The Subtle Physical Body

Now, there are some slight variations. For example, the throat chakra is really a mixture of the air and the water. You might say that's where the element changes, so there's a mixture. The chakra at the very base of the spine is pure fire. The second chakra up, around the area of the spleen, is fire. The navel center, though, is a combination. It's a transition point, so it's an area of both fire and water. That is to say, these two elements come together there, in the subtle physical body. Then the heart center would be pure water. And the throat center would be a junction point. It would be water moving into air. The third eye would be air, and the crown center would be air. However, the crown center would be a junction point between the air and the ether.

The subtle physical body is a body of light. It is a much truer body, it is closer to what we are really like than our physical bodies are. The subtle physical body is composed of strands or luminous fibers of energy that interconnect different planes and times. The times are what we would refer to as the past, the present and the future. And the planes of consciousness are the seven principal planes of awareness, of existence. They're all interconnected through the chakras or gateways that are in the subtle physical body along the spine.

From the base of the spine to the crown of the head there's an astral tube which is called the shushumna. It has two lesser tubes on both sides, the ida and the pingala. The kundalini energy, which is the basic life principle or life energy that works through the subtle physical body, moves normally up and down the ida and the pingala. It does not move too much through the shushumna. The shushumna, you might say, is not accessible to the kundalini in most human beings.

As you go through the various stages of the enlightenment and self-realization process, the kundalini, of its own accord, will flow up the shushumna, through the various chakras, the seven chakras, eventually reaching the crown of the head. When the kundalini reaches the crown of the head one enters into one of the samadhis, the advanced states of consciousness. Each time the kundalini moves through a different junction, a different chakra, it opens a doorway to another world, or it makes that opening possible.

Now, this is a schematic diagram. I can show you a schematic diagram for a television set or a radio, a wiring diagram. It's just a bunch of lines drawn on a piece of paper, and those lines will have very little to do with what the actual TV or radio is like. The radio or TV is composed of transistors or chips, tubes, electronic parts, each of which, if you hold it in your hand, has a life of its own. When they work together in various combinations they create circuits, structures, all of which produce an image which you see on a television, perhaps in a computer, something to store or process data and so on. It interprets a radio signal or a frequency.

Try not to spend too much time delving into the nature of the chakras in the subtle physical body in its schematic terms. Many, many books have been written, some of which are authentic, describing the different chakras, colors they're associated with, mantras they're associated with, strands of kundalini energy. And I've observed that people spend so much time studying these things that they miss what's important. These are only ways of trying to describe something in the physical which is not in the physical. It's a blueprint.

Let's just look at enough of the blueprint to help us in our self-realization process, to help us have more fun and become more conscious, but let's not get fixated or stuck with it. Because you can learn all of these little terms and Sanskrit words and know nothing about God-realization and be totally bound and shackled by frustration and your desires and depression. Whereas if you experience light, you're liberated. You're complete. You're free. You are your true self, which is not who you think you are.

You think that you are a person. You're under the illusions of selfhood, that you're a body, that you're a mind, that you have a structure - not so much in terms of how you think of yourself, but just the way you feel inside. Inside there's this sense of this person who's thinking. But that's not really how you are. You're a limitless expanse of light with no mind whatsoever as you know mind to be. Unless of course, you move into the plane of consciousness where there's mind, in which case you have mind. What I'm suggesting is that you exist on different levels.

On different planes you're different. And in the process of meditation and self-discovery, we draw ourselves from plane to plane, planes of awareness, different dimensions you might say. In each plane we see that we are something else. We have a different identity, we assume a different role. Then there's something that transcends all of the planes, all of the seven planes, which is the superconscious. There are seven floors in the building, and we can go onto various floors and talk about them. It's strange, each time we get off the elevator on a different floor we're different. We have a different body, we have different memories, different feelings, different abilities. But then we can go beyond all seven floors into the sky, into the universe, into eternity. That's the superconscious.

The chakras, then, in the subtle physical body, are the gateways, are the guardians of the doorways of the different planes of consciousness. The planes of consciousness are realities, eternities, worlds, all of which are part of what we call the samsara, the illusion of existence. There are different dreams and you can walk into these different dreams. Right now as you listen to me you're in a specific dream. The dream you're in has a certain tonal awareness, a feeling. Then there's something beyond and beyond and beyond until you move into the undifferentiated reality of nirvana, at which point all descriptions fall away.

