Isaiah’s angels proclaim thrice: “Holy, holy, holy.” Holy the creator; holy the creation; holy man, the crowning glory of creation. Tonight, we touch our holiness. Tonight, we eat and drink our sacredness. Every week in our different groups, we work with our dark side. We shovel our garbage. We do not ignore it. We do not hide from it. We deal with it and are done with it. That tends to skew our image of ourselves. Because we are constantly looking at our flaws, our view is astigmatized. Tonight, we balance the books. Tonight, we immerse ourselves in our true beingness. We reach into our sacred, secret places and find we are beautiful, magical, and holy.

Desiderata says, “You are a child of God, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here.” You are wanted and needed exactly as you are—not only if you earn it, not only if you are better than you are, but just as you are. Not a saint, not a Jesus, not a Buddha, but as you are. Otherwise, you would not be here. If God wanted everyone to be a Jesus or a Buddha, that is what we would all be. But what an ugly world to behold. Imagine everyone carrying crosses, giving Sermons on the Mount to other people carrying crosses, giving Sermons on the Mount, and everyone saying, “Yes, yes, we know.” Or if we were all Buddhas. Imagine everyone sitting under trees for years. How dull. And who would feed them all? No, God wants you exactly as you are.

The problem is, you don’t want you as you are. Everyone wants to be someone else—or at least a little bit of someone else. In recent years, it has become fashionable to proclaim: “I want to be me. I like me. I’m doing it my way. I’m doing real good. I’m good,” etc., etc. Scratch the surface and you will find that it is a huge mask, covering a deep yearning to be someone else. It is in fact a reaction formation to a devastating insecurity about oneself. It is the learned, slick, pretended, glib assurance of a used-car salesman. The very voice that shouts “I want to be me” is an echo of the opposite and an attempt to deny to oneself all that is happening underneath. Or else why bother? Of course you are you. Who else can you be?

We always want someone else’s shape, appearance, health, personality, mental acuity, position, status, career, possessions, etc., etc. This freezes our energies psychically and organically. This stifles our natural climb at the very bottom of the ladder. One thing is certain: We can never be someone other than ourselves. With the greatest of effort, we might achieve a poor imitation of someone else, and in the process sacrifice our own innate, beautiful being.

Imagine if you will a sunflower wanting to be an orchid, because an orchid is appreciated so much more and is looked after with so much more care and concern. If the sunflower were constantly trying to be an orchid, it would become neurotic. It would get headaches, wilt, and eventually die ugly. It cannot be an orchid. It knows that, and so it faces the sun and grows gloriously as a sunflower. Thus it expresses the full potential of what it is. That is its benediction and service to existence. A river goes on rivering, regardless of what gets in the way—rocks, stones, falls, banks, wars, bombs, dams, etc. Whatever the obstacle, the river keeps moving to its ultimate destiny, merging with the ocean. Similarly, all nature grows in its unique expression and maximizes its own beingness. Only man flounders and strays from his essence, seeking fulfillment through impossible imitation of another.

How can you grow if you do not value your self? How can you flower if you do not love your self? It is impossible.

The reason we are so blind, so foolhardy, is that we forget who we really are. I once spoke of the three concentric circles of man. The outer is the mask we show to the world—so many masks, so many facades. The middle circle is our personality, which we hide because we think it is so full of black holes, shadows, dungeons, and demons of the subconscious and unconscious mind. At times it is indeed black with subterranean forces that affect our will and clarity of the world around us. It is precisely this middle realm, the personality, which we perceive as ugly, that drives us to create the masks of the outer realm. It is this presumption of our unattractive middle circle that continually demands that we admire another, respect another, emulate another, want to be like another—any other—but never completely ourselves. It is the presumption of who we really are that makes us want to be another. But in fact this is not who we really are.

The word “personality,” from the Greek word persona, means a mask, just another mask. The personality is only another garment. Our true nature is our inner circle, our pure consciousness—not our brain, not our mind, thoughts, memories, or even will. It is our consciousness. That which differentiates an organism from a mechanism (growth and self-repair) is consciousness. That which distinguishes us from the most sophisticated electronic brain is not our mind; it is our consciousness. It is our inner core, our divinity. (No computer can put an original problem to a mathematician.) Once we get a taste of that essence, we lose all interest in wanting to be someone else. But how to get there?

