k rPortland Regional Seminar
The first thing I want to say to you is in our youth, in our childhood and so many times then after we are grown, we think in the terms of fantasy and dreams. Now I’m not talking about the dreams that you have at night. I’m talking about daydreams. I’m talking about fantasy. And so often, these daydreams are a part of us in growing up. And, they make a part of what we are going to be within our manhood or during our adult years and it’s a beautiful time. And so many times, we think of the children dreaming of things that we always have as a make-believe world.
But so many times, these are not make-believe worlds. We are many, many times the victims of a lot of these daydreams that children have. So many children, or all of us, when we’re in that very pre-teen age, maybe between the age of 5, 8, 10 in there, and a lot of times farther than that. We begin to dream about what we could do and what we could become in the lives that are ahead of us or the days that are ahead of us as being adults.
And many times that we dream, such as those who have become conquerors of the world, people who have become great leaders in industry, business, people who have become leaders in the religious worlds and many times that these dreams that the children have or the young adults have, may end in havoc and catastrophe.
For we would say, often as the whole world, as what happened during the time of Hitler; Hitler did not start his dreaming to become a conqueror after he entered into the army, the German army in World War I. He began this way back in childhood because children can have the most fanciful dreams. They are unlimited in what they can think. They are unlimited in what they can know, what the future will hold for them.
And it’s a very interesting thing that you have the difference between the insight and the daydreaming. And many times, they form their life beyond their childhood by making their own dreams become true. I have seen many a person who has dreamed their own dream, not the night-dream, but the daydream. And that daydream becomes true.
I can remember, at one time as a child, in sitting on the porch. And I had been very ill that spring and I was looking out over the space that was beyond the house and it ran on for several miles. And it was nothing but grass, what we called sage grass, which reached about waist high and over that was the spring shimmering of the heat. And I remember very well on that, sitting there on the porch. And I was just beginning to recuperate from being ill, to see this whole scene in my daydream turn into a mountain that was right beyond me. And all around me was water. Years later, on a ship out in the South Pacific, we anchored in a bay in Guam and I walked out on the bridge and looked up and here was the mountain. And here was the sea around us and I began to think, “Where have I seen this before?”
And my daydream went right into a reality in years later. I had always thought as a child, it would be the greatest thing in the world if I could go to one of the Ivy League schools, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth or Harvard because I had read so much about these places. And I dreamed about them so much in my daydreams, that when I entered into the service, into the Navy, this was the first thing that they did. They sent me, first to Dartmouth University, to have a certain amount of education that came within the Navy work.
Now, I remember one day, in trudging up the back of a hill one Sunday afternoon, looking back at the time and seeing this. And I remember looking back at the time and seeing where I was, the very position I was in at the time that I had had all of these dreams, as daydreams. I looked back and I saw it again when I was sent to Princeton University to finish what the schooling wax that they wanted to give me.
And this is one of the things, which you will find that as a young person, you begin to build these dreams. And these dreams begin to – more and more they begin to expand and they begin to go into the greater self. And if the child starts at this age, this early age, beginning to think about this which he has been taught about consciousness five or the ECKshar consciousness, that which we receive on the fifth plane, then one day, he moves into this area
Now, it’s a very interesting thing that when we get on with age, and we come to the middle age and we raise the family, both man and the wife and the family children leave us and go out and start their own family or their own business or go away, leave home, then we feel like life has stopped and suddenly our dreams are halted because we are looking again at this door of death that seems to have no dreams beyond it. And it’s very strange that man stops his dreams at this point and says, “What is there any more in life for me to do but to finish out and retire? And when I retire, what am I going to do from there?”
Because he has this great state of consciousness that he can reach and he can go on with his dreams, and building and building more, until he eventually comes to this state of consciousness. And, this is what you must begin to think about, as the individual, in working towards these states of consciousness.
