I was staying in a beautiful cabin that Harif and Elizabeth have created, and it’s just filled with, in essence, feelings. I was sitting in their meditation room. I was saying to Maharaj-ji, “Maharaj-ji, what is it you have in mind? It’s not in my business, I know, but what are you planning to do this weekend?” And I reached up onto a shelf on which there were a number of pamphlets of the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, who is the father of Pir Vilayat Khan. And that’s the lineage and transmission that the abode is receiving through its being here. And I picked out one of them randomly and I opened it, and the teaching was a teaching that I often share, but it’s always so fierce that I’m always reticent. And I said, “Maharaj-ji, do you really want to do it this way?” See, it’s like throwing the I Ching or something like that, or heads and tails. You can throw it and say, “Well, whatever comes up,” and then it comes up in a way you don’t like, and you say, “Well, that’s the way those things are,” and, you know, you can….

But I figure now we all are here enough, so let’s spend this next few minutes wrestling with really one of the scary problems of the spiritual journey. I’ll start with this few paragraphs by Hazrat Inayat Khan, who is a great Sufi saint:

It is selflessness—self-less-ness—which often produces humbleness in one’s spirit, taking away the intoxication which clouds the soul. Independence and indifference—independence and indifference—which are the two wings which enable the soul to fly, spring from the spirit of self-less-ness. The moment the spirit of self-less-ness has begun to sparkle in the heart of a human, he or she shows in his word and action a nobility which no earthly power or wealth can give.

To become something is a limitation, whatever it may be. Even if a person were to be called the king of the world, he would still not be the emperor of the universe. The master of the Earth is still the slave of heaven. The self-less one is one who is no one, and yet is all.

The Sufi therefore takes the path of being nothing instead of being something. It is this feeling of nothingness which turns the human heart into an empty cup into which the wine of immortality is poured. It is this state of bliss which every truth-seeking soul yearns to attain. It is easy to be learned and it is not very difficult to be wise. It is within one’s reach to become good, but there is an attainment which is greater and higher than all these things, and this is to be nothing.

It may seem frightening to many, the idea of becoming nothing. For human nature is such that it is eager to hold on to something, and the self holds on to its own personality, its own individuality. Once one has risen above this, one has climbed Mount Everest. One has arrived at the spot where Earth ends and heaven begins.

That’s a selection. Add to that D. T. Suzuki Zen:

To love God is to have no self, to be of no mind, to become a dead man, to be free from the constrictive motivations of consciousness.

Mahatma Gandhi:

There comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible and his or her actions become all-pervasive in their effect. This comes when that person reduces himself to zero.

When I was in Japan and studied in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, every day we would read, among other things, the statement, “When you”—this is a Hakuin song:

When you understand that form is the form of the formless, your coming and going takes place nowhere else but where you are.

When you understand the thought is the thought of the thoughtless, your singing and dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma.

This is a translation of The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton:

The true men of old knew no lust for life, no dread of death. Their entrance was without gladness, their exit yonder without resistance. Easy come, easy go. They did not forget where from, nor ask where to, nor drive grimly forward fighting their way through life. They took life as it came, gladly; took death as it came, without care; and went away yonder, yonder. They had no mind to fight against the Tao. They did not try by their own contriving to help the Tao along. These are the ones we call true: minds free, thoughts gone, brows clear, faces serene. Were they cool? Only as cool as autumn. Were they hot? No higher than spring. All that came out of them came quiet, like the four seasons.

I recently had a dialogue. I was sitting in meditation at the Barre Insight Meditation Society Center in Barre, Massachusetts—which, if you don’t know about it, is a magnificent scene. And when I was sitting there, there were a number of—it was being taught this time by five Burmese monks. Mahasi Sayadaw was the senior of them; he’s a very great Buddhist teacher from Burma. And Mahasi Sayadaw taught Anagarika Munindra. Munindra was an Indian from Bangladesh, originally, and he went to Burma and studied—after having been a Hindu, he was a devotee of Anandamayi Ma for a long time. Then he went and became a Buddhist. And I met him in Bodh Gayā. He was one of my teachers in Bodh Gayā. He was with this group in Barre. His name is Anagarika Munindra. And he’s a very beautiful, he’s so transparent, you almost think he is not there at all. And he’s a walking statement of the Visuddhimagga, the Tripiṭaka, which is a Buddhist canon, the Pali Buddhist canon. And I was discussing with him various experiences that I have had, and he was sort of questioning me.