In our weekly groups, we work with the two outer circles. On the Weekends, we open the gate to the inner circle. Tonight, we walk through that gate. Tonight, we worship. We do not worship my God, your God, or their God. We do not worship the Christian God, the Muhammadan God, the Jewish God, the Buddhist God, the Hindu God. We worship God before the priests got to him, before the ministers got to him, before the monks and rabbis got to him, before the theologians and philosophers got to him. We worship the Great Spirit Beyond, which permeates our very being and the beingness of all that is.

We are here not to talk about God or to praise God or to ask him for things or make promises or bargains or confessions or any of the things we do in church and temple. We are here to experience God, to feel God, to taste God, to dive into God and swim around and splash and know beyond all knowing that God is, that nothing else is, that all else is ego, shadows, and misery. Not because I say so or the Bible says so or the Bhagavad Gita says so or the Koran says so. No. We are here tonight for each of us, personally, to experience our own truth.

There is only one condition. You must drop the mind. Drop the mind and open your heart. The mind is a thief. The mind is a liar. The mind will lie to you and tell you that it is protecting you, keeping you from looking foolish, thus robbing you of one experience after another. I want to say to you: Drop your mind with all of its old attitudes, prejudices, criticisms, doubts, all of your projections. They are old and moldy. Drop all that and allow something new to enter into your heart. And for the first time you will know what life is all about.

If you have ever had a sense of sacredness, or even if you have only conceptualized the sacred, tap into it now and bring it forth here. What is sacred? The word “sacred” is the same as the word “secret.” Anything that is secret is also sacred. I do not mean secret as the word is used ordinarily. That is not secret—it is merely a withholding of information. A secret is that which no one can reveal. That kind of secret is sacred. The only secret that no one can reveal is the secret of life, the mystery of the universe: What is life? Where did it come from? Where is it going? What is it for? Who made it? Why? No one can answer these questions. No one. Every answer given raises more and bigger questions.

For thousands of years, religionists and philosophers have pondered these questions. Thousands upon thousands of books dealing with the mystery of the universe fill the libraries all over the world, and not a single question has been answered. I am not talking about science questions. I am talking about the sacred questions, the mystery of life questions, the mystery of God questions. These have never been answered—not satisfactorily answered.

Because of that, many intellectuals through the ages have concluded that the universe is a huge, grotesque accident—as if that explains anything. Of all the implausible explanations and answers, for me this is the least plausible. Can any rational being claim that Hamlet is an accident? A bottle of ink spilled and accidentally the ink formed itself into the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Or even if millions and millions of bottles of ink were spilled over millions of years, would that be a plausible explanation for the creation of that play? How much more irrational is it to think that the creator of that play, and many more plays, is himself the result of an accident? A single smile on the face of an infant cannot be the result of an accident.

The mystery of life has never been explained and never will be explained. It cannot be explained, because explanations are of the mind, and this mystery is not in the realm of the mind. The very mind itself is a minor manifestation of that mystery. Can a piece of furniture tell us about the carpenter? Can a computer tell us about the engineer who created it? That is impossible. All it tells us is that there was indeed a carpenter and an engineer. To resolve the mystery, you must go beyond the mind into another dimension.

There are three paths to that other consciousness—the path of service, the path of ecstasy, and the path of silence. The path of service consists of good deeds, kind acts, and mainly spiritual service to others. I have known a number of people who dedicated their lives genuinely and without ego to service who have attained higher consciousness. Remember, when doing service, you do not pressure, you do not attempt to persuade. A flower does not have to sell its perfume. People come and bend over to smell it. Be who you really are and your fragrance will rise. That is the greatest service.