The subtle physical body is a body of light. Just as the physical body is composed of thousands and billions of cells - there are nerves and bones and tissues and chemicals and DNA and RNA and all kinds of exciting things, and they all work together - so the subtle physical body is equally, if not more, complex. It's composed of countless strands and fibers of light. And these strands and fibers of light coexist along with the physical body.

This etheric body, the subtle physical body, is similar. Its shape and size can change, and we can have more than one subtle physical body. You can create the etheric double, you can project another subtle physical body. You can have two at once, if you're an advanced yogi. You can gain the power to do this or create multiples, hundreds, thousands of them. But most people have one. It can change shape and form. Just as when water is poured into a glass, it will take the form of the glass, if it's poured in a plate, it will flatten out. Water assumes the shape of the vessel that it's poured into. So consciousness assumes different shapes and forms.

Your subtle physical body follows the form of your physical, more or less. However when you dream at night, when you're asleep, your subtle physical body will very often change form and travel through a succession of different planes of awareness that we call the astral. There you make your own movies. You write scripts, hire a cast, lighting, orchestration. Sometimes you'll put yourself in the picture, sometimes you'll just stand back and direct. These are dreams - experiences in other worlds where you can go and for a time you can create your own reality. It's like the places I used to go when I was a kid where we could go and we could make our own ice cream sundaes. You'd go into this place and pay the guy two or three dollars and they'd have 50 different kinds of ice cream and toppings, and you name it - you could just go and create your own sundae and you'd sit there and eat it and then you'd walk out. That's dreaming.

In dreaming we go into a world where the forms of reality are variable, and the part of us that goes into that reality that plays with the different colors and combinations and ideas which we call dreams, is our subtle body. The sense of self that we have in dreaming is the subtle physical body. We're relating through that. It's the mask that we're wearing, that the soul is wearing.

In dreaming, you may think of yourself as being the person you now are having experiences. Sometimes in a dream, though, we're someone else. There's an awareness - somebody's having that dream, someone's participating in the experience. You may be running down a street in a dream with someone chasing you. You might not think of yourself as you are now in the dream, you might be a different person. But there's still a sense of self. That dream is occurring to someone who's in the dream. Someone's participating and feeling it. That's your subtle physical awareness, which can change identities in the dream.

In a normal waking state of consciousness, we're not too aware of our subtle physical body because we're in the physical body. We're so immersed in the physical body and its senses and desires and feelings, its wants and its needs, that we're not too conscious of it. The physical body is a great screen that blocks out the subtle physical and that which lies beyond the subtle physical, the superconscious.

In meditation we move from the physical to the subtle physical, or through the subtle physical to the superconscious awareness. Very few people meditate well enough to enter into the superconscious awareness. Once in a while they might touch it for a few minutes, a few times during their life. Most people's experiences in meditation are confined to the subtle physical, which means that they have left their physical body in meditation in their subtle physical, just as you do in dreaming, only you're awake. And you move through a variety of different planes of reality in your subtle physical body, experiencing them and coming to know them. But during meditation, as you're sitting there meditating, even if your thoughts stop, if there's still a sense of self, there's still a feeling, "I'm not having thoughts," even if you're not thinking that. But there's still that feeling, that awareness, that there is a presence. Even if you think, "I'm God, I'm eternity, I'm endless," even if you just feel that, there's someone feeling it. As long as there's someone feeling it, there's a sense of self. That self is the subtle physical body, which means you are the subtle physical at that time.

You see, we are the body, we are the subtle physical and we are the soul. We are all these things, and yet we're none of these things. When we're in the physical consciousness, in the day-to-day waking world, we feel, "Hey, I have a body, I'm alive. My body was born, my body will die." And there's a sense of self associated with that and that's correct.

When we move into what we term a higher level of consciousness, which is a subtle physical awareness, if you meditate, and you move into a higher plane of being where you go beyond the physical, or eventually if you meditate long enough, for enough years, and you are able to maintain a state of meditation during your waking or dreaming hours - in other words you're always up, or you're always in a meditative state of being - then you're in the subtle physical. But there's still some sense, even if you're very high, there's a sense of, "I just got into the car." Everything may be fluid energy, and you don't see anything as being solid and there's light all around you, but there's still a strand of subtle physical connection. You're still in the subtle physical realities or realms because there's still a sense of self, a persona.