Because once you drop your dreams, once you begin to let yourself go, then there’s nothing in life for you to live. And, you can begin to think if you’re 80 or 85, you can begin to think about this beauty that is on the other side. And you can live in this state of consciousness in your dream state of this, that’s beyond this door.
This is all a most interesting point to think about, because you don’t have to start when you’re five years of age to go into these states. Because, all these states of consciousness are, is just really is, exactly that. It is another state of thought, another state of the inner self upon which we live.
And you must think, then, in the terms of what this is because of what you can make it yourself. Now, no one else is going to give it to you. It’s not me who’s is going to give it to you. You’re not going to get it by reading the discourses, alone. You’re not going to get it by just studying the books. You, yourself have to put the effort into it. And then, when you begin to think and look at this effort, when you begin to think of this in the terms of what you are building for yourself in the present and, practically not in the future, we can always put our future into the present time, then you begin to think and live in this state of consciousness.
And, this is this simplicity of this state of consciousness, because this has been so misrepresented by so many of the Orientals who have come over into this country, and have tried to package this as a sort of a thing that you can get, if you either are willing to die and enter into heaven and get this state or if you’re willing to go through a great amount of asceticisms, in which you are depriving the body of food or you are depriving the body and putting in certain disciplines and this sort of thing, which are not at all true.
Because what you are building is actually a state of consciousness. And everyone, who builds this state of consciousness, can receive it. And you cannot go any farther than that. You do not have to, particularly, go into deep trances and make great mysteries of this. You must find yourself in a state of dreaming about this.
I think it was Keats, the very famous poet, who wrote once about – was he dreaming or was he awake, when certain experiences came to him. I forget what the poem was but, anyway, this is true. We begin to wonder, are we dreaming or, actually, are we awake? And, this is what comes to us in our life, to know whether we have the reality or whether we’re having the dream state. And, the daydream state is a form of reality. And so many of us who come to this point, and so many times and they cannot see themselves any farther than what is here in front of them, they build no future for themselves.
They build nothing in the state of trying to get into another form of mind or another form of thought or another form of dream. They always have to remain right here because what they’re doing in this life within their own work, their own daily routine, is absolutely so boring and so killing to them that they can get any farther than that and they’re very far down on the levels of energy.
But, if you enter into this state of the dream state as a child does, when he makes the animals within his world, when he makes the brownies and the fairies and all of these sort of beings within his world. If you would begin to think and live in this world, in the adulthood of placing yourself within the center of the drama that you are building, you’ll find that eventually, it will come true. You will find that it will be something that you, yourself, will have look back and said, “Well, I thought that was a dream but here it is.”
It is come true in my life hundreds and hundreds of times. I found that sometimes, involuntarily thinking and just letting my thoughts roam at times, I meet with certain things that actually comes true in my life, maybe a week later or years later.
We used to have when I was a child, a man who drove a bus. And this fellow had a great amount of exaggeration about himself and he was always talking about his farm in Georgia with his racehorses and all of this sort of thing. And we’d always laugh and say, “Well, Rudi is just talking and that sort of thing.” But one day, Rudy, all of his dreams came true. And a very strange thing happened. Rudy met a woman from Georgia who had the racehorse farm and everything and they married. And, everybody said, “Oh, what a lucky fellow he was.” But they never thought about he forecasting him and placing himself into this position. That it would have to come about some way. So it came about in a very natural way in a marriage state.
So, this is the same way with us, that we come about some of these things in a marriage state or we come about these things in the future consciousness of what the, what we term now, consciousness 5, or the consciousness of self-realization, which is on the fifth plane.
Now, this is a very interesting point that you should take to heart. And it is something that you must think about. Because you can remove, from your own life, many things. And, as this man did, he removed from his life the drudgery of driving a bus. And it is a very interesting thing to watch and see that the man, then thereafter, never lived in the town again. And he lived on his racehorse farm. So, you know, we are not all going to get a racehorse farm but I’m saying, to the extent that the dreams that a man has, is what’s coming true in his life.
