ATTENTION AND ENERGY

1.

If somebody’s messing around in the astral plane, which is fast and subtle and telepathic, you have to watch what’s happening very closely. Some people do subtle plane cruelty to each other. If that’s happening, it will manifest somewhere on the material plane. MNC31

2.

So you watch very closely, and sooner or later, you’ll see it manifest on the material plane. Then you say, “Look at that!” Preferably try to get everybody’s attention at the same time so that a lot of people will look at it while it’s still there, or whatever it is. Then, when everybody’s seen it, you can talk about it. If you’re the only one who saw what happened, don’t necessarily try to call someone on it by yourself because then it turns into one against one and that’s ego confrontation. Then you start generating so much ego you can’t tell what the truth is anymore. MNC31–32

3.

First thing we have to get into is what attention really is, and how it works. Each one of us is a fountain of energy, each one of us is like a valve from which universal life energy is metered into the world, and each one of us can point that energy at whatever we want. When you put your attention on me really solidly and understand what I’m doing and pay attention, then that gives me juice, and that enables me to be stronger when I’m talking. MNC33

4.

Now, attention’s powerful stuff, because everybody’s got to have it. It’s a human requirement to have a sufficiency of attention, just like oxygen or water. Everybody needs a certain amount of attention, and if they don’t get it one way, they’ll get it another. The need for it begins before they’re born, and they’ll learn habits of getting it. MNC33

5.

I see some people sort of lay back weakly, putting their attention out there like a loose tentacle, and if it happens to land on something neat, they applaud a little bit and say, “Far out.” They get to see some of what goes on, doing that, but they miss a lot, too, because to know what’s really going on, you have to have been in on it since the beginning of the bubble that’s being blown, knowing all the things that everybody else knows. That’s the assumption pool that everyone can draw on to determine the first cause of what’s happening. To get into that, you have to be able to control your attention, and put it somewhere on purpose. MNC34

6.

A good example of that is the time when I was watching a band playing — and there was a certain note they hit. By the quality of the note, I wouldn’t have been able to tell whether it was a singer or a guitar. It was just one of those real out-there electronic sounds. But I happened to have noticed when the singer started, and I watched her break in on the beginning of that note — so I knew it was her. I watched her go through what she did, and hold the note until, to my stoned vision, she became transparent for a second on the stage. If I hadn’t been plugged into her and noticing that note from the beginning, then I wouldn’t have been able to see that happen. But I lucked out and caught the beginning of that bubble, and went with it until it popped. MNC33

7.

We have to learn how to get our attention out, and how to focus it. But then it’s kind of hard for some of us to even find it…. But that’s how attention works. You have to learn where your attention is, one way or another — and how to apply it. One way to learn about attention is to focus it on something and keep it there… MNC35

8.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that, in this universe, whatever you put your attention on, you get more of. You can learn to concentrate your attention, once you know where it is, what it is, and when it’s turned up or down, and when a piece of music is background music and when it’s not. MNC35

9.

When you’re able to pull your attention down and put it onto a point, you can get into concentration and keep your attention on that point as long as you want. But you have to learn how to be loose to do that. It’s not a thing you can do if you’re tight, because then your attention will tend to fidget. You have to learn how to be a loose observer and really not give a damn too much about what’s going on out there in front. You have to just look at it and dig it, and see what it is, and get the informational content out of it. MNC36

10.

You’re also supposed to groove. You’re supposed to just be grooving as hard as you can. MNC36

11.

There’s a Zen saying: “Although my heart is on fire, my eyes are as cold as ashes.” It implies that you can keep your concentration really well when you’re not attached. That’s the loose place you have to be in to play music or to ride a bike — or engage in any of those loose, no-mind kinds of places. Then you can get to what is actually a qualitative change of consciousness, which you can call meditation. They say one way to do that is to think twenty different and consecutive thoughts about the same thing…. MNC36

12.

One of the reasons that the astral plane is so intensely relativistic is that it includes all the possibilities that will ever happen to you, or ever did — all of them going on at once — and you have to sort out the probabilities yourself while you’re there. But that’s not traveling from here to the past or from here to the future. It’s just that your viewpoint rises until future and past are all there. MNC42

13.

One of the best ways to enter into a meditation comes from learning how to handle the normal thoughts that come up. That’s the process — you sit there and let those thoughts come up and just don’t get uptight about them. Let them happen. They can just happen. MNC43

14.

