’t make any sense. Either you’re eternal or not. Either you’re made up of these particles that are discrete and eternal in some agglomeration. Or you’re not. And if you are, they come together and then they go apart. It could be in sixty years. It could be in a billion years. But they will come apart — if it’s made up of parts. So what is eternal is the ideational structure. The concepts. The things that we can know about how matter always operates. And then there’s another question: Are we — our minds — eternal as well? Are we also individual, indestructible parts of this continual present? And the Movement answers yes. That’s what we think we are. But it doesn’t matter what you believe about it. And I’ll get into that a little bit later.
So after [Note: missing words “that, while”] I was Pythagoras, I was so excited about this idea that you could have an inherent pattern in reality that I started looking for them everywhere. And one of the next ones that I found was the harmony in music — that the length of the string is mathematically proportional to — for harmonious reasons. And I saw another mathematical thing and I got so excited. I know it sounds silly to be excited about math. But I was so excited I said “all is number.” All is number.
In my next life I was Plato and I took it further. Away from math. That there are Eternal Ideas. Now I have an analogy for this — to help explain myself — and that is, people often talk about the mysticism of Plato and Pythagoras. They often say how these people are fairly ununderstandable to our modern world. But, if you were one of the first amphibians, and you walked out of the water, you would still feel wet. Right? And that’s the mysticism hanging onto me from that experience in the pursuit of a reasonable explanation of life.
But that was the start of the idea of a concept, which we all take for granted now. That’s how we have made so much progress that we can find the internal structure of things, the things that don’t change about the way matter operates.
And after that I was recruited by Jehovah again to be Andrew, the Apostle. I’ve written about that back in 1979.
After I was Andrew — I also found that to be a very upsetting experience — but I came back as Martin of Tours, the bishop, which was nice. I got to die in my bed that time.
Then I was a squire in the Third Crusade. I was a boy named Thomas. I assisted a knight. And I knew Richard the Lion-Hearted, who I’ve already said was my brother — now Peter the Apostle — in one of his lives. Although I was a boy — he didn’t know me. But I certainly looked up to him and admired him. And during that crusade in the Holy Land, I watched. I watched and I saw the bloodlust in the eyes of the Moors who were attacking us. And I saw the bloodlust in my knight’s eyes. And in Richard’s eyes. And it astounded me.
Now I have to say this is one of the very great disadvantages to being a philosopher. Because I was sitting on my horse. I was not equipped with anything. I was sitting on my horse watching. I didn’t pay any attention to anything else. And a Moor came right at me with a scimitar and split me right open — as a 15 year old boy. And I can remember that very well too.
It’s kind of ironic. I mean it’s not that ironic, actually, but most people don’t remember because most memories that you would remember are not that much fun. There’s a reason we’re afraid of our memories — we’re afraid of seeing what happened to us. And those are only the painful experiences. And those physically painful experiences are not the worst things. The worst things are being a stupid fool so often. You really don’t want to see yourself as a stupid fool, you know, I mean. No matter what. And those are the hardest things to remember. So — so there’s a reason why people don’t remember. But, as I said, I have an emotional need to understand so that I can explain something and that has always made me and — always made me a little bit more aware of my past.
This is recorded as Jeremiah. I say that Jehovah knows me. That’s the first thing I say in the Book of Jeremiah. Jehovah knew me before I was born.
So — after I was the squire, I was Thomas More. And I worked as a young man with both Erasmus and Peter Gillis, my friends, to try to create a simplified version of Christianity again. And, as I said to you before, Erasmus and Peter Gillis were both among the original Apostles. And it explains something about our lives. We try to fix the problems we’ve made. We try to fix up for things that we’ve done that didn’t work out. We try to solve those problems for other people. For ourselves. And we also carry on our enmities. Because I, as Thomas More, was absolutely furious at Martin Luther — as everybody who has read my stuff knows. And I apologize to the scholars at Yale who have to read those books that I wrote at great length chewing out Martin Luther. And the reason is very simple. From my emotional point of view, you know, Martin Luther was Paul. He came back and wanted to reinstitute faith alone. It was almost exactly the opposite — just a belief in Jesus. Believing that Jesus exists. No. Jesus is not Tinkerbell. No. Whether you believe that he exists or not makes no difference to him at all in his existence. And this idea that all you needed to do is believe he existed and then you would get to go to heaven — I’ve got a good answer for that later — but just the idea that believing in him you would get to go to heaven, as your reward, just astounds people who were there with Jesus.
And of course Martin Luther was right that the Church needed reforming. Everything always needs reforming. But the way he went about doing it infuriated me. And of course, whenever you start a project with your friends to try to improve something, and someone comes and hijacks it and takes it away, you don’t like it, you can’t do anything about it. That’s infuriating. So, as I said, no one needs to bother reading all of my diatribes from that time.
And after that I restored myself a little bit to my Platonic roots, and pursued ideas that I thought would be very effective, and got to do it with a much lighter heart and much more humor. And I was Mark Twain.
So that’s my past. Now I’ll tell you the Messages.
Maharishi’s Message to the TM Movement
It’s everybody’s agreement that I will give Maharishi’s message to the TM movement first, since Maharishi instigated the conversations that have had this profound effect. And I want to repeat here again before — there’s absolutely no reason to believe this. If it sounds good to you, if it resonates with you, it makes sense, that’s great. If it doesn’t, carry on with whatever you already do. But Maharishi, as I said, and the whole Movement, we want the notice of the decisions that were made to get out now and to convey this to everybody. So — Maharishi’s message, which he asked me to do in the first person — so I’m not Maharishi, and I’m not channeling Maharishi — but he asked me to convey the following information speaking as if I were Maharishi.