Because there are all these different category systems in Buddhism as to whether you’ve experienced nirvana, which stage, and all of that kind of stuff. And I was telling him about this LSD trip that I had had several years ago. I have talked about it—here I go again!—this LSD trip I had several years ago in the Mid-America Motel in Salina, Kansas. And I was describing what that exact experience was like. And I was just talking about… what had happened was that I had been given some acid, which was very powerful acid. And when I took it, it was in pure form, so it was many—I mean, you could get five hundred doses on your little fingernail. So I took, in my scientific way, I took the end of a matchstick, I touched it, and I touched my tongue. And I started to go out, and I kept going and going and going and going, and I started to get paranoid. Because I wasn’t sure about the acid. I wasn’t sure what this fellow had given me.

And for you to understand that paranoia, I guess I just got to backtrack a little. I got to tell you the story. I was going to pass it by, but I guess I’m going to tell it to you. There was a time in my life when I was involved in smuggling LSD. And I had distributors. I was doing it because I thought LSD should be part of the American fabric. And one of my distributors was about to buy a large amount of LSD. And he was driving west in a truck with a lot of chemical equipment, because he made another kind of chemical. And he got stoned and he went through a truck stop place and he got arrested, and he was in jail. And this was just before I was to transact this deal. And the next thing I heard was a telephone call from his mother. His mother said to me, “So and so has been arrested, and I need to raise some money for him. And he told me to go ahead with the deal and I’m taking over for him.” Now, this is an unusual situation. In the business that I was in at that moment, there is what you call healthy and functional paranoia. It’s wise to stay quite paranoid all the time, or distrusting everybody’s motives. That’s the way you survive in that business. And the thought that a mother—I could imagine the government going to this woman saying, “Look, we’ve got your son. We’re going to send him away for life. But we don’t really want him. We want who’s supplying him. So if you will help us get that person, we will let your son go.” And what mother wouldn’t? I mean, I couldn’t pit a mother against, you know—I couldn’t trust a mother’s instincts under these conditions.

So the plan was to meet her at a certain time, but I didn’t go. I didn’t, because she was so cloak and daggers. She wasn’t used to this business, and you get very cool in this business. And she was saying things like, she had watched so much television, she was saying, “I’ll meet you on the southwest corner in front of this hospital at 12:05, and I’ll be wearing a blue hat.” You know? And I thought, “Oh boy, that’s all I have to do, is drive up to that corner.” And so I didn’t go. And the result was that he didn’t get the money, and it was a hassle, and he did get out of jail. And then a lot of things subsequently happened in his life and in my life. And it turned out that she wasn’t going to burn me. She really just didn’t want to do the deal, okay? This turned out later, but I didn’t know that.

Now, several years later, this fellow has again been arrested, has escaped, is now wanted by the FBI. I am giving a lecture in a city in the Midwest which will be nameless, and I receive a girl up front afterwards with a note, and the note says, “If you would like to visit, follow this girl.” Signed by this guy’s name. So I said to the girl, “I can’t come tonight because I’m busy here with many people. But here’s my number at the hotel if he wants to call me tomorrow.”—realizing it would be a risk, since he’s wanted by the FBI, but that’s up to him.

Well, he called, and I went out to his house, and he was living a whole different life by now. He had a new wife, new job, new body, new… I mean, he has face all, everything was changed. He’d shaved everything off, and straight haircut, and he had “Healthier Fire Departments” on the back of his station wagon, his estate wagon with his big dog, and he was owning a chemical company as a front. And he was living in a big mansion, and he was like somebody else—except that down in the basement were all the kettles and drums, you know, bubbling away. I said, “Can’t you learn your lesson? Isn’t enough enough? I mean, what do you want, for God’s sake? If you want to be strung up, you’ve done enough to society already, you know? I mean, take some years off.” And he couldn’t stop, you know? It gets, oh, you can’t stop. You’re going to do good so bad.

So he had this little vial of stuff and he said, “Look at this.” He turned out the lights and it lit up in the dark. He says, “This is a sign of really good acid.” So he gave me this acid and I took it. And this is the acid, then, that I’m taking in the Mid-America Motel in Salina, Kansas, you see. And as it starts to go out and out and out, I suddenly think, “Jesus, maybe he’s getting back at me for what I did to his mother.” Okay? Now you want to stand the paranoia, okay? I mean, I had to tell you the whole thing so you just understand that level of paranoia.