And if he’s going to dream to the negative, then this is what is going to bring havoc into his life. Now, if you stop to think, Alexander the Great, when he was young as a child, he was one who did not have much mobility about him up through the age of 5 or 6 but he was always speaking to his mother, who was very close to him, about great he was going to be one day. And his mother encouraged him in this, telling him that he was immortal, that he was a God. And he believed this and he dreamed this. And he thought there was nothing in this world that could take him from this earth. No man could cut him down with a sword. And, time after time, this seemed to be true. Because he fought all of these numerous battles, and wounded dozens and dozens of times, but nobody could bring death to him. So it had to be monaural fever that finally got him at the very age. But he conquered all of these words. And these worlds were the dream worlds that he had built from the time he was a child and going into his youth and then into his manhood.
And this is the thing, in which that so many of these people who have become saviors of the world, as we term them, have gone through the same thing, again and again, of what their importance is within this world. Mohammed did this. Mohammed, up until the time when he was in the cave, he was a man who had great dreams of what he could be as an individual who was going to be a leader of men and the founder of a nation in which it was ruled by religion. And it came true. And he put himself into this state into the cave because he brought these to a climax when he had gotten to the cave and had the enlightenment and then came out and declared himself as the prophet of God.
So, you see, you have to begin to think about this. I am the fellow who is responsible for myself being in this condition. And no one else can bring me to this point in life. And you and I know this to be true because I knew way back there in my childhood that, one day, that I would be on the platform and I would be giving a message. I knew it was going to be the message of ECK. I knew it from the beginning.
And those today who are thinking they are beyond the age of this must remember that, if they don’t have their dreams, they’re lost.
You first, usually as parents, you dream about your children. But you shouldn’t give all your attention to this, because their dreams must be their own dreams. And yours must be yours, into what area you are going and forming your life. Sometimes, we are stratified into certain areas by society saying that we have to do this. We have to go in this particular area and this particular route.
Well, this isn’t quite true because I think today, youth is beginning to break out of this and go into their own particular route and the way they want to go. And, they have dropped the way that society says you must be this or you must be that. Because now their dreams have begun to form differently. And they form differently because education has brought them, especially the lower-class people today, to find an escape route, out of all the grinding misery of the lower strata, into becoming a useful member of society. It used to be, 50 or 75 years ago, a person had to have a considerable amount of money in order to go to college. If the parents could get the child through high school, that was just about all he could do
But today, almost anyone can go to college and anyone can get a degree. And it’s been the breaking out of this mold that we’ve formed in society that only a certain number of people can be educated, like in the old European style, in France especially, who said, “Well, in the year of 1971, we will have graduated from college, 35,000 engineers. And we’re going to have a place for them within our society.
Today, in America, they can graduate a 150,000 or 200,000 engineers and they are not guaranteed any place in society at all. They have to go out and make their own way. But, this was a stratified or a rigid society in France and it is now beginning to break up.
Now, a lot of this you must begin to examine yourself and examine everything within each of you to learn what will be this, which you want to do and which you want to break out of this mold, of what you are now. And you can say, this time next year, I’m going to be a different person. And you can come out of this, of being a different person, by starting on this sort of thing and making your goals. Because if you don’t, then you’re lost. You wonder. You begin to think of something else that will pull you from this particular road. or something from this particular side and you end up by wandering around. And when you’re up in the middle ages you don’t. You’re still wandering.
But you have to settle on this thing early. And, the place where the parents can help is, if they know about such things is going on in the child, they can encourage them and guide them. But they cannot build this sort of thing within them, in the child, because if they do then they begin, maybe, to interfere. And the individual must do it his own particular way.
This is one of the truths and the facts of life. And in ECK, we don’t study it just because it is ECK. We study it because ECK is all life and life is all ECK. And when we begin to think in the terms that we’re getting it outside of life or something of that nature, we’re not. And that is the reason why we cannot, particularly, be called a religion because we cannot be put into that straight-jacket.
