1.
What I mean by “become planetary” is reaching the point where you know that you’re also partly responsible sometimes [with the emphasis on “sometimes” 2005] for the welfare of mankind, and that in itself is heavy enough for you that it makes you want to straighten up. I think that’s what the real flash is. MNC21
2.
By achieving planetary status, I mean feeling your responsibility for this chunk of the universe. I don’t know how many other star systems with inhabited worlds there are. I don’t put any limits on it, because the universe is infinite in dimensions and directions forever. You can’t put any limits on that, but getting planetary means that you’ll buy in at the level of the vow of the Bodhisattva, which is taking responsibility for this universe — at least. [The Vow of the Bodhisattva is to save all sentient beings in all worlds and universes (the Multiverse, or Buddhaverse). 2005] MNC25
3.
When we’re at the place where we know that we’re plugged into the universe, then it’s time to ask for more energy, for the sake of all humankind. MNC21
4.
As far as astrology goes, I think astronomy is more exciting, and may actually have some effect on us, since the sun really exerts a fantastic influence on the Earth – magnetically, electromagnetically, radiationally. I’ve seen a diagram of the earth’s field, which is a normal dipole field, but distorted by the sun’s magnetic field – the solar wind, as they call it. It’s all bent over on one side until it’s almost shoved right down to the surface of the earth on one side by the power of the sun, and then it feathers out a long way on the other side. The field is so tremendously distorted that day and night, just for starters, is a very heavy trip.
The moon is also up there, pretty close, only 240,000 miles away, and pretty heavy, made out of a lot of iron and rock, and with a heavy electro-gravitational field. It’s spinning around the earth, like a gigantic electric motor and armature, generating a tremendously powerful electric field that’s putting out billions of volts of energy, which we call on our scale of energy – zero. That’s just where we come on for openers on this planet.
Each one of the planets is also a huge electromagnetic thing, which also bends that field. You start with a field that’s symmetrical, and then it gets bent this way by the sun, and then this much this way by the moon, and then this much this way by Mars, and this much over here by Venus. And all of those things are moving in different orbits. So the solar system and his pattern of vibrations is changing like a kaleidoscope – always moving, always changing – with a different electrical field passing through all the time. MNC47–48
5.
Birth [is] a heavy passage. There is a tremendous change that takes place at birth: The bloodstream changes in nature from that of a fish to that of a mammal – in one instant. It’s one of the few things in the entire birth-growth process that undergoes a sudden and basic change that way. You have a two-valved heart while it’s hooked up to the placenta, but when you come out and the cold air hits you, a little valve slams shut, and it’s a four-valved heart. Zap! You’re a mammal. MNC50
6.
Biologists say that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” which is to say that the process of evolution of any individual creature will more or less follow the entire revolutionary trip of the whole species. Right there at birth is the place where we quit being a fish and start being a mammal. It means that, when that door slams shut, you’re on your own. You’re not a parasite on Mom anymore. You’re out there in the cold world, and you’ve got to generate your own heat. We’ll take care of you for a little while until you learn how, but you’re going to have to do it. MNC51
7.
[On the poor:] Some people don’t have the material plane worked out. We’re all hip to that. When you start maneuvering the material playing around from the material plane, it does not come out even, because those who are strongest on the material plane will take most of it. So the only way to bring about anything on the material plane like fairness, is to teach justice in the spiritual plane as hard as you can, in order to educate people out of the idea of having more than they need. If you try to move it around from the material plane it means you have to take it from somebody who is not going to dig that. It needs to go out free and impartial. MNC71
8.
Therefore, for each one of us to do our best locally, our good-hearted, straight-up, go-for-broke best, will raise the vibration equally around the whole planet, all of which needs it. [Working unselfishly for the sake of the whole world or at least the piece of it that is closest is also required. Taking care of yourself and your family is not selfish. It means that someone else doesn’t have to take care of you. You should work to become strong enough that your presence adds, not subtracts. 2005] MNC72
9.
Now, it might be more dramatic to put all that juice into saving one trip, and trying to go for lifting the whole thing might be kind of like the job my cousin had. He used to drive a truck from Long Beach into the city, about seventy miles into Los Angeles, and he had to run the oil out of the truck into a big tank there. It took him about eight hours to do one trip, filling up the tank, driving it about seventy miles and draining it into the other tank. When he drained it into the other tank, it raised the level of that tank three-eighths of an inch. Right? But it did raise the level of the tank three-eighths of an inch. And so what we do here, instead of like shooting up a thermometer to show how far we can squirt it, we try to raise the whole planet about three-eighths of an inch each time. MNC72
10.