The demarcation point, of course, is nirvikalpa samadhi. We would link the lower samadhis, which I've talked about before with you; the lower samadhis are connected with the subtle physical. That is to say, all thought is stopped, you've gone beyond this world, you've gone beyond time, but there's still a sense of having done that. There's still a sense of experience. So salvikalpa and the other samadhis, which Pantanjali and other describe, are part of the subtle physical awareness. Nirvikalpa samadhi, which is nirvana - these are different terms, of course, that we apply to describe these indescribable states - means there's no sense of self.

Now, one of the questions that students like to ask teachers is, "Well, what's the difference between the deep sleep state and nirvana?" In the deep sleep state, there's no awareness per se. There's no sense of self, and there's no sense of self in nirvana or nirvikalpa samadhi. Is it the same thing? No.

In the deep sleep state there are seeds. Something will come forth from that state. Just as a tree has a little acorn, there's a seed in it and the seed may be still for a while, but then it will germinate and grow and develop a tree. So in the deep sleep state, all the tendencies, latent desires, attachments, all of the things that bind you to this world are still present. They're just dormant, they're still. But upon waking, all of those tendencies will come out.

Before you went to sleep, you liked cake, you liked croissants. You went to sleep. You entered into the deep sleep state. Maybe you dreamed for a while. When you came out of the deep sleep state, in which there was no dreaming and no waking and no sense of self, you still liked croissants. You still liked cake. Nothing changed that much. Everything just rested. It disappeared for a while, but then it returned.

When you enter into nirvikalpa samadhi, into nirvana, it's different. You never come back. You are not the person who went into nirvana. It's something or someone else. It's impossible to describe; it's not too bad. But let us say you might not like cake (Rama laughs). Then again you might. Everything is reshuffled. You're a deck of cards, and you're dealt out the same way again and again. But, you see, when you go into nirvana - not that there's an "into" - the deck is reshuffled. Different combinations occur. You let your being go to God. You merge with God and whatever God wants to send back, if God wants to send anything back, it comes back. And in the advanced spiritual states, of course, you do this many times a day. You constantly change. There's constant revolution in your being upon return, you might say, or as you move into this awareness - all very abstract, but also quite concrete.

The subtle physical body, then, is a body of light. And the physical body is dependent upon it. By that I mean that when there is damage to the subtle physical body, you will see in concordance with that, relating damage in the physical body. The reason you die is not usually because of damage to your physical body but because of something that happened to your subtle physical body. There are obvious exceptions. In the case of a violent death, if someone shot you, or you're in an automobile accident and there was tremendous damage to the physical, naturally you'll die because of physical injury.

But the aging process, the process of decay that we see in the world, takes place largely because the physical is affected through the subtle physical. The subtle physical wears down, and as it wears down the energy which keeps the physical alive, which comes from the subtle physical, is lessened and lessened. And of course there's a corollary reflection in the physical. The physical goes downhill. So if you wish to improve your health, it's necessary to improve the health of your subtle physical body.

The physical body is dependent upon the subtle physical. Now, if your health has descended to a static point, that is to say, if you've gotten very, very sick and your body is very weak and tremendous damage has been done to the physical, it may be almost impossible to reverse that. Once a part has been damaged, it can almost get to the point of being beyond repair. We might be able to stop any further damage from occurring. The subtle physical body can restore the physical unless too much damage has been done. If there's too much damage done, it will restore it partially, but it can't completely restore it. That's what happens in the case of aging. You see, there's a certain residual wearing that takes place on the subtle physical body that reflects in the physical body. When that happens, we can't expect the subtle physical to repair that. That's just the way existence works.

But that's only of great concern to you if you think the physical body is life. If you're totally concerned with the shoes that you're wearing and you think that nothing matters but the shoes that you're wearing, then if something happens to them, you'll be very sad. However, you can just get another pair of shoes or go barefoot. Death is going barefoot, that's all. Your body falls away, then you're in the subtle physical. You spend some time in the subtle physical, you go through some different journeys and lands and have some adventures, and then you go beyond the subtle physical. The subtle physical falls away. It falls back into its own plane or its own world. Then that which is left, which we call the jiva or the soul, is absorbed into eternity for a time - kind of like going to sleep, in the deep sleep state. The soul just merges back with eternity for a while. And then it comes forth in a new lifetime. It takes on a new subtle physical and a new physical body.