In Tibetan yoga they say it’s important to know that thoughts arise from “a concatenation of causes.” That is to say that thought just pops up out of your subconscious over your whole life, and you may have no idea what it is or how it got there. You don’t know why those thoughts are coming up until you get into full communication with your subconscious. The way you do that is to not get uptight about anything you find there. MNC43

15.

Here’s the thing about energy: You can’t store it. We’re not batteries. We can handle a lot more energy in motion than we can statically. One of the nicest things you can do with [a load of extra] energy, then, is to use it to make your environment and tripping mates as beautiful as possible. You can say, “I’m just going to make everybody around me be really pretty.” Make the whole house look really good, and just pull her on. If you’ve got enough juice to turn the house into the Taj Mahal, crank it up. Go on ahead, because you have to spend the energy anyway. Go ahead and get to it. MNC43

16.

By perceiving it and by digging it, we reinforce the life-force energy that we all live and exist on. If it’s taken away, you die; if you have it, you live. What we’re seeing when we’re stoned is the energy, the life stuff, the Holy Spirit. To perceive it is to be blessed. To perceive it and know what it is and not be freaked out, so you can continue to be a channel for it and bring more of it into the world for everybody to use, is to be thrice blessed. It helps to create us all happier and healthier and rosier and three-dimensionally stronger, here and now, in the real material world. MNC52–53

17.

The Holy Spirit is the matrix that sustains us all. It’s the one mind – the prime container that contains all things and all of us. It can be perceived. One of the times that you can perceive it is when you are making love with your spouse, that energy passing back and forth between you, and one of you can rev up a little bit of energy, and the other one can feel it – that’s it, too. That’s Holy Spirit, that electricity that plays. It’s the life energy that keeps us all alive. It’s why a baby looks like a blooming flower. When you look at a baby, you can see it shining and radiating that force – pure life force. It’s the one that keeps us all alive and making it. It’s not something remote that you seldom see, or you only perceive once in a lifetime. It’s the bread of life. It’s that energy which you live on, day by day. We all live on it. It’s that stuff that melts the fatigue out of you, and you feel the warmth and the life flow into you. That’s the Holy Spirit flowing into you right there. It’s a real thing. It’s the medium in which we are all messages. MNC53

18.

We’re all like little energy transmitters. You know those things that float in swimming pools and suck down all the leaves and bugs and sticks and stuff. That’s what we are. You wander around through the world and take in all the vibes, transmute them through your serenity, good dope and what-have-you and put them back out, all vacuumed. The way we do it is that we absorb the body energy at this level and then transmute it. We do other people’s homework as if it were our own. We do the homework of all the people around us. That’s how we can help out by refining those vibes everywhere we go. MNC64–65

19.

If you create a channel at a level you have control of, energy at different levels can become involved. Macrocosm, microcosm, as above, so below…. If you can create an energy wave in the physical plane, then higher and finer vibrations can ride on that physical plane vibration, like a carrier wave. MNC65

20.

[Can you over-amp yourself?] No, your own energy doesn’t hurt you. What you’re doing with high energy is like raising some Kundalini, and they call the Kundalini the serpent power. The particular kind of serpent I always think of is some thirty-five-foot rock python or something, you know, cause it’s a lot of juice. Kundalini is the body’s answer to the Stanford linear accelerator. Don’t decide that it’s too much, for a start. It’s whatever you decide it is, because it’s your own energy. There is a way to sit back down on top of the energy instead. Sometimes if there’s a lot happening around us and the energy gets high we’ll shudder, and that’s like shaking it off, letting that energy go, shaking it loose from you. Sometimes when energy comes on strong, you’ll tend to want to do that, and try to get loose from it. If you’ll relax as much as you can, and just settle back on it and let it flow, it can work for you. MNC65–66

21.

If you get tense from doubt or fear, it will throw rigidity into your colloid. If you get rigid, you’re going to have trouble with high energy. Just sit down on top of it, and let it get you high, because the answers are in the direction of high. MNC66

22.

If you feel uptight, and you feel like you’re on a high level, what you have to do is take care of the homework on the material plane. You have to be sure you don’t have unresolved fear, desire, hate, or other negative emotions in your ordinary mind to have both ends working all the time. It goes back around to the old lady asking the policeman if she’s gonna get electrocuted if she steps on the streetcar track. The policeman answers, “No, not unless you put your other foot on the overhead wire.” It’s the same with getting too ethereal or too spiritual and not hanging in there on the material plane a little bit. If you get loose from the bottom, you know, you’re just flappin’ in the breeze. MNC66

23.