Fear is ignorance. You should never, ever be afraid that anything can happen to your Self. There is no way anything can ever happen to your Self. No idea, not even extreme pain or punishment, can hurt your Self. It’s eternal. It’s indestructible. Don’t be afraid of it. He said to listen, listen to my explanations that I worked out with my friends in the Holy Tradition about transcending and about states of consciousness. Because the explanation I believed before I died was a purification of the ideas of the Holy Tradition — yes — but we have a new way of explaining these things and a new approach. That doesn’t mean you have to come along with our new approach — just us. But if you find it interesting and you find it persuasive, or even partially persuasive, please lighten your hearts about these things, because there are many things that he’s concerned about. One thing he’s very concerned about with his teachers who have given so much time to the TM movement — that they don’t die in fear. Or that they don’t die, as many of us have so often, upset about what we just did. He wants you to be happy about what you just did and to do that he wants you to understand that there is no reason to be afraid about your Self.
There’s also no reason to be afraid about several other things. One of those things is ruining the purity of the teaching. Maharishi wants you to know that you cannot ruin the purity of the teaching. It’s not possible. You don’t have that power. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is all the leaders of the Holy Tradition concluded that all the rules that they created to try to protect the purity of the teaching — before it would get lost again — all those rules were counterproductive. Because it created fear in the teachers that they would do something wrong that would ruin the purity of the teaching and therefore created fear in the teachers and that fear caused more of a problem than any rule that might have ever been broken.
Maharishi is very clear he doesn’t want anyone to worry if a flower falls on the ground during the puja. If they put a picture up on the wall without knowing they weren’t supposed to. I don’t need to detail these things. But it’s important to understand something else about these rules. Those rules that are usually simply given, very simple rules, to protect something or to do something, often become a myriad of a thousand rules or a million rules over time. And why does that happen? We have an explanation. It’s because the people who are timid begin to be afraid that they can’t keep those rules and the people who are not so timid realize that they can intimidate the timid by making even more rules. And therefore by making a few more rules the timid become even more fearful that they’re going to break the rules, whereas the ones who like to intimidate the others begin to create more and more rules so that the elect becomes a smaller and smaller group who can keep more and more rules. And why do they do that? It makes them feel important. It makes them feel more important than the timider ones. And I’ll explain that in more detail later. But that’s the conclusion.
The reason why all rules are being dropped — we’re taking away the power from the people who like to intimidate others.
At least we’re trying. We know it won’t work overnight. But that’s the theory behind it. So the purity of the teaching — Maharishi wanted me to explain — that Transcendental Meditation, as good as it is, that he created with the help of Guru Dev, the inspiration of Guru Dev, that this extremely effective method — what, what made it so effective? What was — in a way — what was Maharishi most proud of, that he did in this — in his life — in this last life. He’s most proud of having cut through all the nonsense that the mind is fickle, that the mind needs to be trained, the mind needs to be, you know, put into a certain box to hold it so that it could experience the silence of the mind. And he cut through centuries and centuries of those ideas and said — no — he had perfect confidence that the mind would go within naturally, that the natural tendency of the mind is to go within. And he harnessed that natural tendency with this technique Transcendental Meditation. Now — he wanted it to be made perfectly clearly, as well, that harnessing that natural tendency with a technique doesn’t make the technique indispensable. It’s a technique. That turning within and following the natural tendency of your mind — that is what’s crucial. That is what’s crucial.
And he said that there’s a way to tell when you don’t need any techniques at all. And the way to tell is when your mind is filled with light. Every time you close your eyes, if your mind is filled with light, you’re already knowing your Self. Just close your eyes and know your Self, and discard all techniques. Because the whole purpose of the technique is to take you to where you’re comfortable enough with your Self that you can experience your internal light. This was stated — Jesus stated, “The kingdom of heaven is within”. The kingdom of light. And so on and so forth. There’s a lot of talk about that. It’s not a kingdom. It’s your own mind. It’s your own mind.
We are so inexperienced of [Note: “with” is meant] experiencing our own minds that we get really excited when we do, and we think that it goes on forever, or it’s infinite, or it’s this, or it’s that or — but it’s our own minds. Our own minds. And each individual. And that’s why even in the states of consciousness explanation there is no particular state of consciousness to reach for. There is only enjoying your own mind, your own pursuits. And when you understand life better, the quality of the desires that you pursue are going to make a big difference on your emotional life. That’s — again — for another time.
So Maharishi wanted me to say something that he knew many of you would have difficulty with. When it comes to the purity of the teaching, he wanted to make it perfectly clear that everyone in the Holy Tradition is on the same page with this, that instead of having a pure teaching that becomes adulterated by fear, it’s better to have an adulterated teaching that stays free of fear.
Thank you for that laugh.
That’s — it’s a very important thing, and I’m going to even say it again. It’s better to have an adulterated teaching that has no fear than to have a pure teaching that’s ruined by fear. And so Maharishi wanted each of his TM teachers to think back into their own minds. He says, what drives the ability to teach TM? What drives the car? As Jerry likes to say. What does that? Is it that the puja that’s done first creates enough Shakti to give you the power to convey that? Well, that’s very useful to inexperienced teachers. There are so few inexperienced teachers left that another way of explaining this is important. Because if we are only experiencing our own inner mind, our own minds, the light within, then what does it — what does it — what happens that really makes it work? What makes it work — work — is the resonance between a mind that’s comfortable going within and a mind that’s uncomfortable. And if you sit with a person who’s uncomfortable going within and you go within, you are going to bring that person into the habit. That’s really what’s behind it. That’s the bottom line on the purity of the teaching. And Maharishi doesn’t want any fears about this to go on. He knows that a lot of people who are upset that people teach TM differently, and teach it in different ways, and so on and so forth. People that were TM teachers then teach something else. Or they go to a different guru or — and I’m going to explain two things about that from Maharishi.
