k rCincinnati Regional
I always start out with these talks and I really don’t know what to say and they develop as I go along. It’s always very interesting as I look back from the time that I started 5 to 6 years ago in this work. And I see a change in myself and I see a change in the people who come to these meetings. I see changes in a great number of things in communities and groups, people I meet and in people, I later meet again. And I feel that the personality seems to have grown smaller and the message has grown greater.
And I’m always feeling in the sense that I, personally, don’t count. I’m just the instrument that has been used. And I say used and I’m well used at times, I feel. And it gets to the point that, sometimes, when the personality tries to get into in between the message and the coming out, it pretty well gets battered and bruised and beaten until it feels like that it has no place. And this is true; it has no place in the work and with the messenger that although I feel that it has to be there because, after all, I’m living in a human body, too. And, by living in a human body, I do have need of what we call the personality and all the faculties of the human self.
And, because of this, I do feel that there are times when the personality does get in the way because I know that many times with you it gets in the way, too. And, I hope that you will forgive me, at times, when the ego or the personality arises, as much as I do with you, because I know that isn’t the real you and you know that isn’t the real me.
In all of this work, we have to look at the human side of life because this is where we’re living and we can’t go any farther than that. We cannot move outside of the states of consciousness until we become quite aware of ourselves as the person or as the human. And, we have to recognize this, and this is the difference, of course, between ourselves and the animal state.
And when we begin to realize that we have the faculties and the finer qualities and the finer instincts of life, we raise ourselves above the animal state. And we become, then in the human self, and then we go beyond that human self into the psyche. And we go beyond that into the soul self and we become, then beyond that, into the God self.
And these are states that have to go through besides the other states and the other levels that we have to go through at times and we know, ourselves, you and I how impatient the human side can be. And, it is so interesting because, beyond the day in our present time, where we have so many things that are instant, as instant foods and instant TV and instant news and anything else that we want, we expect to have the instant God. And, we expect to have instant enlightenment and instant realization. But, we never get it. And it is always those who are looking for these and, what I call the spiritual flirters, are those who will not stay with anything long enough to understand what they are doing or what is being said to them. And they keep on moving from group to group trying to understand and grasp more and more.
Now, there’s no feeling of condemnation of such people who do move from group to group and read and study a lot and end up very confused because, in a sense, this is where they are supposed to be. And we leave them alone and eventually they will come to that point in which they know that they cannot go any farther until they settle upon one thing.
Now there’s a very interesting point, in all of this, that I want to make. In all history, In all religious and spiritual history, here on earth, there has been a strange factor that I don’t suppose that too many people have thought about, in a sense. And, If they did, they did not think about it very deeply.
In the Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad which are the scriptures of the Eckankar, the ECK works, there is a line or a sentence that goes something like this, “That he who comes to this world to spread the message of love and peace, also brings wars.” And Christ, himself, also said, “I come to bring the sword and the peace, to set brother against brother and father against son and family against family” or something of that order. And this is true.
Because all of those who have come to bring peace and love to to this world, of themselves, did not meet a peaceful end. Muhammad took up the sword to get his own people, the tribes of Arabia to take up his religion. There have been wars upon wars that have been named, or been in the name of Christ, and even wars that have been fought over the difference of how you pronounce certain words. There have been wars because of the Buddha, differences in the Buddha world. There have been the wars that are still going on today between the Moslems and the Hindus. All of these things you wonder, “When will they end? And, what brings the peace and the happiness to this world?”
As a collective group, it is rather doubtful that we will ever have any peace within the worlds. As you can see now, within your lifetime, there’s been wars upon wars upon wars upon wars. And it seems like those who, like the Quakers, who seemed to suffer a great deal by preaching the message of peace and in going into some of the countries where there’s been war, they have suffered tortures and many other things. For example, I knew a man who tried to preach the message of peace during World War II in Tokyo. And when the Japanese returned him to this country after about 3 years, he was quite a tortured man. He had been beaten. He had been going through all the tortures to get him to change his message because the military caste did not want him to give the message of peace.
There was a few years ago, or we would say back during the latter part of the last century, a young Indian, an American Indian, who thought that he had received the message from heaven and he began the Ghost Dances and they were misinterpreted by the U.S. military, which believed they were the war dances. And they completely massacred and wiped out most of the Indian tribes in the West.
