I was busy trying to be divine. And I thought that if somehow I did it all perfectly enough, I fasted long enough, I prayed hard enough, that sort of error of my humanity would disappear and I would be divine. And what he said was: your freedom lies through your humanity, not in spite of it.
If you look at me, you see a body; a 56-year-old attractive gentleman. If you shift to my personality, you see a pleasant-looking chap, a mild manic depressive. If you look at another level, you see an Aries. If you look at another level and we look into one another’s eyes, it’s very much like those beings, the people who went to the Moon, and they wore those spacesuits, and they had little windows in them. It’s like you come up and you look in the window and you say, “Are you in there? I’m in here. How did you get into that one?” See, when you look at another person through their eyes—that’s why the eyes are called the windows of the soul—you see through the veil of all the individual differences, and you see another entity in there just like you, just looking back at you. And you see the entity is packaged differently, and because it’s packaged differently, it’s living in an entirely different universe than you are—or in a relatively different universe. Now, if you go one step further in your altered state of consciousness, you look, and there’s only one of it looking at itself looking at itself. There’s only one awareness that is playing by being in these many forms, and you’re only appearing to be an audience, and I’m only appearing to be a speaker, and we’re talking to itself. And to keep the Buddhists happy: if you change once more, it all disappears—which is the same, only the other side.
Once you see that all of the forms of dualistic experiencing, of collecting experiences, is all just relatively real, it loosens the power of all those things over you. They don’t compel you as much. And at first, when that starts to happen, you get a little anxious. Because it feels like the richness of life is dying for you. And you’re beginning to experience this statement “Lest ye die, you cannot be reborn.” You begin to feel death around you. You feel the emptiness of things that previously were extremely pleasant to you. And it’s a little disconcerting. And some people that are on this journey would like to say, “Stop. I think I’d like to go back. I think I would like to milk it for a little more. I’d like to have just a little more of the pleasure, of the rushes, of the romantic drama.”
My work at that point was to learn how to live my life impeccably, honor my incarnation perfectly, so that I could be free through form, not in spite of form. Most of us think we’re only free when we break out of forms. But as long as you’re in an incarnation, there is no way out of form. You are in form. So the question is: can you be free in form?
We thought freedom was being able to not work, for example. Freedom had to do with external freedom. It had to do with political systems, it had to do with economics, it had to do with how you spent your time. But if you are around affluent people at all, you begin to see that that kind of freedom is not free; that those people are as trapped in their minds as people who have very considerable economic hardships. And that when we’re talking about real freedom, we’re talking about the freedom of awareness from identification with thought.
It is so incredibly sweet to go in to the bank teller to cash a check, and—who do you see? It’s interesting. If you see a bank teller, if you’re a check cashier, you see a bank teller. If you’re resting in your being, and you’re just a being who happens to be cashing a check, you meet a being who happens to be a bank teller. Now, he or she may think they are a bank teller, and you have no moral right or even opportunity to say, “Come on, you know you’re not a bank teller!” Because their finger goes for the little button that calls for help. Walk in and you say, “Oh, divine mother!” See? And button! You’re about to be erased. Error in the system. I have learned well not to do that. You don’t say everything you see.
Your mind and your awareness becomes an environment where, if somebody else would like to come up for air, there’s nothing in you that will keep them stuck. That’s the secret of it. Not that you force them to come up, but you create an environment where you’re not caught in any play, and you’re seeing bank teller, man, woman, helper, server of humanity, fellow soul who took birth and happens to be a bank teller. You see God in drag, God at play. You see it’s all empty. It’s all true. It’s all relatively real; all of it is relatively real. And you’re sitting with all of it simultaneously, and you’re just cashing the check, and then they are who they need to be.
As you get less and less caught in your roles that you are fulfilling—many of them every day—you learn how to play them impeccably and yet always remain quiet inside. Quite equanimous and quite present and quite clear. And you are amazed at how many people are right there, waiting for you to be there for them that way, and how surprising it is what packages they come in. Because often you would expect that in that package you will not find a conscious being; you’ll find somebody who’s very asleep into their role. And it’s quite a surprise to find them right there.
It is only as you quiet your mind so that you are quite extricated from identification with your own desires. It doesn’t mean the desires aren’t there. It doesn’t mean my neuroses aren’t there. It’s all there. It is just that you are no longer identified with them. Your awareness, you—when I talk about you, I mean your awareness—your awareness has come out of it, so that it’s in it but not of it. It honors it, it experiences it, acknowledges it, but it isn’t lost in identification.
Something clicked in me in which I began to allow myself to be; just allow myself to be. There had been a little hook in there that never—it was always: “I’ll be okay. I’ll be holy when I get rid of those things.” And suddenly it’s: “I am what I am, and it’s okay.” And that desire that that happened is: I can feel it beginning to happen. I can feel myself beginning to appreciate other human beings instead of judging them. The judging always comes from your own sense of separateness.
It’s very strange to me still to walk down the street and look at somebody, and our eyes meet, and at that moment the flickering occurs just almost like that. They go from “What do you want?” And then, when you don’t want anything, some of them flick again, and suddenly there you are. Just took a moment, and you’re there in love together. And what are you going to do about it? Should we have coffee? Let me have your number in case I run out later. Or finally you just let go, and you just allow yourself to see the beloved more and more in everyone you look at.
The work you do to relieve suffering in the world becomes a form of making love, or a form of being in love with another being. And there are two levels of that. One is where you see the beloved as a separate entity from yourself, and the next level out is where the suffering is your suffering, and you’re relieving the suffering just in the same way as you might pull your other hand out of the fire. And when somebody says, “Thank you,” that almost feels as if they are making you distant; more distant than you are. Because you weren’t a “Thank you” away.