So I start to freak. I think, “My God, what has he done? I’ve got to stop this.” I’m running. I’ve got the whole room. Somebody has asked me to take a lot of Tibetan thangka to Boulder, Colorado. I had them in the trunk, so I’ve got them all over the room. I’ve got Maharaj-ji’s picture on the front of the television set. I’ve got the set on but the volume off, so images are coming out of his body. I’ve got all kinds of holy quotes all around the ground, incense, and I’m naked in this room. And I start to flip out, and I think, “I’ve got to stop this quick.” And I rush to the door. And then this image of what’s going to happen next, if I walk out that door, I mean, you know—I mean, it’s one thing to be in your own reality. It’s another thing—naked man in room 125, you know? We have a code 12. And then it’s going to be a mess. And if I’m going to die, I’ll die anyway, and it’ll be just a horrible way to go.

And so with my hand on the doorknob, I thought, “No, I don’t want to die that way.” So I turn back and I try to figure out if there was some other way I could die that would be more pleasant. Or could I avoid death? Was there some way I could avoid death? No matter how hard I thought about it, there was no way I could avoid death. I mean, it might take forty years, but I was still going to die. You understand? I mean, I’m taking you now into my LSD world, alright? There was no way that I could avoid death. And I realized that, as long as I thought I was anybody, I was going to die. And what was going to die was who I thought I was. And if I,—each time I had a new thought of who I was, that one was going to die, too, one way or another.

And finally, since I could find no way out—there was a no-exit situation; there was no way not to die—I thought, “Well, why wait?” And I turned to this big picture of Maharaj-ji and I said, “Maharaj-ji, would you please let me die? I’ve had enough.” And I lay down and I experienced my thoughts. They went VURRRRRRRR, until pretty soon I saw each thought arising, existing, and passing away. Tiny space, next thought arising. And as long as I was in a thought, I was living, and I was somebody, and I was going to die. And then the spaces between the thoughts became more pronounced. And finally I was sitting in a thought facing the space, and I dove into the space—which was the space between two thoughts.

Now, the next thing that I experienced was the thought. Well, now you can be anything you want to be. And the thought after that was, “Uh-oh, you came back.” Do you hear that? I grabbed—do you hear the way that works? I mean, it was bittersweet. I could be anything I wanted to be, but I still was going to be something, because even though I was free to choose now, because I saw that I wasn’t who I thought I was, still, any thought, I grabbed onto it, and I had grabbed because there I was, back again. Now, how long that space lasted—I don’t know. It might have lasted a millionth of a second. It might have lasted an hour. I have no way of knowing that. It was within that range, I assume, because of the way that night and day and all that. And the rest of the session was all very interesting and pleasant.

Well, in telling Munindra-ji about this experience, he said to me, “Well, that was an experience of nirvana. Now, I had never associated that experience, even though I sort of thought it might be. I mean, I never thought it was. And the first thing I said to him was, “Yes, but that was drug-induced.” Okay, that’s my head trip about my values, about methods. And he said, “Well, the drug has nothing to do with it. It was you that were ready to do that thing. That happened to you.” I said, “But the truth,” I said—then I went into the discussion, “Well, how do I know it’s a valid thing?” He says, “Well, you should be able to do this, this, and this.” I said, “I can’t, because the way I got to it was through drugs, and I can’t do it without drugs.” And so we are a standoff about that issue.

But that isn’t the thing I’m trying to raise with you. I’m raising an issue that when he said to me, “that experience you had was nirvana,” I experienced almost a cold chill. Because I think I faced directly for the first time what I had been talking about for about a year now of what it meant to become nobody. See, I’ve been saying ever since I met Maharaj-ji, the thing about Maharaj-ji that was interesting was that, no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find him. I mean, all these stories and events, and he did things that were just all this stuff, but I couldn’t find a person there. I couldn’t find somebody. There was nobody responsible inside. There was nobody minding the store, if you will. And I was looking at that from outside in. And I could see that there were long periods of time when I’d be lecturing, when the lecturing was just happening, and I was sort of just aware the lecturing was happening. But, you see, there was still somebody that was aware the lecturing was happening. But in that little space, there wasn’t anybody there at all.