What I'm suggesting is that the subtle physical and the physical are related. What happens to your subtle physical affects your physical tremendously. However if something happens to your physical, it won't affect your subtle physical. If you lose an arm, you won't lose your subtle physical arm. This has happened to many people who have lost a limb but still retain the sense or feeling of body beyond where body ends. They lost their arm but they can still feel their fingers. That's their subtle physical that they're feeling through. They just associate it with the physical because that's all they've ever known.

As you meditate more and more you'll become more conscious of the subtle physical awareness. The subtle physical awareness is very important. Without the subtle physical we do not exist in this world. If the subtle physical is weak, we're weak. If the subtle physical is strong, we're strong. If we're not aware of the subtle physical, then we're locked into the physical world of desire, pain, frustration, transitory happiness and pleasure.

The physical world is very limiting. It's like a maze that you're stuck in - and a very small maze. The way out of the maze is the subtle physical. When you become aware that you're not just the pair of shoes you're wearing but you're a whole body, you become conscious that you have an entirely different self, which is light, which is free to travel throughout the universes, beyond time itself, then you're not really trapped by what happens to your physical body or what occurs to you in your physical life. In your physical life you can be working at your job and working at a computer terminal and talking to your boss or your employees, but at the same time while you're doing that you can be in a meditative state and be having experiences in other realities and universes, in and through your subtle physical body.

Just as when you work at a factory - when I was a kid I worked at some factories and we used to put boxes together and put products in them and stuff, over the summers after school, and after a while your body just gets used to it. You can just stack those boxes on a palette and they'll ship them away. And your mind is free to go elsewhere. You can think about something you read. I used to think about Thoreau or what I was going to do on Friday night or whatever it might be. My body was not limited by my physical surroundings. That's what gives us intelligence.

In the same way, you are not limited by what your mind does, by your thoughts or by your physical proximity. There's a step above - my experiences in the factory, when I was freed from the actions of my body, the actions became so routine my mind could wander elsewhere and I could think of all kinds of lovely thoughts. You can put your mind into work, you can put your body into work, and then you can have a nice time with your subtle physical, being aware of countless levels of existence and planes of realities and so on.

Now, there's something beyond that, and that's once again our friend nirvana. In nirvana, you can't do anything. When you're fully absorbed, your body is not there. So you can't exactly be working in the factory because for you there is no factory. But not to worry about it. When it happens, it all works out. The universe does everything perfectly.

The subtle physical body becomes stronger through meditation. Meditation is most important. The subtle physical body is purified through self-giving, whenever you give of yourself or you do something remarkable for someone, particularly when you help someone gain more light, spiritual light. Or even on a basic physical level. But particularly when there's any kind of transference of light that purifies your subtle physical body. Humility, purity, integrity, truthfulness, honesty, caring, raising your higher emotions - these things purify the subtle physical. Whereas passion, frustration, anger, jealousy, hatred - these emotions damage the subtle physical. The subtle physical is like a delicate, beautiful flower. If the weather conditions are very bad, the flower fades quickly. If the flower has what it needs, a nice environment, it can thrive.

The world we live in is not conducive to the existence of the subtle physical, in a sense. In ages past, in this world, the vibratory energies were more conducive to a healthy subtle physical. Not only were there less people on the planet, with less energy waves, but just the vibratory energies of this universe were very, very different. It was a different time, a different era. This is in past yugas, past cycles of existence. So people lived to be very, very old, thousands of years, because the subtle physical was maintained. You might say the energy of the earth was more healing and more nurturing. But as times change, which times tend to do, and the cycle of history ensued, we've dropped through a succession of ranges of consciousness. The level of consciousness of most people of the earth right now is very low. All those energies affect the subtle physical bodies and damage them, and therefore people don't live for as long a period of time, nor as happily as they used to.

Now, you can go above it all. These are weather patterns. The weather on the earth right now, well, we're in a time when there are a lot of storms. It's very tough on the planet, a lot of erosion. There were times when it was sunnier. There were times when the conditions of the earth were more favorable to what we call life. So if you can go beyond the weather patterns, it's not a problem. If you can go up above the clouds, no matter how thick they are, there's nothing but sunshine. That's the superconscious. The conditions of the physical or the subtle physical vary, but the superconscious is always perfect light. But the physical factor, the vibratory factors of this time and this era, is that there's a great deal of darkness.