So, dig, the sun’s like eight light minutes away and affects us directly by light, radiation, and gravity. Seems silly to me to worry about the effect on us of like large bodies that are a long way away. Well, the next closest one after the sun, which is eight light minutes away, is a group – Proxima and Alpha Centauri of Wolf 359, I guess – that is four and a half light years away, four and a half light years away from eight light minutes…. And the other ones are all the way out there, and some of them get into millions and billions of light years – and in fact it gets to a point where they can’t even talk about light years anymore because the light years get so small, and they’re using so many of them, that the numbers are getting too big to handle, and they start talking about parsecs, you know, and spatial measurements of weird varieties, because it’s getting so huge. And that’s us out there, you know, that’s us and that affects us all the way from out there. MNC101
11.
But the sun’s pretty close, and this little trip we’re going through right now [the Equinox] is our little trip with the sun. Heavy ceremonies of the year are attached in that way, like the winter solstice is where a certain force of light comes back on. The winter solstice is the long night. And the reason you celebrate the winter solstice is the end of the long night, man. It’s the end of the long night, and you’re going to start coming into the long day, so there’s a celebration at that level. Most of our heavy religious celebrations are keyed into that kind of thing, because it makes changes in our behavior. MNC102
11.
The thing is, there being electricity and freeways and double-decker trains and all that kind of thing does not change the nature of man and God… or change the nature of man’s relationship to the universe. It’s just the same as when we lived in caves and gathered berries. The outer trimmings don’t make us any different. What I’m saying now is the same thing as what any teacher has said in any materialistic time, which is this: If the culture teaches people to be materialistic, the culture will then find itself in the position ofsupplying everyone with materialistic needs and wants, and people’s materialistic needs and wants cannot be satisfied. The only kind that can be satisfied is spiritual. If you turn people on to Spirit they can live together cheaply and economically for the common good so that everyone may have their chance at Spirit, but if they’re grouped together on a material sort system then they’ll fight over the dwindling supply. That’s what I’m coming out to say is that we must be spiritual… that that’s the only thing that is going to help man over this weird little atomic-chemical hump that we’ve got ourselves into. C8NOV70
12.
I don’t allow myself to be fooled into thinking that 1970 is any more special than any other year or any other time, or that the condition that we find ourselves in now is any more modern or any more progressive than any place where we’ve been in any other time. The United States is just like the Middle Ages or the early ages or any other place. Just because we have a lot of ninety-degree angles and electricity doesn’t make us much different. In that matter I don’t see time at all. It’s just us monkeys working it out, and it’s always heavy when us monkeys are working it out.. That’s our trip and we just do it. C8NOV70
13.
The moral code is simple and obvious and everybody really knows what it is and the children know what it is. Kids can go along and they can argue about how many balls you’re supposed to use in three-cornered catch or anything like that, but there’s always a place where all the kids will agree and will say, “Hey, that ain’t fair,” and they’ll all agree on that. And everybody knows what’s fair, everybody knows what’s just, it’s really simple. It’s been put down in words for thousands of years — the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments. C8NOV70
14.
[The Ten Commandments say,] “Thou shalt not steal.” I was reading a local quote hip unquote newspaper which was talking about how it was cool to rip off, how so long as it’s only General Motors you can go ahead and steal from them because it doesn’t matter. It may not matter to General Motors — General Motors may be able to write it off on taxes, and it may not matter to them a bit — but it matters terrible to your soul to do the action, never mind who you do it to. C8NOV70
15.
Of course all my thinking at the time wasn’t all this logical and all in a row as it is when I’m telling you now. I was still kind of fumbling around, a little mind-blown. It’s hard to keep track of things when the whole universe turns on. Well, when I went to try to communicate that thing to some people at the Experimental College at San Francisco State, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing except I wanted to communicate that thing. So we set up Monday Night Class. Actually I didn’t set up Monday Night Class, Experimental College had an empty hole on Monday night. That’s a safe one. We know that’s cool because it just fell down that way. The way you know things are cool is you name them by the right names. Later on we started having Sunday morning service, which we called by the name of Sunday Morning Service. C12NOV70
16.
So I started interacting with the beatnik community of San Francisco, and I began to realize that I was serving the function of a parish priest or something because I was taking care of the spiritual needs of a little community. I just learned how to do that on some kind of on-the-job training thing, and it scared me about the first time I found out I was doing it. I asked for advice on that and the only advice I could get was, “Go carry your own mail, I got my own route.” So I went back and kept doing it. I copped at that time to being a teacher and do now. C12NOV70
17.