One is that helping others turn within is all he wants done. Now he had — and I still joke about that — Transcendental Meditation — TM — you turn the M upside down. It’s a W. Turning Within. TM, he says, is a subset of Turning Within. It’s an extremely effective one. And it has this one element to it that he’s so proud of, which is that it’s based on the natural tendency of the mind. That you take the technique and it harnesses that thing and it pulls you within very easily. And so for most people that don’t have an experience turning within, this is an extremely good way to start.
But don’t stop and say the technique is everything. No. It’s the minds of the individuals who are experiencing it. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. To let people know themselves.
So — that said — he wants everybody to feel comfortable, who he taught to be a TM teacher, who feels that their mind is filled with light, to teach other people to turn within however they want to. But if they want to teach Transcendental Meditation, to do it according to the rules of the organization. And his request to the leaders of the TM organization is that they each think in their own mind about what he’s saying, and he couldn’t have said it before he died because he didn’t have the conversations before then. It came about because of his own experiences afterwards, and his own instigation of this meeting. Now he knows you. He knows everyone in the TM movement that he worked with carefully. One thing you know about your teacher, especially Maharishi and many others as well, they can see through to you. They can see through what — what — what your personality is like. And many people have that experience. You don’t have to be a guru to do that. Some people are much more perceptive about other people’s personalities and that. All kinds of people that run sales groups are master manipulators of other personalities. So it’s all kinds of different observations. But Maharishi knows that they’ll — you will be afraid about making any decision which he told you not to. And he says absolutely fine. You can decide to do it exactly as he told you before he died. Anything that he dabbled in — and that was the word he used — besides Transcendental Meditation you can teach exactly as he said. But the bottom line for him is to get people to turn within and to do it effectively. And he would like as many people to experience that in the next 20 years that he thinks his thousands and tens of thousands of teachers have to share their knowledge with other people. And those of you, either for the reason that this doesn’t make any sense to you and is not convincing — you’re afraid to do something that is so unusual or to accept the information that’s being given — absolutely no problem.
Another thing that he said is very important is that many of you wanted to be here today but did not come because you were told not to come. Don’t be mad. Because the reason for this event to be done live and in person, and to be recorded as it is, is so that your friends in the Movement can come to you, to sit at dinner with you some couple hundred years from now, and say, “Would you like to watch a video?” Because one of the things that the Movement wants to do is to open as many memories as possible so that people are not afraid of death. And that’s a crucial thing to our friends. The Movement is interested in everyone. But we have a lot of close friends. People who have known one of us or many of us many times and we’re concerned — and this is Guru Dev’s big concern too and he had that concern and why he was reluctant to become Shankaracharya — the concern is that by taking on these positions of authority which we have — not me, but the Holy Tradition teachers — that they make people get in the habit — our close friends and others — of listening to somebody and believing everything that they say, especially if they look into your mind and give you really good advice about your personal life which you might not have done, but you think it’s a good idea, and that they seem to know you better than you know yourself.
Well, that’s sometimes a little bit true. But it’s also usurping your free will. And so no one in the Holy Tradition ever intends to come back as a master again. That the master-disciple relationship is not going to be engaged in by anyone. They’ll come back as your friend, sit you down at dinner, and say let’s watch this video and say — that’s you. That’s you. You were there. You saw this 300 years ago. Don’t worry so much about death. And think about the ideas that we have for you. And those of you, as I was saying, who really wanted to be here, but didn’t for whatever reason, especially if you were asked not to. Don’t worry that you’re not here and therefore do not have the ability for Maharishi to sit down next to you 300 years from now and say hey, see, there you were. Because Maharishi’s much more talented than that. As are all the others. And they can show you watching on your TV at home. And they can show you watching that in your mind, and reopen your memory. And they intend to do just that.
So don’t be mad at anyone. Everyone should work together. We are a group of people who have been working on this and trying for thousands of years. And many of you have been involved for that long as well. And we want to have a little more cohesiveness. We would be more effective.
So — Maharishi also wanted to say that — and explain — that all of the details, all the Vedic ritual details, all the things that he built up over the last 20 or 30 years — not from the early part of the movement, but from the late — later part of the movement — as he said, he had the analogy of the car breaking down, and him sort of trying to deal with the situation. But not — not just saying let’s all go play on the hill here. He decided with the group that was left, after he lost some of his best friends, he decided with the group that was left that the best way to impress upon them his care and love for them was to ingrain in them all the traditions which they loved from their past. And so he brought everything back in because some people were attached to some things and some people were attached to others. And he, as he said, dabbled in everything for your benefit.
But he also wants you to know that the crucial thing is turning within. As it was at the beginning of the movement. And he wants also everyone to know that he doesn’t intend to ever start another movement. That what he wants to do is he wants to engage in this spiritual regeneration of the Movement. Explaining things and not trying to inspire people. And that is what he intends to do for the future. And he said that it’s extremely fine for all the current leaders to do exactly what they think he told them to do. Exactly as he did. So that you don’t feel that you’re violating his trust. But he also said anyone who feels in their heart that they don’t need to do it, should not do it. Because he knows that he laid an impossible task upon you. And his attention has gone elsewhere. As we all experienced with him many, many times. That’s Maharishi’s message.