And all he was trying to do was to bring to the world or bring to the Indians, peace and prosperity again and get the Indians together so they would have some voice in the government. Now, I have delved off on the side just a few moments to try to bring to you what the problem is within the world when one tries to preach love and peace. And he cannot expect mercy at all because he must remember that he has the great odds of that negative force, which is out to win because this is a negative world and he must be aware, at all times, that it is going to use others in order to destroy the voice.
And I, myself, have been in the position of where the same thing has come to me in which that I have had the same problems. And I’ve been fortunate enough to know, beforehand, when someone was going to try to destroy me in some manner and I, very quietly, stepped out of the ambush. But, this comes down to the one thing I’m trying to say, here and now, that we’re dealing with worlds beyond when we’re doing this.
We’re dealing so much with the Astral World in our lives today. And, its influence upon this world is unknown to most people. And, when we begin to think about how, for some unknown reason within the past 15 to 25 years, that they have allowed opening channels to these psychic forces and {to} bring forth and even to teach within the colleges, certain psychic subjects in which that are the negative forces. And, it has brought forth destruction and leaving nothing but unhappiness and destruction in the wake of things. Then, we begin to wonder if there is actually at work today, a greater force than what we have known before.
And, there is because this is the last age, which is called the Kali Age or the Iron Age, the last of the 4 Yugas in which now we have a few more million years left in which that we have, at the end of this period, {that} all of the lower worlds, including the physical world, the astral world, the causal world and the mental world will be destroyed. The records say that we have a million and a half years within this age and scientists say, I think, about something in the order of nine or ten million more years here. But we, ourselves, we’ll wait, of course, and see who’s right.
But what I’m saying, the astral world is now having a greater influence upon the lives of people than we know. And, for some reason, these forces which always influence the emotions of people is becoming greater. And the astral world’s greatest part of its senses is called the emotional sense. And it is the sentimental law and the feelings we have and all of these things. It is the sex law and all of these things which make up the part of the individual.
And, it makes up a great many things that move us by feelings, by emotions of anger and these types of emotions. And, they have become greater, within I say in the last few years. And, it is said the Van Allen Belt, which is the belt that surrounds this world, has been broken by certain scientific things that have been used in the exploration of space and all that has been said that has been broken, but I don’t quite go along with that. But, I know that it has been penetrated.
And, it has allowed a flow of this to come into this world. And, it has begun to influence and bring together more of this on an emotional basis than it has in the sense of previous times. Now, this will always have a big influence in the worlds and it has always come to the point of bringing men together under adverse conditions. It’s always been a big part in politics and a number of aspects of our lives. But today it is greater than ever and it is greater than ever because we have allowed it to become a part of us.
And, we’re now depending, more today, upon emotion than we are in the fact of the mental realm, which is the intellectual realm. Which seems, if we read all the publications and see all the publications, we’re thinking that the intellectual life or the mental life has been built up so great that we have more of the mental and the intellectual side than we do of the emotional side. But this isn’t true.
When we take it in comparison, when we take the comparison [of] all the people in the world and I don’t know how many, perhaps 10 billion people, there’s only a small amount who have been in a position to develop the intellect. There’s this intellectual world, this intellectual plane, that also brings a problem to us. And, it brings a problem to us in the form of hashing and rehashing and questioning and questioning until those who are trying to move out of the body and move into the higher states, they’ll come to this realm and they’ll stay in this realm and they will say, “I have fear. I question this. I look at this. I don’t trust this. I wonder what is wrong with this and why and how and what are the great words that are used in there?”
Now, emotion will stop one from moving out of this body into the higher states because they have mistaken the emotions for the true and the more advanced stage in the spiritual side than they will in what is truly known as the spiritual or the detached state. And, they move into this mental realm and they become, sometimes, hung up or stuck on this realm because, in the world of questions and in the world of thinking, they cannot go any farther than this because they have to have a reason for everything that they do. And, when they try to move beyond this, they cannot move beyond this because they must have a reason. And, once the person stops the movement of the mind towards the reasons why that this happens or why it doesn’t happen. then he begins to move into what we call the soul plane or the first plane of the pure worlds. And, then he begins to get expansion and begins to have a certain amount of the spiritual phenomena that he can report as reality or true experience or survival.