I make big differences in the world around me, and I don’t do anything violent, and anybody can do what I do. C12NOV70
18.
I don’t know anybody who if they really think about it wants to hurt a cop, because that isn’t relevant. What you want is the cop to do his job, take care of traffic, help little ladies across the street, keep the burglars from busting into the grocery store, that trip. There’s nothing served by hurting them, so how about if you can just talk the cop into being groovy. C12NOV70
19.
We’ve been coming out across the country in no way camouflaged. We take up ten or twenty miles of highway when we’re rolling. When we come through a town the people’s vibes stay good and they keep smiling and their eyes are shiny, but their hands begin to drag after a while because they get tired of waving to so many of us. And we have been in massive engagements with the police of eight or ten states across the country, and I have not sold out anything I believe in to deal with any of those cops. All I have done is treat them as human beings — as I would like to be treated — tell them what we were doing, and the way has been made open for us. We have been treated well, shown where to park, not hassled, taken good care of. C12NOV70
20.
I teach nonviolence, but I also teach, “Don’t go in the army.” You can ask me questions about how not to, but I think everybody already knows any way they want to, as long as you don’t screw your soul up too bad by lying. It seems to me that nobody has to lie about not going in the army, and it seems if you have nerve enough to tell the real truth that you don’t have to go, which is, “I do not agree with killing as a means of settling human differences and will not participate in any form of it to any extent.” C12NOV70
21.
I was a Marine Corps prison guard, man, when I was seventeen. And I was scareder of them than they were of me. I didn’t know what I was doing there or what they were doing there. I’ve also been in a Marine Corps brig. I was not compassionate enough, at that age, to understand that things were as heavy for other people as they were for me. C12NOV70
22.
I never killed anybody, and I remember the night in Korea when it seems to me from here it’s where I made that decision about that … I grabbed my gun … and I was going up the hill, and as I was going up the hill I was looking inside myself to see if I was afraid. I was saying, “You’re getting close to the top, are you afraid yet? Getting closer, are you afraid yet?” And I ran across somebody who was wounded on a stretcher and needed to be carried away, and I threw away my gun and helped carry the stretcher. That’s the closest I ever came to doing somebody in. I spent the rest of the night helping with the wounded and dead … and didn’t use my gun … and never did have an occasion to after that. C12NOV70
23.
Now what they used to use instead of psychedelics was the parish priest, and he’d say, “Ah, John, you’re getting far out with beating your wife. You got to back off and stop all that, go back home and take care of your kids, don’t be out here messing around all the time, straighten up, man, and get back to your family,” or something like that. You ever hear anybody come on to anybody like that outside of a movie? But that needs to be done sometimes, because a lot of people are incredible wastrels and goof off all the time from being on ego trips. Now there ought to be somebody who would tell them that. C13NOV70
24.
Well here’s the way the structure works out about the heavies: You get a man who can do that and who can do it pure without … he ain’t got anything to gain by it, it’s not going to get him any brownie points or get him a better car or anything like that, and everybody knows that he does that all the time, and then you juice him. C13NOV70
25.
If you be on the caravan, we make it day to day by how cool we be, and if you don’t be as cool as us so you make it dangerous for us, then you’ve got to shape up. C16NOV70
26.
The caravan is a traveling monastery, if you like, in that it’s a religious thing I’m trying to teach all the time. Well, the way I teach is I tell everybody what I see when I see it, and we just go ahead and do what we’re going to do — move the buses, you know, go ahead and do a thing, and they let me kind of walk around unmolested and tell them what I see. C16NOV70
27.
As far as like structure or family life goes, I feel that like the shape or structure of your family life isn’t what’s so important so long as it’s a real compassion and commitment thing. C16NOV70
28.
I don’t believe in rules, because it’s like you can’t have rules. I don’t want rules because people’d break ’em, you know. C16NOV70
29.
But those who love me are not necessarily those who say they love me. Those who love me are those who do what I do and learn from me that way. Nobody has ever seen me hardass a cop, for instance. And anybody who watches me for a minute learns the way I do that and they know how to do that, sort of by example. C16NOV70
30.
Also I have been giving lecture things for a long time. This is a telepathic phenomenon. I get the use of the group head when we’re all together here like this. Like you guys are letting me use this group head. This is a fine group head. It’s a smart one and I knew it was heavy during the OM, it felt strong, and I enjoyed getting to talk about this kind of stuff. C16NOV70
31.