The path of ecstasy lies within the heart. At the gate hover intuition, love, joy, and devotion, leading to ecstasy. This is the way of the Hasid, the Sufi, the Tantrika, the dervish, and others. Biblically, it is the way of King David, who sang in the Psalms, “Worship the Lord with joy; come before him in song and dance.” The prophet Samuel tells us that when David brought the holy ark to Jerusalem, he sang and danced before the whole nation in such ecstasy that his queen, Michal, watching him through the palace window, mocked him in her heart, seeing him only as a clown. When he returned to the palace, she openly abused him with, “You behaved like a maidservant in front of the whole nation, shaming us both.” God punished her. He locked her womb. She died childless.

Why this particular punishment? Because her act was one of self-denial. What she was witnessing was in fact a feminine energy. Ecstasy is basically a feminine energy. She saw David, the mighty king of Israel, the hero of many battles, the slayer of Goliath, drop his macho male ego, sink deep into his center, and tap his manifest feminine divinity, reaching the heights of ecstasy, thus seeding his kingdom for a thousand years and into eternity: “The house of David shall never be destroyed.”

That is the power and glory of ecstasy. It burns away all demons, leaving all shadows behind. Michal, the aristocratic daughter of King Saul who married this shepherd boy, could not drop her male ego. She saw him as a clown and denied her own natural response of ecstasy. She chose to remain in her male ego. Symbolically, God is saying to her: “Males do not bear children.” She lost her kingdom to Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon.

Ego closes the womb and aborts every potential birth. The antidote to ego is ecstasy. It opens all the gates and is a holy midwife to continual birthing in every area.

A caution about this path: Ecstasy is not a craziness. It is not a tantrum. It is not an exorcism of demons. It is not “whooping it up.” It is a softness that melts the whole being. It is a state of grace. It can be wild, but at the center is the most sublime peace. It can be fast or slow, loud or a whisper. Underneath is a great stillness. Ecstasy is a bouquet that emanates from a union of four flowers: sex, passion, love, and prayer. If any one of these is missing, there can be no ecstasy. If a person is unable to experience sex, passion, love, or prayer, he or she will never know what ecstasy is.

True ecstasy is the culmination, the fruit of all the pleasures. Because it is literally so far out, it can easily be misread, misdirected, misunderstood, and easily mistaken and substituted with damaging elements. It is easy to confuse certain kinds of neuroses with wild joy. It is possible to interpret instability as pleasurable excitation of movement, to mistake the babbling of a drugged mind with the blissful expressions of ecstasy, the look of madness with the gaze of a mystic.

To avoid these pitfalls, it is essential to employ two sentries that will guard and ground the pure essence of true ecstasy. These sentries are silence and service. To gauge the reality of ecstasy, one must develop, through meditation, the acuity of silence and be of genuine service to others with the sharing of any and all spiritual growth. When the mind is silent, we gain clarity. We can guard against ersatz ecstasy. Being connected to others through service grounds us to the reality of this plane. Thus we can lose ourselves in ecstasy without getting lost.

The path of silence is at the third eye. Total and complete silencing of the mind unveils that higher intelligence beyond the mind, beyond duality, where you see not with the two eyes of duality. The third eye opens when the two become one. This is the way of Moses. When Moses fled Egypt, he was a young man. The next we hear of him, he is standing barefoot at the burning bush. The Bible tells us he is 80 years old. The Bible says nothing about all the things that happened to Moses for so many years to prepare him for greatness. This is one of many gaps in the Bible that only the esoteric teachings deal with. According to the oral traditions, Moses pursued the path of silence for 40 years. That is why when God said to him, “Go speak to Pharaoh,” Moses replied, “I am not a man of words. I am on the path of silence.” This is also the way of the Buddha. This is also the way of the yogi.

David said, “Rejoice and you will know.” Moses said, “Be silent and you will know.” Both paths, the ecstasy of the heart and the clarity of silence, ultimately lead to crown consciousness. That is where you resolve the mystery. Not that you know the answers—rather, all the questions become so meaningless, they disappear. The beauty and the grace of it are such that you need not wait for crown consciousness to know the truth of it. Glimpses and reflections of that ultimate knowing abound and fill whomsoever is on that journey. You know it beyond any doubt, while still on the path. In ecstasy and in silence, you know it is so. All the questions have long since disappeared. Only the quiver of the mystery remains, even unto the bliss of crown consciousness.

(The evening continued with words, meditations, and rituals relevant to that moment.)


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