[Does psychic energy persist?] That’s a heavy thing about vibrations. If you don’t consider that they persist, then a lot of stuff doesn’t work. The vibrations you put into a room will hang in there, like you can walk into a room where there’s a big hassle happening, and you can tell, you know. Not only that, but you can get to where you can see the astral furniture of a room…. MNC67

24.

The thing about attachment and change is that you can change your self, and [the malleable portions of 2005] the universe limited only by your attachments. But the real thing about being unattached is to be unattached by the second, here and now, and allow change to happen. It’s like the story of the guy who was told, “You shouldn’t think about that anymore. That’s kind of a drag, so why don’t you just forget that?” He says, “Okay,” and they say, “The reason you ought to forget it is that it’s really kind of a bring down,” and he says, “Forget what?” That’s the way to get high. You’ve got to be able to cut loose just like that. MNC93–94

25.

To make things change on the physical plane, you have to make changes at all the other levels first. You have to be unattached all the way. It’s easy to be unattached when we’re very stoned and one with the Godhead, because there’s nothing to be attached to. [It’s much much harder in the “real” world. 2005] When you’re that heavy, you don’t have to know any details. God isn’t bound by knowledge or anything. It’s much heavier than that. It’s not even in the same level of sort system. MNC94

26.

If we’re going to make change happen in the real world, we have to understand that this is three-dimensional illusion. It’s hard to the touch because we agree it is. It takes a great deal of mental to make a little something happen in the astral, and then it takes a great deal of astral to make a little something happen in the physical. It’s like multiple-multiple-multiple trips. MNC94

27.

The way you do magic on that level is you decide that you know what you want and then just sock it to it with everything you have, that you know what you want and then let it happen. Relax and don’t be attached because if you pray too long you mess up the machinery of prayer so it’s hard for your thing to happen. MNC94

28.

Prayer is how we manifest our thing. We don’t have to kneel to pray. We don’t have to use words to pray. All you have to do is sincerely want it, and know that it is good, and then you get it, unless you are too attached. It’s like throwing an anchor over and hanging on to the rope. You have to let go of the rope. MNC94

29.

But real nonattachment is being willing to give up the whole universe, over and over and over again. You have got to become nonattached to the whole universe. If you can become nonattached to the whole universe, so you don’t really care – you’re not attached to yourself – then you can make changes in the universe from kronon to kronon. But it means you’ve got to let go of everything. You’ve got to let go of caring who you are. MNC94–95

30.

One of the things about attachment to knowledge that I find is you get these great big books written by some medieval magician, and it tells you that there’s umpty-ump orders of angels here and that there are 17 kinds of dominions there, and it goes through this army-like hierarchical breakdown of the various planes and things. You don’t need to know all that stuff, because that’s an attachment trip to try to write all that stuff down. The thing about putting something in a solid coated frame is just about the way to kill it. That’s what happened to Christianity. They finally got it nailed down, as it were. MNC95

31.

Magic is working with vibes. That we work all together for the vibes for the good of us all is the real thing. A magician is just someone who moves the vibes around. MNC97

32.

The scientists who first got into ESP and started messing around at that level, didn’t know it but they were messing with magic. Not only did they not know that they were messing with magic, they didn’t know that there is a whole spectrum full of magic. It ain’t black and white. It’s like all the angstroms you can think of. They’re doing things on the basis of non-spiritual sort systems, like, can you get this person to know that person’s thinking a thought or can this person kill a frog. They don’t care what the thought is; they just want to get a result. They’re not into believing it so much as to bother to keep track of what color of magic they’re doing. That’s why science’s soul is at that level. MNC97

33.

That’s also why we can be as high as we can get as long as we all keep our compassion going. Compassion is what keeps us tagged back into material reality so we always know we are grounded. That’s where compassion is. If you aren’t grounded, you aren’t in the monkey rules anymore. MNC97–98

34.

“Attachment to feelings” covers a lot of interesting places. It goes all the way to are you attached to your emotional feelings? I have some people say to me sometimes, “I have these strong feelings.” I say, “How do they square with good sense?” They say, “You don’t understand. I have STRONG feelings!” I say, “Yeah, sure, people do sometimes. I’m hip, so what?” You can’t make good decisions on the basis of feelings alone. MNC98

35.

Like I have emotional feelings pass through my bod occasionally that are real warpers. I feel some stuff that bends my head. Well, if I feel that thing and plug on to it and say, “Oh my God, I felt a fear vibe in me. I must be scared,” and then invent something to be scared about. No, I just can’t do that. If I feel a vibe coming through me, I say, “Interesting. The astral weather is a little scared around here. Somebody must be scared around here. It might even be me but I’m not going to freak out even if it is. I am going to see what’s happening.” MNC98

36.