Shankara’s Message
Shankara has a message for everyone as well. Shankara wanted me to say that he’s extremely enthusiastic about the new rational approach to things. He, as is well-known, really loved rational discussions. And he had a really, really good time in the two years of discussions that Maharishi instigated. He also wanted you to know that during those meetings, near the beginning, it was Shankara that opened up Maharishi’s memory to his life as the third son of Bhrigu. And the reason Shankara did that was because Shankara was the second son of Bhrigu.
As those who are aware, there were four sons of Bhrigu and they were all famous teachers themselves. Shankara said … Eh, OK, I’ll tell them [Note: this is an aside to Shankara, who reminded me just then that he wanted me to tell the following story] … Just two weeks after Maharishi had let me know that he was my third son in that life, and that I had not done a very good parenting job, Shankara came to me. He laughed. And he showed me that he was the second son. And then he laughed, and he said, “and I have no complaints.”
And so there is the oldest record that sibling rivalry continues for 5,000 years as well.
So Maharishi was shown by Shankara that he was the third son. And Shankara also showed him that he was one of his four disciples — at the time Shankara was Shankara. That’s another life that Maharishi lived in the Holy Tradition.
Shankara wanted to say that almost all the time he has been in the Vedic tradition, in the Holy Tradition, as a leader. But that he also had another life. He was Archytas, the Pythagorean mathematician who was a friend of Plato’s in ancient Greece.
He also told me to tell you, and to explain, a legend about him. There was a legend — that, well, Shankara was sort of unbeatable in conversations and discussions. And there was a story — the legend that went around — that Vyasa came and appeared as a — an old man and started a debate with Shankara about his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. And that that debate went on for a long time and ended in a draw. And that the draw happened because one of Shankara’s disciples said, you know, this isn’t an old man. This is Vyasa.
The origin of that legend was a lucid dream that Shankara himself had. Shankara had this dream because he was worried that it was rather presumptuous to write a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. So he was worried about what he’d said, had it been right, and so on. And he had a lucid dream about Vyasa coming and having a discussion with him, and it ending in a draw. But what he did not tell his disciples was that he realized in the dream that he had been Vyasa himself. And that that’s why it was a draw — because he was the same person. And that’s why he could comment on the Bhagavad Gita, because he had written the Bhagavad Gita when he was Vyasa. And he also wanted to make a comment about this — that he was afraid to tell his disciples that he was Vyasa, because he thought that the disciples would think that was extremely presumptuous of him to have done so. He told me to tell that story for its obvious reasons today. Because today we don’t look at Shankara and say it would have been presumptuous of you to say that you were Vyasa. You’re Shankara. Why not? And he also told me that in his life as Vyasa, when he wrote the Bhagavad Gita, that he had remembered an even earlier life, in which he told the stories from, that are in the Mahabharata. So that’s the background on that part of his life. He didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it. But he wanted you to have that information to have — he said, since we’re all in a sharing mood, I’ll share too.
But he also wanted to predict the future, which nobody else really wanted to do. Because of the decisions that the Movement has made, Shankara predicts that within the next century, in India, there will be an extremely talented mathematician and theoretical scientist. And it will be Shankara. And he’s going to push forward the mathematical and scientific ideas that the Movement is very interested in. He also said that you can expect in the next couple centuries that hundreds of individuals with the talent level of Leonardo da Vinci will be reborn, because they’re all excited. It won’t be just one every two centuries. He said hundreds of people are lining up to get involved, with that level of talent, to help build a better civilization for the human race.
Then he had another message. And these are to the Shankaracharyas. He knows that he established the four seats of the Shankaracharyas, and since the Movement has decided the master-disciple relationship is counterproductive to the spiritual advance of the human race, he would like the Shankaracharyas, at the end of their life, to not be replaced. And to bring an end to the Shankaracharya tradition. And he also asked, that if that seems too much, that the rituals that keep accreting every century more and more and more and more get pulled back, simplified or eliminated. He even said every year they get more boring. And then he also said, it’s no problem if you don’t listen. Because I will be coming back, life after life, if the Shankaracharyas continue, and whisper in their ears, “Enough is enough.” It’s time to move on to our next phase. That’s Shankara’s message to the Shankaracharyas.
Guru Dev’s Message
Now I have a message from Guru Dev. As is well known about Guru Dev, he’s a man of few words. But he did want three things said. He wanted everyone to know that he’s in agreement with Shankara in putting an end to the Shankaracharya tradition. He also said that although anyone who wants to can certainly still do the puja to teach TM, that it’s not necessary. And he wanted to explain why.
See — it’s not that we want to eliminate these things that are so valuable and that have helped everybody so much. But because of the pejorative, or negative, consequences which they have, that we need to do that. And the negative consequences are that so many people who learned TM, even more than learning to turn within, got the idea that they would like to be worshipped like those in the Holy Tradition. And that many more people among the TM teachers who did this for a long time want to sit in Maharishi’s place, or want to be the guru, want to have everybody listen to them. And therefore the only way that we can make this perfectly clear is to take a very strong stand. And to say no one in the Holy Tradition is going to come back as a guru. And for all our closest friends to know that, although you have an emotional attachment to having a guru because of having that emotional attachment to a very, very good person — doesn’t have to be in the Movement. There’s lots of people besides us that do the same thing. Because you have that emotional attachment, you may want to do it again. But it won’t be the same person and there’s plenty of people who will want you to listen to them. And that — that’s not a good thing. So if you ever wake up some day and realise that you’re doing this with someone, and listening to everything they have to say to you, you should tell them that they should watch this video. And you should tell them that having power over any other mind is always a delusion.
