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The whole thing was too empty. It was not honest enough. And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.
his openness to new ideas and his willingness to take wild risks in thinking.
I associated the name with myself and my parents called me Richard: “Richard, you’re a bad boy.” So Richard has badness. Then “Richard, aren’t you beautiful!” Then Richard has beauty. Thus develop all these aspects of self.
The seeds of the ability to be able to confront, and even disagree with, an existing institution and know and trust that inside place that says it’s all right. It’s something I could never have done without anxiety until that moment—until that day.
If Admiral Byrd and an exploratory party are going deeper and deeper into the polar region, the things they think about and are concerned about and are interested in become less and less relevant to somebody living in New York City.
“To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.”
And at the end we had these 200 protocols and the first analysis we did showed up very clearly that the reactions were a function of set and setting—a function of their expectations of what was going to happen, and the environment in which they took the drug. If they had it in a very paranoid environment, and they were expecting to have excitement, they tended to have paranoid excitement. All it did was intensify one’s expectations.
the most likely experience everybody had was a heightened sensitivity to all of their five senses and speeding up of the thought process.
the next type of experience that people would frequently report was an interpersonal shift of figure and ground, where they would look at another person and see the way in which the other person was similar, rather than different from themselves.
“Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.” He had just sort of wiped out my whole game. That was it—that was my whole trip—emotions, and past experiences, and future plans.
As they say in the Sikh religion—Once you realize God knows everything, you’re free. I had been through many years of psychoanalysis and still I had managed to keep private places in my head—I wouldn’t say they were big, labeled categories, but they were certain attitudes or feelings that were still very private. And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that.
That desire to proselytize, to turn him on, to show him, to bring him to the light . . . is a reflection of your lack of wisdom. For only some people can hear. Only some can awaken in this lifetime. It’s a little like seeing a friend drowning and being unable to catch his hand. You want so badly to DO something. But in truth you can only BE . . . be as straight and as open and as HERE as you can be . . . and if your friend can hear, he will hear. And if he cannot hear, he will turn away from you. No blame.
“Our sins are created in secrecy. The moment we realize that God witnesses even our thoughts we shall be free.”—Wisdom of the Ages, from Sat Sandesh “What makes a man unworthy of the Temple is the cowardice which prompts him to avoid the experience of shame, for this avoidance breeds oblivion. For shame accepted is the greatest treasure. The Door will open before your eyes when you have understood this: the only thing that is humiliating is helplessness. The cause of such helplessness lies in ignorance of your errors; awareness thereof, on the contrary, attracts you to the power of your God.
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If you sense the limitations of a specific tool you do not necessarily throw the tool away. You first explore whether there is a way of using this very powerful tool in such a way as to develop a better tool or vehicle. That is, can you use the rational mind to transcend itself? The answer is yes. And the technique is known as jnana yoga, or the path of knowledge arrived at through reasoning and discrimination.
Now if you very dispassionately understand all the above, as well as understanding the truth of yoga, or union, and if you understand the essence of the fundamental truth that it is attachment that keeps man caught in the illusion of separateness, you begin to understand more and more of the way in which the universe functions.