Now, I do not belittle anyone who has the astral experience because, actually, so many people do not have any experience beyond themselves. And I would say, that any experience outside themselves or expansion beyond themselves is good. Even if it gets into these areas, but I know I don’t want to stop there. I don’t want anyone to stop to pick the flowers which are so beautiful in these areas because when they go on the joys and the bliss becomes so much greater. And, you would think then, that all these people who have such great enlightenment, you can go all the way across the board from the poorest and the most ignorant to the greatest in the intellect that has been known in some of these worlds.
You take St. Thomas Aquinas who has one of the greatest minds, or who had one of the greatest minds in all Christendom. He, himself, had great enlightenment. And yet, we go on the other end of the scale where we find those who have been poor and ignorant and had no education. And we can say that. when you would think about St. Anthony of the Desert who had no education, here is a man who left a record, not in the books, but a record of his life which shows that he had great enlightenment. And yet we have those writers like Swedenborg, who one of the great intellectuals. And yet, he wrote in great enlightenment. And yet, when you talk about St. Catherine of Siena, who had no education, and yet she was one of the greatest in the Christian world.
And you begin to wonder how these people had this and each one of these people went beyond that one realm of the real and the mental world. Omar Khayyam was not an educated man and yet he wrote his Rubaiyat, and what a finer piece of poetry we don’t know in all literature. And yet, there was Rūmī, who was also another Sumi poet, who was a highly educated man and he held four professorships all at the same time in four different universities and he taught, simultaneously during the week, at each one of these universities in metaphysics and law and several other subjects. And yet, he spent 30 years writing his great poem called The Reed. And yet, today, how many people know it? And he was, still, one of the saints who has the greatest of enlightenment and we can go all through the history and we can find this.
And we often wonder why that these people stir up such things to have and come to their own ends and when they tried to bring something of peace and love here then they were attacked. They weren’t all martyrs. But on the other hand, they never led a peaceful life. And, I was talking about personality a minute ago. You wouldn’t say that Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, who as I spoke a moment ago, was one of the greatest enlightened men and a man who could do out-of-the-body travel and has numerous amounts of experiences recorded. And yet, his personality was always standing in his way. He was a man who was known as a carouser and who would be in the taverns. And. he was a man who took approximately 5000 pieces of gold when some King, I think it was at Sharez, or one of the places there in Persia, who asked him to come to there and be the official poet. And. he agreed and he accepted $5000. So he started out on board a ship and he didn’t like water and a small storm came up and they put back into court and he got off the ship and said he wouldn’t go. And when he asked for the money back he said no. He wasn’t giving the money back. He had made the attempt so he should keep the money. So that’s a funny thing when the personality gets in the way with all of these sorts of things.
And on the other hand, you have this part of the man which was the good part. And, this is a part about you and me, in which we ask the human, always look at our little self, And we have all this recrimination about all the little things, about all gifts and all of that and this is where our attention is put. And yet, we don’t think about this part of us, which is the greater part. And this is a mistake that, I would say, the majority of people who are trying to seek a path today are making the mistake.
Because we have it and it’s here and all we have to do is transfer the attention from the physical to it. This is all the simplicity of saying it. But, the simplicity of doing it is another thing.
And this is, basically, the whole thing that is in ECK, is trying to teach someone to transfer the attention from the outer, off from the physical or the human side to this, which we know as the spiritual side or the greater side. And, until the individual does that, he is always thinking about the little things that get in his way, always thinking about are all of the little things which has happened or all of the things or all the wrongs that he did. And, his attention is on the wrong thing. And the problem. that lies with all of us, lies in this area and it also lies in some other areas, And some of the areas are, very frankly and very simply, that we will not accept self-responsibility. And, this is the greatest thing that is trying to be taught in ECK, that each of us must accept, for what we have gotten and where we are today, here and now.