Now we will be and a lot of times, in our own thinking too, we think in the terms of religion, ECK as being a religion, which it is not. And in order to classify it or get some sort of a category across to it, often times we think of it being this way. Or, we might speak to someone else of it as being this way. But it isn’t. Since it is all alike itself, therefore we cannot have this stratification or this straight-jacketing and putting it down the same as with another form of religion.
So, we have to then, begin to look in and see that we, ourselves, are molding this way of what we are. And, as a group consciousness, we are molding ECK into a certain form. And, as an individual, we are molding our own lives. into what we want it to be. So, collectively and individually, we can mold ECK into being, or not particularly not quite the word, but we can bring it forth by showing and by demonstrating, ourselves, what it is.
And, until we start demonstrating it, what it is, it means nothing to anyone else. And people might say, “Well, did you in ECK, did you get a better job? Or, did you get a pocket-full of money? Or did you get his or did you get that?” That isn’t important. Because what you are working for is states of consciousness. And these states of consciousness must be the higher states that we’re thinking of and not the psychic states.
Because, once we move into the psychic states, then we are not moving into these higher states. Because the psychic states are like, I would say, a great deal like tides. They flow in and we can perform very well in psychic phenomena as long as the tides in, but then the tide goes out. And we can no longer perform so we might have to become to fake the psychic phenomena and when we do it doesn’t work because somebody catches us and then they say, “Well, there never was this in the first place.” Because once you’re caught, you know, the reputation grows that you never had it in the beginning. So, to stay out of it, then we build the consciousness on the higher planes. And if one does not know what these conscious states are, then they can read them in The Tiger’s Fang. They can grasp what they are in some of The Discourses or any of the books, what these states are.
So, it isn’t hard to start building and forming, in your own mind, what you want. And, if this is what you want, then you start from this point of view in trying to say, here is what I want. And you begin to think and you begin to put the dream into that state. And, this is what we are always looking for in our own mind and it isn’t a question of exactly having peace because sometimes, when we get this state, then we’re attacked on all sides by others who don’t understand this, as I said last night. They can’t understand why this fellow’s so happy and they’re not. And they don’t want him to be happy because he’s got something they haven’t got and they set out to destroy it.
And this is true because this is the way the cow works because he uses these people who are in the lower states. And they can become a channel for him well as you can become a channel for the ECK. But it, as a power, wants to destroy anything that begins to move into the higher states. For this is his duty. This is what he, of himself, tries to keep us from moving into this higher state. So that we can have the struggle and we can reach perfection of what you are speaking of through the tempering of soul.
And, it isn’t an easy way of going because none of the ways are the easy way of going. If you want the easy way of going, I just recommend quitting now because there’s no easy way that I know of. Well, if you’re enough of a reader, you will read enough of about what the old saints went through n practically every religion in the world, in order to try to get to certain degrees of perfection. And you find out that some of these people just absolutely had torture. And whether it is, I’m not saying that we’re all going out to be martyrs. That isn’t the point. Or whether we are going to go through a certain mount of torture or not. But you can expect, when you reach these certain states of consciousness, it’s just like any man who becomes a successful businessman. He has to struggle to hold this attitude of being a successful businessman or a successful leader in his own field or he’s going to be put out of there, sooner or later, by somebody who will come up and take his place.
And, this is true, within this state of consciousness, that somebody is always trying to destroy in you because the negative force is moving through them in order stop you from moving into this state.
And, therefore, it takes a struggle sometimes to maintain these states of consciousness. We are not fortunate like Ramakrishna or some of the Indians, who have been able to go into a trance and stay for 35 days or more, because we’ve got household duties. We are different. We are Westerners. We make a living. We don’t have people who would take care of us in the first place. And, because we haven’t got the stamina to do such a thing.