We try. Everyone likes to have power over other minds. But every way that you gain power over another mind is to manipulate their motives, to manipulate their emotions. There is no other way to get them to do what you want. And that’s not respecting their free will. And their free will is the most important thing that they have. And therefore, Guru Dev said that, no power over other minds, just power over things. We are all eternal equals. We are all the same — basically. We all have different personalities. No one will ever be alike. But we’re all basically the same. And therefore the best relationship between equals is friendship. And that’s why they say they’re going to come back as your friend.
So — Guru Dev also said that if you want to hang onto his picture you can. If you want to hang it on the wall you can. If you want to toss it out with the garbage you can. It’s not important. It’s not important. You know, one of the things that’s really important about these rules is that the rules were there to try to convey the importance of what it was that we were doing. But in the end the rule overtook the purpose. And it kind of makes people laugh in the Movement in a way, because we’re just not that petty-minded that someone would be upset that you took a picture of them and threw it out. Or that you took a picture and put it on the wall. It’s just — it’s just not — not even close to how anybody thinks.
So — he also said that he wanted, in case anyone had any doubts that that was his opinion, that they should look back at what he wrote when he was Shankaracharya. How reluctant he was to become Shankaracharya. Because, he said, I’m not going to give you too much advice because you’ll get used to listening to me as Shankaracharya. And then when someone who’s not fit is on the throne, you’ll just do whatever they say because he’s Shankaracharya. And he did not want to lend his authority to that experience.
Now each of the people in the Movement — to go back to one thing that I didn’t mention earlier in the experience — each of the members of the Movement has a distinct personality. Very distinct. We’re all similar in some ways. But we have very distinct personalities. And Maharishi has the energy and strength and firmness of a 50-something man who is out — very excited about the new project that they have. And Guru Dev has a sort of ancient but very light feel. Like an ancient one, but very light. And Jesus has an extremely compassionate feel. Extremely loving about other people and understanding and — and just whatever they do doesn’t matter. And Shankara has this sort of very ebullient, intellectual, young energy, as if he’s always 20 years old and very excited about ideas. So that was what Guru Dev asked me to say.
Jesus’s Message
Jesus asked me to say a few things too. And this gets a little bit harder. But Jesus said he wanted everyone who believed in him, who didn’t believe in him, who hated him, who had any emotional reaction to him at all, to know that whatever your emotions about him are have no effect whatsoever on his existence. On the other hand, he loves everybody just the way a generous-hearted person does.
He doesn’t know all the individuals. He’s not omniscient. He’s extremely intelligent and extremely aware, but that doesn’t make him omniscient. If he were omniscient and omnipotent, and he only healed a few people instead of everyone, that would be kind of insulting. This is not — not — and — and there’s something else. There’s a lot of things about that, but the thing that bothers both Jesus and Jehovah the most about what happened with Paul’s theory is that the theory is that somehow Jehovah was so mad at everybody for their sins, for their bad behavior, for not listening to him, for not being obedient, that the only way he could feel better was for his son to get killed. This is such a — unbelievable idea. An unbelievable idea.
And as we listen to lots of hate about us, some of it justified. We listen — we listen to lots of arguments and upset that we’ve done this or that or another thing. But this is the thing that bothers us the most. That somehow it could be thought that Jehovah’s inscrutable divine plan was only taken care of by the suffering of his own son. It’s just — there are no sacrifices that make any difference at all to him.
So Jesus wanted me to say a few more lighthearted things as well. He said about prayer, if you go back and you listen to the parables he said about prayer, it’s the same thing that he’s saying now. You know, prayer is like gambling. The house always wins.
You can say over and over and over and over and over again this prayer asking for something. But who will respond to that kind of begging? He told the parables just like this. Go. You can read them in the Testaments — in the New Testaments. You will read those things. He said, what is prayer like? It’s like a woman who lost her property and then goes to the judge who allowed that — who was bribed by the person who stole her property — and stands outside his window and yells and screams and makes noise for weeks until he gets — she gets — her property back. That’s not a compliment. In case you missed that point. In case you didn’t have ears to hear that. Jesus said it doesn’t matter that you didn’t understand what he had to say as well, because he said, you know, we talked in parables. That’s the way we did it. Can try to be as clear as we can in our explanations today.
So prayer is just like gambling You know you only will get people to respond who appreciate being begged over and over and over again. As Jesus said, If you’re a good parent you’ll give your coat to your child before they even ask for it. It’s a totally different situation. Now, Jesus wanted me to make one thing clear. He’s only explaining prayer. He’s not complaining about it. He just wants to explain what it is again. Anyone who prays — it’s all right. And actually prayer as a form of turning within, you know, works all right. There are more direct ways of doing it. But at least you can turn within with prayer.
Oh yes. He said there were two things he wanted to complain about. He said, he would appreciate it very much if no Manhattanite ever asked him to find a parking place again. He said build more parking garages.
And — and — and the other complaint that he had he said it came from St. Anthony. St. Anthony says, please look for whatever you’ve lost for at least one hour before you put it on his list. OK. Those are the only complaints.