And, the minute that we start doing that, we start expanding. We must accept each of these things as a part of ourselves. And, these things are so simple. They are so simple that we miss them most of the time and yet, they are all right there, right with us. And, we must at all times, begin to think that here and now is the time. Yesterday wasn’t the time to do it. Tomorrow isn’t the time to do it because this is with us at all times and all it is wanting to be is have recognition. And, the more we recognize it and the moment we begin to see this as ourselves, then we begin to take control of the switchboard and we begin to expand and move from this position, where we are here, to that position here. Not over there, but here.
And here is wherever that, which we call the other Self, the soul or whatever you want to know, is. And, body is always there.
Now, there is a difference in all this terminology, because we’ve always got it backward and we know [that] just backward is what they have in daily conversation. We also never talk about the soul or my soul because we are speaking from the human or the physical self. And body is only or it is that which has possession of soul. We don’t do that, because we can speak of my body, because we are speaking then from soul position. And, this is the way we speak. We say soul which is then we are speaking from the real self and we are speaking from a level in which we are putting the physical and all of the things in their places.
So then we have to think in the terms – this is a complexity and yet it is a simplicity because we are dealing, in the beginning, with 5 bodies. We are dealing with the physical body. We are dealing with the astral body, the causal body, the mental body and soul body.
Now, soul is here on earth for one reason. It must be trained. It must go through its schooling, just like a child goes through academic schooling. And, then someday it leaves here because it has graduated and it goes into the other worlds and begins the work again.
But when we are moving from state to state in soul body, we are moving from the physical to the astral, to the causal, to the mental and to the soul plane. Which is it, where soul has it’s habitat. It’s the true place where soul belongs. Now, we carry these bodies with us and each of these bodies, as we carry with us, is on the different planes because these planes we carry with us, are within us and they’re without. And, they are also outside of us.
We live in them and I will put it in this manner, we live in them and we live out of them because we are the personal world living in the universal world or the microcosm living in the macrocosm.
And when we move this state of consciousness to the astral plane, we do not move the astral body. The astral body is already there and we move the consciousness to the astral body. And then we move it to the next plane and the next plane until it enters into the soul plane where it recognizes itself and has self-realization. And, this is a point you must remember. That when those people in certain religions and groups talk about self-realization, they then be talking about God-realization but in interpreting them in what they are saying, they are only talking about reaching soul plane.
Because we must go beyond the soul plane in order to enter into the God-realized planes. And, believe me. and don’t be discouraged, there are not too many people who will enter into the God-planes. There will be a great number of people who will but I’m speaking from the point of the masses. I would say in this work that I’m in and I modestly say this, that we have a few and we have a handful of people who, out of the numbers that we have, who can reach this state or have degrees of realization in it. And yet of all the group, we know that many of these people will never have it. Not in this lifetime; a lot of them will never get out of the state of realization or the human side in order to get into that which we know as the astral. They won’t even have that sort of experience.
Now, I cannot give you a percentage on this, but anyone who has dealt with people in these fields will know this because they realize that a certain number of people will never go beyond a certain area because they have many problems. And these problems cannot be resolved at this present time. There are many factors for these and if you just want to give it one big fat solution of karma. well, that’s easy to say but that’s not always the answer.
Now, we’ll go from there to the point that so many people will stay in ECK because they like it. Some will like me personally and I like them personally. We have a number of people who drop out but we never try to keep them in because we know perhaps they’ll go someplace else where they can do it as well or maybe better. But, we always say there is a hope someplace for these people, regardless, because they will. The time that they have put in is never to be wasted. And, this time is made up and added onto that part in which they are coming closer in the end when they do eventually enter into these areas. They have earned or done so much merit for this because the ECK master, now mind you, has always been within all these worlds since the beginning of time. And, although these people who have been under him in their lifetime. and in his lifetime because he chose a body, a physical body, to be with the people.
Whether they left him 10 centuries ago or not, they will eventually come back to him in a future lifetime, Now you’ll say, how can this be? The body, as I said before is only a vehicle in which this enters into, like the state of spirit, and yet uses this vehicle century after century or life after life on someone because the body is not permanent. And, the body will die for some reason and this power, this which we call the ECK, moves out of that body into another body. And, therefore, another ECK master, he takes his place and he teaches and he picks up where the other left off, Those who studied under the same spirit, or the same thing which we call the ECK master, enter into his presence again. And they, themselves, have gained so much. And, perhaps, this is the time when they take up the works and maybe not.