In India they refer to this as the Kali Yuga. It's the last age of human existence before the cosmic dissolution occurs; this world as we know it ends. This dream ends, and then a new dream will begin, another cycle. But this is the end of the cycle. After this cycle there will be a complete washing and dissolution and then we'll start off again in a new age with a high vibratory cycle, with excellent conditions for the subtle physical. It will be a very beautiful time. When people talk about a coming golden age, that's what they're referring to. After this final world destruction that will occur, there will be a washing, a purgation, and everything will be cleansed. This dream will end, a new dream will begin. And in that new dream there will be a kind of golden age. A time of beauty and light and so on. There won't be hate and things like that. That will happen one day. It's happened before. This is the cycle of existence.

There was a previous golden age several ages back, when it was just like that. But then after the golden age comes, it won't last. And we'll pass to a lower yuga and a lower yuga and a lower yuga until bam! We're back here again, at the bottom of the barrel. That's the cycle. That's the weather pattern.

But one who can enter into the superconscious can be in the golden age at any time, at any place, in any condition. As a matter of fact, for them, there is only a golden age. You see, the golden age still exists. What I'm suggesting is, it's like a four- or five-dimensional chess game that's going on. There are different planes of consciousness interacting. There are different ways of looking at all of this, this puzzle we call existence.

Most people are aware of only the physical. They're born, they grow up, they marry, they have children, they age, they die, they have experiences. Their subtle physical experiences are mainly limited to their dreams when they dream at night or whenever they're asleep. When you meditate, you're changing your structural awareness of reality. You're becoming conscious of the subtle physical. The following remarks, then, after our brief scan of the subtle physical, are more directly aimed at a person, or directly aimed at a person who meditates and who is seeking enlightenment.

If you wish to attain liberation, or you wish to attain a position of service - you're interested in aiding others in their liberation - then you are a spiritual seeker. Then you are going to go through the stages of development that create enlightenment. You're going to move beyond all weather patterns to the light of the superconscious, which is our true self. But you will become conscious of it. It's inevitable. You can do this slowly or quickly. It's entirely up to you. You must, first of all, bring your physical life together. If your physical life is causing you tremendous pain, then it is going to detract from your awareness of the higher realities.

In the physical world we will always be distracted to a certain extent by our careers, relationships and so on. But you shouldn't spend too much time on the physical. If you do, you'll short-circuit your awareness. So take the time to organize your life, as I've described on previous tapes. Take your time; pick a good career; don't be afraid to go back to school, spend a few years so that for the rest of your life you'll be in a good career, you'll earn the amount of money you need to exist the way you want to. Have some nice friends, take time to develop them, have a good place to live, work out all the basics: a good car, whatever you need. Be conscious of security, all the different things that one has to have living and working in the world. Even out your physical. Do it right. If you have relationships that are destructive and drawing energy from you, eliminate them. Start to meet new people at the meditation centers and so on, or just wherever you meet them.

We do all those different things to try to balance our life. But don't spend too much time on it. Spend some time, get your physical together, and just get it running and forget about it. Once we set up the software program, we'll let it run. Once in a while we make modifications in it. Initially we have to write a program. We have a new computer and now we have to write the program which will run on the computer. The program will determine how we're going to process data - how we're going to store it, subdivisions, categories, different functions. So we take the time and we do a systems analysis.

The first thing we do is we look at our life, and we analyze it. What do I want? Where am I going? What have I got? How do I want to live? How much money do I want? Where do I want to work? How much time do I want to have - free time? We do a little systems analysis, realistically though, dealing with the conditions of the world as they are. Then from that we determine what it is we want. We write the program and then we start to run it. Once we start to run any program there are going to be a lot of bugs in it. We're going to find that it's not going to go exactly as we planned. But if we work on it, we can work out the bugs in the system.

So, you decided to go back to school. You thought it was going to be two years, it turned out to be three. We go through these experiences and we make the best of them, happily learning from whatever position God puts us in. But once the system is running, once the program is running, it doesn't take all our time. It took a lot of time to get it going, to work out the bugs and to write it and things. Now we can just let it run. Once in a while we make a structural change, a new person comes into our life, we enter into a new plane of awareness. But get the program running on the physical. Taking care of your body, your health, exercising, being vegetarian, following the vegetarian diet program, not smoking, you know, all the basics. Then we can begin to work, which we'll also do at the same time, but more freely, on the subtle physical.