Now Jesus wanted to explain something about heaven and there’s very good news about heaven. Heaven is not a place of forgiveness. It is not a place of judgment. No one can judge another person. No one can know what’s going on in another person. Even members of the Movement who have such good insight into — still can’t judge you. You can’t even judge yourself. No one has perfect knowledge about themselves. There is no such thing as judgment. There’s no final day and there’s no judgment. So there won’t be any final judgment day either. Heaven is a vacation. And it’s a vacation of generous — generosity, kindness and understanding. And everyone goes. It’s like everyone gets a long vacation in Hawaii. No one is left out. And as soon as you want to come back you can.
No, so it’s — Jesus explained that of course he got mad a couple of times, and it sounds like he’s mad at people a few times and so on. That’s just the frustration of working. Most parents get mad sometimes too. It was a parental role. But that’s not the attitude. And Jesus and Jehovah maintain this — it’s called an afterlife, but it’s actually between lives — and that’s there to help people relax and recover so that they can become more loving to their families in their next life. The intensity of human life takes a lot of energy. And most people find it frustrating by the end. So everyone gets a good break. One of my breaks was just a couple of years because I was so keen on going back. And sometimes it’s a couple hundred years. So that is another element that he wanted me to convey.
Jehovah’s Message to the Jews
Now I have a message from Jehovah. He has a couple. First message from Jehovah is to the Jews. Because of my experience, he wants me to speak again as if I were Jehovah. But I’m not.
He says — I am Jehovah. I am also Allah. The Jews were my original chosen people. I want you to understand me — Jehovah that is — I want you to understand me in the light of what I said about my experiment and the fact that I lied. I know that I have been both loved and scorned by you. I know that you feared and hated me and loved me all at the same time.
But — all those who second-guessed me — he means me among others — who have second-guessed what I tried to accomplish. I want you to look at what happened in just 4,000 years. In 4,000 years I took this group of people and they are the most productive, humane people on the planet. And I’m very proud of my people. And he said that in just 4,000 years the descendants of Abraham are more numerous than the stars. Just as he had promised. And then he added, well the stars that Abraham could see. They won’t be ever numerous as all the stars there are in the Universe. But as numerous as — as the stars that Abraham could see. And that the old covenant that he made with Abraham and his people has been fulfilled. That the covenant is complete. It is done. It has been totally successful. And he said that now he would like to make a new covenant with the Jewish people and also with the Arabs. And with all the people on the Earth. And that covenant is: you shall each know me in your own heart, you shall know me through the information in my explanation which I gave to you about myself. Know that I am who am. But you are who you are. I am just an eternal individual like you. And from now on, in your spiritual maturity, we will be eternal equals. And that’s the new covenant — with my people.
I also want to say that I gave you the land because the other people had human sacrifices. And I gave that land back to you after the Holocaust — which was an unimaginable human sacrifice — and I’m so sorry in my attempt to eliminate human sacrifice that this happened to my chosen people.
He said, but the land is not as valuable as your principles. Jehovah thinks that he would despair if he only thought of the Holocaust for the future. And he would despair if he only thought of the angry older men who make younger men and women destroy other people and themselves at the same time. That he would despair. But he has hope. He has a lot of hope for the future. And that’s why we’re stepping forward again 1,400 years after the last time. And that hope is that human sacrifice still will come to an end.
And Jehovah’s message to his chosen people is that the land is not more important than your principles. He gave you that land. He gave it to you again. And he said, I do not want that land to be a millstone around your necks. I gave you that land because you could prosper on that land. But this is the 21st century. This is a knowledge-based economy and you are thriving in that knowledge-based economy as you have thrived throughout the centuries. And so Jehovah said that it’s your choice. If you can work out a way to live on the land, in a way that you want, then keep the land. But know that Jerusalem is not sacred to Jehovah. That the land is not sacred to Jehovah. That you — you my chosen people — you are sacred to me. And he wants you to thrive. And it’s your choice as to whether you can make that happen on the land under the current circumstances, or if you decide that it’s a millstone around your necks.
Jehovah also said, that looking to the future under the new covenant with his people, he wants everyone of you to know that he’s very, very proud of his stiff-necked people and that he knows that you’ve already contributed a tremendous amount to human civilization. And that you will in the future as well.
Allah’s Message to the Muslims
Now Jehovah, who is also Allah, would like to give a message to the Muslims. Allah the compassionate, the merciful hereby confirms that he is also Jehovah. He also confirms that Mohammed was indeed his last prophet and that he is very proud of the improvement in Arabic civilization which Mohammed accomplished.
He also wants me to make it perfectly clear that Mohammed remains his last prophet. I am not speaking — this is me, George Hammond — I am not speaking as a prophet of Islam. I am speaking to you as Joseph. Gabriel had a story in the Qur’an about Joseph. And Jehovah asked me to confirm that the details that Gabriel gave to Mohammed about Joseph’s story were accurate. Because he gave them details that were not in the Jewish Testament. So I am confirming that those details in the Qur’an were accurate that Gabriel gave. Allah also wants to thank Gabriel publicly for having taken the time to learn Arabic so well so that he created a literary masterpiece — in addition to the guide for the Arabic people to create a better civilization.
And Jehovah — excuse me, Allah — same person — would like me to also add that he’s very proud of what the Islamic people created in their civilization. And all the wisdom that they collected from the human race which has made — given — a priceless — is of priceless value to the rest of us.