And, this is one reason why that we have never gone into trying to do like many groups will do, in a sense, to hold out and say we have this which is greater than the others because we want people to make their own choice about being in ECK. And we know that one day, that those who have been in the past, come again. And many of those who studied under me, many centuries ago, and not this personality. I’m talking from the other position, are now back again and this time they have accepted fully and in the end they, themselves, will enter into the high worlds. the Kingdom of God and they will never have to return to this world.
Now, in all of this, people question. They ask themselves, “Is there truth in this, in what this man says, or shall I believe what I believe?”
I always say to people, “You believe as you want to believe and I cannot change you from your point of view. But, it is you who has to make the change. And when that day comes that you will make the change or you do make the change, rather, then it is done naturally with no forcing, no selling of something, nothing to be said except that the choice has been made by the individuals, themselves.
And, we never give initiation, until, I don’t say never, but we usually give initiation after two years of being in the work because we feel that so many people must first learn something about it. And know that they want to continue with it after the two years, rather than be initiated and then one day, they want to leave. And they feel guilty or have a guilt conscience or have been unhappy about having the initiation and then go away. Because after two years time, I’ve always said, well maybe, the person got, after studying for two years with me, maybe you didn’t like me. And if he didn’t, well alright. I didn’t make anyone unhappy. But he’s always free to go and this is what I’m trying to say, that we propose to all people in ECK to have their own state of consciousness dictated by spirit and not by someone who is saying, “These are the rules and these are the laws that you have to go by.”
Now, we’ll lay down general trends of thought and we’ll say this is what should be done. This is how, that in the past, that it has been tested and it’s been successful in these ways. But perhaps you as an individual, cannot follow this and if you can’t, then there are other ways that you can do it within the framework of ECK. And, because we recognize the other person as being an individual and having different environments and different developments, different patterns of life. Then, they must, of themselves, be given individual attention, And, they are given it whether they know it or not.
Because the master is always there trying to unfold this person and get him into a higher level. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s easy. But most of us get it like a balking mule and we are not going to be moved unless we are positive that we are going to get some results out of it. I feel like the fellow who one time, and I think some of you have heard this story, but he wanted to be in ECK and he wanted to be in ECK very badly and I didn’t see why he should be in ECK and I told him and finally I said to him, I says, “What can you give up for ECK?” He went off and he thought for 2 or 3 days. So, he came back and he said to me, “I can give up everything but my wife.” Now I says, “Well, I don’t know what we would want with your wife.” But I was trying to get across to this man that if he could detach himself from prefixed ideas and from opinions and from all the set attitudes on something, then he had a greater opportunity to understand and know what ECK was.
Now, there are people who understand it from their level of thinking. It’s like the woman one time when I was in San Jose, California making a talk and I got through. Not that well. I did very well with this talk and I got it across very good to the people. They seemed to be attentive and she comes up and says, “Oh, this is Christian Science isn’t it? And I says, “Christian Science?” And she says, “Yes.” And she said something, I didn’t know I said it, but she said, ‘Well you said God was Principle. And I says, “Oh, well. alright.” You know, but you see, this is the way she grasped it and this is the way all of us will grasp it according to our training in the past, according to what we know. And, this is our first impression of it, But then it begins to grow and the seed is planted and it gets a little greater and it begins to move until, one day, it blossoms into being a great flower.
And there will be a day coming when some of you people here who are in ECK will have your ninth initiation. And you will set down in a room. And you will watch the rose grow until it blooms into the blossom of the beauty of the rose itself, And I say because the bud, the tight bud, will be put within the vase of water and you will watch it, And how long you will stay there depends upon you and depends upon the growth of the rose and your own spiritual growth. And that day is coming for some.
Now, in the end I say this, that i always feel in being in the city, where I’m not known as well and seeing new faces, is always very encouraging to me because it gives me a talking point and it makes me try to do a little better in getting out the message. I’m trying to carry the message as much as I can, serve those who’re coming for the first time {so they} will get something from what I’ve said. And, whatever I’ve said to you, I hope that it will have some bearing, someplace, sometime upon your life, whether it will be tonight or whether it will be 5 years from now. May the blessings be.