If you're still working on your physical, I consider you a beginner. If your physical life is not yet together, you're having problems with employment and relationships and all this stuff, you're a beginner. Take your time, straighten those things out. Now let's move to the more sophisticated aspects of the spiritual study. And of course, as you meditate, you'll gain more and more strength to help bring your physical life, emotional life and mental life together.

But now, if you're moving a little further along, if you've worked that out a little bit or you're doing it really quickly because you don't have that much time in life, now you're turning your attention to something else. And that's your subtle physical. If you want to make your subtle physical not only stronger and more vibrant but also become more conscious of it, then there's very little that you have to do. First you have to spend time with people whose subtle physicals are more evolved than yours are, who have more energy. We do this when we join a meditation center and we go and associate with others who meditate. Being around people who meditate, who seek light and who are channeling light through their being - in other words, when you meditate, light comes through your being. If you're around them and if you meditate together, that increases it.

Secondly, we have to look at where we lose light, what damages the physical: people we spend time with, people who drain us, thoughts that we ourselves think, situations we put ourselves in. We have to eliminate that. We have to think ahead and plan and say, "Now look, last time I got myself into this situation and it wasn't pleasant, and it drained me and I didn't feel well. So this time I'm not going to let it happen. I'm going to be a little more clever and anticipate and feel inwardly in my meditation, stretching out my being so I can feel beyond my being, sense beyond my senses," and you can then alter reality. You can change dreams in the middle of a dream, several times, so that you won't even encounter those situations.

Then you need to find an enlightened person. You need to work with me or someone like myself who exists in the superconscious. While we pass through the subtle physical and the physical, most of our time is spent absorbed in the superconscious, and we enter in the physical and the subtle physical just enough to do what we need to do. But the rest of the time we're absorbed in the superconscious. And there's a light that passes through us, which is the superconscious light, that will infuse in you, it will give you, a tremendous charge. This is the kundalini. It's also called the shakti, when it's transmitted.

If you can be around an enlightened person - it's like standing near the sun - you'll get a lot of light. But you have to be aware of it. You have to meditate and purify your consciousness and practice self-giving and just tighten up your life. Otherwise the light will pass through you or you will not retain it. You can come and see an enlightened person and spend time with them and get a terrific charge of energy. It's very healthy, it's good for your subtle physical, it opens the doorways of your awareness. But then you'll leave, you'll go out into the world and immediately go associate with some people who just have a lot of anger in them and hate, and that will enter into you, or you'll get frustrated or you'll be worried because you don't have enough money to pay the bills, and that will drag you down - all these different things, holes in your being, the light will pass through, you'll lose it. So you have to work on accessing more light and then retaining light. If you do those two things, then you will gradually move higher and higher into the tremendous beauty of the subtle physical.

You should be around people who meditate in your free time. Don't be afraid of other people. If your subtle physical is nice and strong, you can be around anyone. But in your free time you should be around people who vibrate at a higher level. It will help attune you. Particularly, of course, be around someone who's enlightened whenever you can.

You should try to have contact with someone who's enlightened not only outwardly, but inwardly. Tap into them whenever you can. Draw light from them. That's what they're there for. They're like tremendous generators. The more you draw, the more you have. Each of us has to draw light in a different way. Someday when you become advanced in your spirituality you won't necessarily draw light through a person, or a persona that we call an enlightened being, you'll draw light directly from the source. Just as an infant has to take - the infant takes nourishment from its mother in the beginning, then eventually it can eat independently - so we draw light from a spiritual teacher to start with. It's easier that way. Then eventually we can just draw light directly from the superconscious, and then we realize that we are nothing but light, and then we realize that we don't even exist, and then there's no realization, it all goes away. The cycle ends. And a new cycle begins.

Places of power. Just as different human beings have subtle physical bodies that emanate different amounts of energy, so there are physical places that emanate different amounts of energy. If you go to visit places of power, these are places where there's a tremendous charge - a certain mountain, certain deserts, valleys. These are places where spiritual practice occurred over thousands of years, or thousands of years ago, and there's an actual cosmic charge on the land. If you go to these places, then you can access more energy - if you meditate there, that is. Even walking through them, of course, you access energy.