And when I read the Buddhist texts, it describes that as you go into the nirvana state, then after a while you get so that you can stay in it longer and longer and longer, until pretty soon you could actually act while you were in it. And I began to understand what it is that is the end result of what it is you and I are doing here. And it was the chilling realization that the end result didn’t have “me” in the scenario; that I just wasn’t going to be there to say, “Well, this is the end result.” See, I’ve been saying it so many ways. I’ve been saying, “You can get up to the door, but you can’t get through.” And I say all these cute things, like “Nobody gets enlightened.” But I never really grokked it. I never really experienced the feeling of what that no-self-consciousness means.

If you take Gandhi’s thing again—“There comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effect”—this is Christ’s statement “Had ye but faith, you could move mountains.” This comes when he reduces himself to zero. It isn’t the place where you say, “Now I am zero.” See, the wording, it’s very hard. Because the statement “He reduces himself to zero”—it sounds like the “he” that reduced himself to zero is still going to be around, saying, “Now I’ve reduced myself to zero.” But it isn’t that way. The “he” that says, “Now I’m going to reduce myself to zero” goes into itself.

There used to be a wonderful UPA cartoon. I’ve never seen it in many years. It was a movie short in which a man is in a car, and he drives out, and he stops the car, and he reaches into the back, and he pulls out something, and he takes an air pump, and he pumps it up, and it turns into a big lake. And then he takes something else out, and he pumps it up, and it turns into a boat. And he pumps up something else, and it’s a fish. And he pumps up something else, and it’s a beautiful girl. And then he gets into the boat, and he goes out, and he catches the fish with a beautiful girl on the lake. And then he comes back, and he pumps up a tent, and he goes to sleep, and then he gets up in the morning, and he takes everything down. He deflates the girl, and everything gets deflated back, and the fish, and he puts it all back in his back of a station wagon. And he’s going off, and you see the station wagon driving down, and you see a tack in the road. And the tack hits the tire on the road, and then the station wagon slowly turns back into nothing.

See, we can go through the stages where we get to the point where we are so free of clinging, we are not clinging, we don’t care if we eat or don’t eat, or if we eat good food or don’t eat good food. We don’t care if it rains or it’s sunny. We don’t care if we get sick or healthy. We can handle pain, we can do all these things. But there is still somebody. There’s still somebody-ness. And that force of the universe, that statement, “Your singing and dancing is no other than the voice of the dharma,” when you meet a being who is cooked, there is only the dharma. It is no different than a tree or a river. There is nobody home. And in that sense we are babysitting our own psychological death. And whether our physical death is coincidental with that will be of no relevance to us. Can you imagine that one? Because when you aren’t, when there is no self-conscious entity, what difference does it make whether the body or that body is there or not? And when I try to make sense out of the things that my guru has said, it only makes sense when I do not try to project a solid, self-conscious entity into them.

Now, the reason that I have to talk about this stuff—which in some way seems a million miles beyond us—is because of the perspective-giving nature of this discussion. What often happens is: we have made—you and I—we have made great gains in terms of awareness. I mean, most of us have been through a lot of stuff now, and those that haven’t still have tuned in and done it very quickly. And so this group is, within the cultural framework, a relatively conscious group of people. You are more aware of the ecological implications of your acts. You’re more aware of the social implications. You can be expected to be more of what would be called a conscious being. And it all starts to get lighter and easier and more playful and more dancing and more delightful. And, I mean, I’m drifting through life, I must say it’s really—as heavy as it gets—it’s delight. And I hang out with dying people all the time, and it’s still a blast! I deal with people with excruciating pain, and it’s still okay. And there’s a sway in which it’s spacious and beautiful, and there is that awareness that surrounds it all, and there is an open heart, and there is flow, and it’s beautiful, and there is a tendency to say, “Well, that was pretty good. We’ve really have it together. That’s great.”

I just want to keep this chilling spectacle of where the game leads in my consciousness and in yours. Because I think that what has happened for many of us is that we have been somewhat reductionistic about the spiritual journey, and we’ve tended to say it’s nothing other than BLIP. But the words that characterize the Sufi tradition of “towards the one,” “the return to the one,” means just that: return to the one. And when there is one, there are not two. And your self-consciousness only exists so long as there are two. It does not exist in the one. God does not know itself, it only knows itself through a duality. And duality has inherent within it suffering, and the end of suffering is the end of duality, and the end of duality is the end of you. And then the forms may go on or not, but you will never notice.