One has to be prepared to do this. And, remember, that when you get into some of these states, you become, often, the very lonely person. You think that you are lonely now and think that nothing has happened to you, often time this comes about.
Just think, let’s take the example of Jesus, who at one time, he fed the crowd of 5000 by the fish and the loaves. And yet, he had all these people who were following because he was demonstrating psychic phenomena to them. And they followed them down to the water’s edge. And he had to get into the boat and he had to leave the shore to escape from all of these people.
Yet, when he was arrested and taken into prison and they knew he was going to be crucified, not one person ever made claim to him. They asked Peter if he was one of the Galileans and he said no. And, 3 times he said no. His own flock was scattered, of the 12, and nobody would even try to bring about any rescue of him. And. the only one who went to see him crucified was John, as far as I know, I’m not a Biblical reader. He took Jesus’s mother and himself. They were the only 2 that were there out of all the multitude of people that followed him. How many were willing to come forth and say, “I will fight for this man. I will give up everything I have for this man”? None.
And, this is true because, when we get into this state, these very high states, we are then under this great attack by the cow or the negative force. And it, of itself, will probably do the same thing as to him. We have no friends. We have nothing to come to us. We have no one to say, “I know this man and this man is a truthful and an honest man. And I will stand by him.” How many? We don’t know.
And yet everything, all heaven and earth, shook at that time when he was crucified. And yet they still, themselves, were in doubt. Now, I’m pointing this out as an example because a man in a state of consciousness can always be the man who knows what he is and who he is. But, at the same time, no one else knows it. These people cannot be with him. They cannot understand him in his state of consciousness because he said, and it is true. “If you will come and follow me, I will show you what is in heaven and what is in my father’s mansion.”
Nobody understood or paid any attention to this. And the same goes here. If you will follow me, i will take you into these heavens. But, how many actually and deeply and truly would say today that, “Alright, I am ready and willing to go with you to the ends of the earth. I am willing to do whatever there is to be done for you. I am willing to give up my family, my children and everything else.” They will not do it because they do not understand this state of consciousness.
And, until you have the experience, until you know, you are then in deep doubt. And, no one can tell you and no one can give it to you. You are the who will receive it, of yourself, You are the one who’s going to have it. or the one who’s going to give ort receive it. And, until you are open to receive this, then you are not able to know what goes on within the master.
I have found in all of this work, that the reason that we, ourselves, are this way, the reason that we are called weak and cannot follow. The reason that we cannot go into these heavenly states with the master is the fact that we have not yet reached a level of knowing and thinking. We are allowing ourselves to be used by this negative power.
And, until we open ourselves up to the fact of trying to do well within these states, until we know that we, ourselves, are ready for it, we have lost. We are standing still. We are treading a mill and no one can bring it to us but ourselves. And I have seen people who, for 25 or 30 years, have sat at the feet of enlightened men. And yet, when they were ready to die, they say, “Master, give me just one little bit of light.
And, I do not want to be in that position where Sudar Singh one time who in his ashram, had this young chap who kept begging for the light. And, one night he stood up and it was getting quite embarrassing because he was asking and praying and said, “Master, will you give me the light?” And, the master says, “Oh, if you will come up here, I will give you the light.” So, he came up and he bowed very deeply and the master took his shoe off and he hit him on the head. And, in a few minutes, he woke up and the master said, “What did you see?”
He said, “I saw all these beautiful lights and these stars. And the master says,”Well then, you have had the light, haven’t you? And, he says, “Yes sir, I have” But he never thought about the sore spot on his head. Well, that is a fact, that when people bring about such pleading of this case, they really never get what is truly the light.
Because when you become calm, when you become trustworthy and putting your own trust within the individual or that which is ECK, then it is when it begins to come to you. Then it begins to be yours. And you, yourself, will one day find this to be true. But, again I say, the responsibility belongs to each and every one of us. And we, ourselves, must walk this very narrow path in order to get there.
May the blessings be.