This is what pilgrimages were all about. The idea was you go to the holy place. There's a place, or several places where there's more energy or more light for one reason or another, something connected with the past that happened there. If you go there, you imbibe this light and you take a part of it home with you. You change. Metamorphosis. It's the same as meditating. So sometimes it's good to go to a place of power to meditate. And there are many, many places of power, of course, particularly in the southwest United States. California probably has the most, which is why I live in California, but there are many places that have strong subtle physicals. The whole Southwest does, and there are places, of course, in Europe, and all over the world, India and so on.

At the places of power there are guardian beings. There are spirits or forces who guard the gateways. There's a mystery to places of power that I'll talk about sometime perhaps. And when you go to a place of power there are beings who are there who guard the access ways to the other worlds, the other realities. If they like you, they can help you. They are great warriors, and if they smile on you they will bless you in the same way a spiritual teacher will, an enlightened person. They're enlightened beings, they just don't have bodies. They're the same as the enlightened. It's just that they don't have a body. They have a different job to do, you might say. And they're very brave and free and happy beings. They only exist in the subtle physical. They don't bother to take physical form at all. They're not more advanced than an enlightened person with a body. One is not more advanced than another. It's the same thing. It's just one has the physical body, one doesn't. But they don't work so much with people, as a rule - -or a very small group of people. They just exist. They are power and light. And that's really enough.

If you want to work with someone to help you attain enlightenment, you should go to a teacher who is in the physical body. They will help you. Sometimes particularly they help very advanced souls, people who were perhaps enlightened in their last lifetime who have come in again in this lifetime. And when you come in of course, you lose it, you forget. So they help the enlightened person gain their enlightenment again. They draw them back to the places of power. And when the enlightened person who has forgotten, who is in maya, in illusion, goes to the place of power, for some reason they're drawn there, then they help them gain their enlightenment again. They usually work with very, very advanced spiritual seekers. Not too much with beginners. But they'll help you, they'll smile on you, if your attitude is good, if you really care, if you're pure at heart, then they'll help you.

If you can go to a place of power with an enlightened person, with a spiritual teacher, that's the best. You can go to a place of power and not see too much or feel too much. But when you go with an enlightened person, they can open the crack between the worlds for you and help you go through into those other realities. You see, an enlightened person has the power. You're like a kite, but there's not much wind. The enlightened person brings the wind and you fly in the sky, into the other worlds, into the other realities.

So don't be afraid, be brave now. The spiritual path is easy. It's exciting, and it's adventurous. You must become aware of your subtle physical body, which I can't describe to you in words. Let's not get too caught up in description. What matters is that you care, that you love and that you're going to do everything necessary to perfect yourself while at the same time accepting your limitations, your desires and your frustrations without getting too taken out about it. It's going to take a long time to perfect yourself. But fortunately, we don't have to wait for your physical nature to be perfected. If we did, we might as well give up now. You will still have desires, you will still have feelings. That will always be going on to some extent in the lower stratas in your being. On the lower floors they will have different things - they may have a tag sale going on or whatever. But if you're up on the higher floors you won't even know about it. There's more light on the higher floors.

So don't be disconcerted if you find that you're doing the same stupid things again and thinking the same stupid thoughts and having the same mucky desires. It's not necessarily essential to stop all of that. It's nice, it's easier. It's more pleasant when you're in those states. But you can simply go beyond them into the higher realities, and then the light from the higher realities will wash down into those places and help you straighten them out. But put your attention to God, to truth and to light. Meditate, be around those who will help strengthen you, avoid those who weaken you, and mainly work on yourself.

Your challenge is yourself. Your challenge is to meditate more deeply, to give more of yourself. Not to blame others or blame your circumstances or your age or your economic condition, but to change those conditions. To change them. That's what yoga teaches us. To change things, not to say, "Well, I can't. Gosh, I'm too old. I'm not capable. My life has been bad." Those are the thoughts of a loser in the game of life.

Your meditation gives you the power to totally change everything you've ever done or been, to develop talents and abilities and strengths far beyond anything you've ever imagined. And it's necessary for you to do that. To do that you need to meditate more deeply, to become conscious of the subtle physical, and to begin to happily and joyfully walk through those other worlds and other realities of consciousness. Who knows what you might find. I'll be there waiting for you, though.

Along with a few friends.