But he has a few suggestions. He wants everyone — the hundreds of millions of people who believe in Islam — to know that he does not care what version of Islam you believe in. These are all based upon historical events that cannot be changed anyway. He understands that you each want his love and each want to be more important than the other group. That’s natural. He understands it. But he has a deal for you. He wants you to think about how to restore the Islamic Golden Age. There are many people among you who are trying to restore the Islamic Golden Age using jihad and violence. He suggests that that will not be successful. The Islamic Golden Age was an advance at the time. But Allah wants you to know that to retreat to what was an advance 1,400 years ago does not amount to progress.
Especially with women there was an advance that he gave to the Arabic civilization, in their treatment of women. To go back to it is not an advance. It’s a retreat. And so Allah’s idea is that each different version of Islam should compete in trying to make good and fair and equal laws that will raise the value of the contribution that half of their population makes to civilization. Until then — until that competition succeeds — Allah wants all of you to know that he has in his many-roomed mansion of heaven — he has a place for each of the various beliefs, no matter how small a group it is. And he will keep you separate from all the other beliefs so that anger does not invade heaven. But in that separation he wants you to know that’s just so that you can relax. Recover. Calm down. And then come back and work on creating a greater Islamic civilization. And Allah predicts that when you have treated your women with more of an advance than Mohammed even made at the time 1,400 years ago, then you will be proud of your civilization. And then a new Islamic golden age will start with a democratic Islamic nation larger than any other, and richer than any other, Islamic civilization that has ever existed. And when that happens, Allah promises that when you have joined together, and don’t continue your divisions, and have improved the condition of women, then — as you have done on Earth, he will do in heaven. He will unite all the Islamic heavens together and you will be able to move back and forth in an Islamic civilization that you’re comfortable with — at all times.
The Movement’s Message to the Mormons
Now the Movement has a message for the Mormons. No one in the Movement knows who the angel Moroni is. But we wanted to make a very important point that even if Joseph Smith made everything up, he created an idea and a set of ideas that have created a good culture for family life to thrive in. And essentially it’s no different than anything any of us have created. We don’t have any — any statement against that. And there are many other groups out there who also had a very well-intentioned leader who may be trying to repeat something that they experienced hundreds of years earlier or thousands of years earlier. And as long as the bottom line is a better civilization for humanity, this is not a problem.
But the Movement and Jesus in particular wanted to point out something very, very important. And that was — recently one of the members of the Mormons had a terrible ordeal and has been extremely courageous about it and he wanted to use her as an example, for all religious people and particularly for the Mormons, and that is Elizabeth Smart. Those of you who know her ordeal understand that. But also — that she has taken to explaining something which was the hardest thing of her ordeal. The hardest part of her ordeal was her feeling of misery — that she was so violated by the man who stole her as a 14 year old or young teenager. And that that misery was that she was no longer spiritually pure. That that was the worst part of her ordeal.
Now, the Movement cannot figure out any way to get rid of all the suffering in the world. However, about 80 percent of it is self-inflicted. And we’re trying to do something about that portion. This is part of the problem for women, especially women who are trying so hard to be pure. Elizabeth Smart, Jesus wants you to know he had a parable. The parable was, it’s not what you put into your mouth that makes you impure it — but it’s what comes out of your soul.
Now that parable is correctly taken to mean that you shouldn’t be so fussy about rules about food, or about who you sit with to eat dinner, or all those kind of things. But that was what it was particularly applied to. But Jesus would like this applied to our physical bodies and to sex. There is nothing that happens to your body — whether someone else does it to you or you do it to yourself — that makes you spiritually impure. It’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant. And women everywhere should know that so they don’t feel miserable over things they have often no control over and is due to the cruelty of other people.
And Jesus suggested that the Mormons, during their two year missionary experiences, should at least use some part of that to tell the story of Elizabeth Smart to women everywhere, so that people — women in particular — men don’t seem to have a problem with this issue — women in particular do not feel that their spiritual life is imperiled by anything that happens. Because if that happens, you become miserable for long periods of time. And instead you can get up and try for a good relationship as she did, and succeeded at. And that was what Jesus wanted the Mormons to hear.
So those are the Messages.
The Future
Now we’d like to talk about the future. Everyone said that we’re hitting the reset button. And I have to say that I haven’t felt this good about getting so many things off the table since the 1520s when I cleared my judicial docket.
So moving forward. I think what the Movement at least is interested in, and what we hope that the friends of the Movement get interested in — we know that this will be hard to switch. But what we’re very interested in is something very simple. We have tried lots of different ideas. Right now there’s this Vedic tradition. It’s exceptionally good at turning within, exceptionally knowledgeable about yoga. Although the definition of yoga will be to know yourself, instead of a divine union with the Absolute Mind. But almost all the information that was put down by people in the Movement, who are all part of this discussion — they all agree that taking that idea of turning within to such an extreme that we ignore not only our own physical lives, but also all of our neighbors’ physical lives, is too extreme a version. And so we were too extreme in India over the 5,000 years that developed that way.
And in the West we take good care of physical things but we forget to turn within most of the time. Now to combine those two things with also the Pythagorean movement toward scientific knowledge is exactly the aim for the future that the Movement wants. And so, as I said, those people that you are familiar with as gurus, and also as beings whose personalities were so different that your imaginations could only deify them, instead of seeing them as individuals trying to help in the creation of human civilization — all those people are on the same page. Which is why there’s a lot of joy. A lot of reaction — a lot of energy — to the situation.