And what you find (and what I find at times) is: I am going hellbent—whatever that expression is; hellbent for leather, or whatever that is—towards the goal of being one with God. And at the same moment it’s like one of those horses that’s got its paws into the earth, pushing against the momentum of the thing it’s doing. There’s part of me pushing against the ultimate, irrevocable end of this story. At the same point, another part of me is racing headlong towards it. I mean, there is a neurosis in the spiritual journey. And it is inherent in the—what it lies in is the issue of psychological death. And that’s part of why my project with dying is so important for me, because it allows me to deal again and again and again with this issue of death.

When I was in Thailand, I went to a Buddhist monastery in which they cure heroin addicts. And they cure three hundred heroin addicts every ten days, and it costs fifteen dollars. And no statistic was like that anywhere else. And when I went there—I’m not going to go into the whole story now, I’m just going to tell one little part of it—the person that runs it is a monk, a Theravadan Buddhist monk. And he is a monk. Well, the two-minute story is that he was a member of the drug division of the government of Thailand. He was a policeman. And he had an aunt who was a Buddhist saint, and she said to him—I don’t know what a Buddhist saint is but she was one—and she said to him, “You’re going to end up killing and hurting people. Why don’t you help them instead of hurting them?” And he said, “I don’t know how.” She said, “You get your seams straight and I’ll tell you.” So he gave up the police and he became a Buddhist monk. The Buddhist monks take on 228 precepts. An initiated bhikkhu. Non-killing, non-stealing, non-lying, non-sexual misconduct, not-taking intoxicating beverages, that’s five. Then there’s: you don’t sleep on soft beds, you don’t listen to music, you don’t adorn yourself in any way, you… then it gets into more esoteric ones. You don’t leave the monastery during the rainy season. It goes on and on, and they get more and more complex. I mean, you can’t spit in this thing. I mean, it’s 228 of them, and those even weren’t even tough enough for him. He added ten more. You don’t ride in any vehicles.

So he was like three hours by car south of Thailand, from Bangkok, and when he had a fight with the government he just walked to Bangkok. I mean, when I met this guy it was like meeting an oak tree. There was just nowhere that… this guy was just UGH. And he got to this point where he had done all this discipline, and then his aunt said “Okay,” and she gave him an herbal method, and also a set of vows and stuff like that. And he says to these people who come to the monastery, “You can come once for ten days. You may never come here again.” And he just—his mind is so powerful, and his reality in which they are not drug addicts is so strong, that his mind and his reality is stronger than their addiction. And in the battle for their souls, his statement—it’s not religious; he doesn’t teach them religion or anything. It’s merely that the power of his being, there comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible, and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effect. This comes when he reduces himself to zero. And this guy, through 238 precepts, has become merely a dharmic instrument for the healing of heroin addiction and opium addiction. And it is so strong that even junkies can’t resist it.

So I said to him, “Is it possible that anybody else could do this, or only you and your aunt? I mean, could we take it to America?” And he says, “No, others could do it.” I said, “Could I do it?” And he looked at me, and he said, “Well, perhaps.” But there wasn’t much hope, I could see. And then he tested me in various ways, which the tests were very perplexing. But instead of going to the test now, let me come back to this. When I came back to the United States, I have many, many friends who are extremely devoted social servants. They really love humanity and they want to help people. And I thought here—and there are many of them that are working in drug rehabilitation. And I thought “Here I have met something that works. And I’ve tasted it and touched it and it feels real. And I saw the changes in these people in ten days. And I really think—I don’t know the statistics—but I think it may work.” And in all the time I’ve been in the United States in the last three years, I have not found one human being who was ready.

Do you hear that? That’s what I mean about dying. Because when you get trained in that training, he’s not going to let you be done until you aren’t. And all that’s going to be left is somebody that cures drug addicts. There’s not going to be anybody that says, “Well, I finally did it. I now can cure a drug addicts.” There’s not going to be any flicker of consciousness. Because the power comes when the mind has become one-pointed, when it just goes ZIP. And as long as there is the flicker of thought form that is self-consciousness—of: you do something that way, and then there’s a quick thought of “I’m doing something that way”—forget it. It’s watered down. And that’s why you and I have what we have, and why Christ had what he had, and Buddha had what he had. It’s because we are full of thoughts that keep us oriented to who we are and how it is.