What we mainly came out to talk about was peace. We’re still operating on the teachings of Jesus and Buddha as concerning violence, and are able to travel at all because of that. What we came out for is to come on to people and say, We ain’t scary, we didn’t go crazy, and here we are, and we’re interested in Spirit and we’re interested in getting the planet together, starting from the closest thing around us, like making a human contact with the first person sitting in front of you. if he happens to be a police officer writing you a ticket, your job is still to make a human contact with him, forgive him for any inconvenience. C16NOV70-2
32.
Now I could come on and tell you all about Gospel, an old word that means good news. So I spread the Gospel — it’s good news that there’s something you can do about the situation, and it’s within your power to do it, and it makes a difference. What more can you ask for? C22NOV70
33.
You have to work all the time, and if you ever get it mastered they just double the work load, if you get it cool, they ten times your work load. The more you can do they’ll just load it on you, and if you do all that they’ll just keep loading it on you. And you can take as much responsibility as you want. Anybody can be as heavy as he wants to be. All you’ve got to do is just accept the work load and start polishing that one and you’ll get more work load. And you just keep on truckin’. We pile more work load on ourselves. I are we in corporate agreement. We are I, I are we. C22NOV70
34.
This is the first time that I’ve ever been in the state of Rhode Island, but it’s not the first time I’ve been in this state. Now people have been coming on to me for the last ten days and saying, “What did you come to Rhode Island for?” I guess we came to Rhode Island just to tell you that God is real and that how you be makes a difference in how it is for everybody. C4DEC70
35.
Now the thing that gets mankind in trouble a lot is future-tripping. Like I think the communists blew it when they said it’s all right for us to wipe out this generation for the sake of the next one. No, man, you got to be cool with this one right now, because the trip is here and now, all the time, and if you sell out your here and now for the future you have no value in the here and now and none in the future either. C8DEC70
36.
I think our technology right now is like an extended speed trip that mankind has been on for a couple of hundred years. The industrial revolution was just like methedrine in the arm of mankind. Aldous Huxley said there had been only one new sin invented since the original seven deadly, and it was speed. And conceptual speed, mechanical speed, chemical speed, electronic speed, and all those kinds of speed are all the same thing. C8DEC70
37.
I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to quit gratifying the gross material senses so much, because it costs so much for all of mankind to gratify those senses. and we’re going to start learning to gratify our finer senses, which are spiritual, and there’s enough spiritual stuff to go around all the time. So the direction is for us to go simpler and simpler with material, and you can get pretty fancy out in there if you be simple with material. C8DEC70
38.
A friend of mine had a 650 Triumph and he was trying to fix the throttle cable, so he had the throttle cable off and he had the motor started and he knocked it off the stand and it fell over on its side and it kicked the throttle wide open and it just screamed for a few seconds and then exploded. And that’s what this culture will do if somebody doesn’t turn off the key. This depression that’s happening right now is the culture collectively turning off the key, saying, “No, man, you can’t drive that fast if I’m going to ride with you. Somebody’s going to have to slow this car down, man, it’s getting dangerous . . . too fast, too leaky to go so fast.” C8DEC70
39.
I think that mankind has got to back off this speed trip if he intends to survive on the planet. [Technology could only be helpful] as soon as it starts becoming compassionately applied for the sake of all men, instead of uncompassionately for the sake of corporations, which are soulless entities that have growth drives and no intelligence or soul. Technology ain’t going to lead us to any kind of enlightenment, if we’re lucky we’ll get loose from technology enough to get enlightened. The major bar to enlightenment for the people of this culture is their technology. C8DEC70
40.
I’m specifically trying to disabuse you of the notion that the technology is what is saving you, because the technology ain’t saving you. I feel like sometimes the universe is going on and somebody’s saying, “Turn off the machine,” and somebody’s saying, “I can’t hear you for the machine,” and somebody says, “Turn off the machine please!” and somebody says, “I can’t hear you! The machine’s too loud!” “Turn off the machine!” “Can’t hear you! The machine’s too loud!” C8DEC70
41.
What we’re doing? We’re a group of folks who discovered that you don’t have to get a fire but that you can make a fire. And so we’re making a fire. And once you get far enough into making a fire, then you find out that that’s the way all fires happened— they got made. And then you know as much about firemaking as anybody knows. And so we’re just into firemaking. C8DEC70