Because we are hoping that this new approach to science will — will — will take hold. And the Movement’s idea is that people would develop an actually scientific attitude towards what we understand and don’t understand about life. There are a lot of scientists, but there are only a few who have a scientific attitude towards life. The scientific attitude towards life we describe as follows: one, that we hold fast to provable theorems and incontrovertible evidence, two, that we hold lightly to well-reasoned theories and reliable evidence, three, that we take as an opportunity to improve any decent generalizations that have holes in them or ideas that don’t add up, and we can work off of that to try to create a well-reasoned theory out of it, and four, to completely dismiss unpersuasive, ridiculous ideas and preposterous facts that don’t exist. But still to not mind however many minds believe in those ideas.
Because it’s true, and probably will be true for thousands of years to come, that there is no myth so irrational that no one will believe in it. And there is no truth so obvious that everyone will accept it.
And so we’re taking this attitude and trying to combine all of our efforts and all those cultures by discarding the ideas which have gotten in the way. And the ideas which have gotten in the way are the theory of karma, the theory of rewards and punishments, the theory — because all those things are manipulations of each other — of our manipulation of each other. That life is only inherently just because our emotional life and its quality is directly related to the quality of our desires.
And there is no bureaucracy that can get in the way of that experience. So that is where we’re aiming. There are some ideas. And I should find out, before you are talked to death -
Oh my. Already went much over the two hours. All right. So — the end. I’ll — I’ll — I’ll do it as fast as I can.
Life is an Eternal Democracy
The basic idea is that life is an eternal democracy. That there are eternal minds — decillions of eternal minds — not all on this planet probably. But we know there are quadrillions of minds here. Human race is a very small portion of this. The Movement is focusing on that small portion. If sometime in the future we’re so successful that the orangutans complain that we aren’t paying attention to them — we’ll include them as well. But for now we’re being anthropocentric.
And the idea of this — of that life is an eternal democracy — has one other benefit. We have an explanation for why evil exists in the world.
The Importance of Being Important
Evil exists because of what I call the importance of being important. The importance of being important is that we are all individual minds in a huge universe and we use almost anything we can to feel important. And that whatever we use is a relative thing. This is a very short version of this idea. I’ll explain it more later, but — the problem with this is that when we feel miserable, in order to keep our place in the hierarchy in our own imaginations, we must make the people around us feel even more miserable — because otherwise we can’t keep our place in the hierarchy. And therefore we are cruel to them. What is cruelty? Cruelty is the desire to gain happiness from another person’s pain. It’s like any other desire — it’s designed to produce happiness. But in this case we desire another person’s pain and suffering. And we do it only because we are deluded that we can have power over their minds. Because their free will can always say no — no matter how submissive they behave, they can stand up and say No anytime they want.
Transcending Cruelty
And so this idea that we can transcend cruelty is the aim of the Movement. And how are we going to transcend cruelty? It’s very simple. We only have to recognize two simple things. One: we are indispensable to ourselves. We are eternal beings. No one can take our place. Even if you get advice from anybody else, no one can ever really step in and take your place. So you are indispensable to yourself. And we’re thinking — although it’s not provable — we’re thinking that that’s eternally true. And you should get comfortable with that idea. And if you do get comfortable with that idea, you will no longer have to be indispensable to anybody else. You won’t try to be indispensable at work, you won’t try to be — because it’s all impossible. No one is ever indispensable outside of themselves.
However, if you decide to be valuable to other people, you’ll get the same benefit that you were looking for. And it’s very easy to be valuable to another person or to any group. All you have to do is give more than you take. And that is how human civilization is built. And so to transcend cruelty, we only need to understand that clearly. That’s all that’s needed.
And Maharishi asked me to say at this point — very graciously I have to say — that my naming this idea Transcending Cruelty is the memorial that he’s most proud of. Because he was the midwife of this idea. And he wanted me to say that he was the midwife of that idea — which was true.
So moving forward the Movement is not going to scold or complain or anything like that. The Movement is only going to explain the idea of how to transcend cruelty. And the interesting thing about it is, that if you forbid anything or put pressure on anything — all of our reformist zeal for all these thousands of years — we’ve realized is somewhat counterproductive. Because if you try to prevent people from their sexual behavior, they become more miserable, and in their more misery they become more cruel. And if you try to prevent them from being greedy or being lazy, you’re interfering with their desires, and they become more miserable and therefore more cruel.
And even if you try to prevent them from being cruel, they become more miserable, and therefore more cruel. And so there is nothing that can be done about that as an attempt to change another person. But I think you’ll all find — especially the closest friends of the Movement — that at dinner some time people will be whispering in your ear the explanation about Transcending Cruelty. Because that’s the focus.
Conclusion
Now — there are many, many more things to say. There’s lots of time to say them. In fact, we could talk about this forever. We probably will. But it’s a terrible death to get talked to death. I’m sorry that I went so far over the two hours.
But now — I open at the close. The Movement wanted you to see the resurrection stone. From Harry Potter.
So — I hope everyone was watching — because I will not be doing that again.
So — I’d like to go back to the beginning, briefly, and say that, as I said then, believing in anything that I just said — that doesn’t — doesn’t make any difference. And as I said, even if you believe and you don’t want to have anything to do with it, that’s also fine. I think I’ve made it perfectly clear that freewill is at the top of the list for what the Movement is interested in for all of you, for all of our friends.
And as I said before, I’d like to go back to that beginning and mention that blue genie again. That 50-foot blue genie that I’m not. Because I’d like to quote him:
You ain’t never had a friend, never had a friend. You ain’t never had a friend, never had a friend. You ain’t never — had a — friend like us. No, no, no. No way. No, no, no. No way. You ain’t never had friends like us. Woah!
Thank you very much.
[Note: This transcript was created for the 5th Anniversary of the 30thNovember talk at Jerry Jarvis’s request.]