The old heavy magic books always have you make a pentagram if you’re going to conjure up some thing. The thing about making a pentagram is that the five sides of the pentagram stand for the five senses that they used to count in those days. You build a side of the pentagram when you take control of that sense. If you have control of your senses, that means you’re in total control of your manifesting universe. MNC98

37.

[How to get out of hell?] You have to plug up the holes in your bucket, then you get higher. Most people who are in hell are complaining. They think they’re complaining because they’re in hell – and some of them are, but some of them are in hell because they’re complaining. MNC104

38.

If you’re going to share someone’s karma, you have to take what comes. When you go to help somebody, if you involve your affairs with theirs, they are your brothers and you share with them, and that’s what that kind of karma is like. MNC104

39.

We found that out as a class when we went from Glide, when we used to meet at the Glide church, and when we went to Haight Street. We said, man, we’re going to go to Haight Street, and Haight Street was in a far out place at the time. It was very hard; there was a lot of speed happening and stuff. And so we said, “Okay, we’re going to have to go to Haight Street and we’re going to have to share Haight Street’s karma.” And we had some things happen at the Straight Theater that were really pretty heavy. And some people said, “How come these things are happening?” I’d say, “Man, this is Haight Street karma.” MNC104

40.

We just split fields with Haight Street, and we stayed there as long as we could. We didn’t leave because we decided to; we left because they welded shut the doors to the theater. And we’d split fields with anybody who’d walk through the door. And it got us high; in the long run it got us high. And that was really important for us to learn…. We were splitting some heavy karma, but I guess we did it okay because we’re doing this now. MNC104–105

41.

What holds the yin and yang together is because they’re the same thing, on a continuum, just different gradations. You start off with like love and hate, and you come in and it’s like strong attraction and pretty strong dislike, and you come in and it’s like you dig and you don’t dig and, well, pretty soon you can’t tell, you know, you just can’t give a hoot. MNC105

42.

And it’s the same continuum all the way – that’s what holds it together is because it’s the same thing, it doesn’t need to be held together, it’s one thing already. That’s why if you find yourself in a hate place, love. If you find yourself in a fear place, have courage. See, the antidote for any emotion that is unacceptable is its opposite one. Like the Buddhist scriptures say that the antidote for ignorance is enlightenment. MNC105

43.

I try to put everything on a continuum. I try to put just everything on a continuum that I can possibly wire on to one, because I don’t want to get hung up on any large jump gear-shift things, because it makes my rubber peel a lot, you know. Like if you catch second gear too hard you squeak a little chunk of rubber there. That’s what happens if the gear is too tall; if you had several gears to go through between low and second gear, you wouldn’t peel, and peeling is a waste of time. So we want to have as fine a level of differential as possible until it has become real flow, so you can move from one place to another place gracefully, like dynaflow, not like shifting gears. Then you go to a real fine gear level place or differential for that kind of thing. MNC105–106

44.

That’s what saves you from getting hung up in the dichotomies — mobility on all continuums. And then you be appropriate in yourself to what’s happening. And that’s when Sangsara and Nirvana are one, when you’re doing that. Moving on continuums lets you stay higher because you can make finer distinctions, finer judgments. MNC106

45.

You see, the universe needs all of us to be as smart as we can, and use our head as best we can. If you’re putting a sufficient amount of attention and intelligence into baking a cake that the attention and intelligence would be sufficient to govern a galaxy, well, maybe you are a governing a galaxy while you are baking that cake. Maybe you are because there is no space-time on the astral; whoever is doing, is who’s doing it. MNC106

46.

[How to plug up holes in your bucket?] The first thing is to find out where is your attention at. You might not know where your attention is. There’s lots of reasons you might not know where your attention is…. MNC106

47.

Plugging up holes in your bucket is like finding right where your attention is, because if you don’t know where it is you don’t know what it’s doing. And what you want it doing is getting you high by paying attention to everything that’s going on, really digging it, not floating around in your head, not thinking about last week, not thinking about next week, not thinking about somewhere else. Like it’s always here and now. MNC107

48.

You can’t get enlightened tomorrow. You can get enlightened right now if you’re lucky, but not tomorrow. You can’t get enlightened yesterday either. Too late – down the tubes, man. Enlightenment is always here and now, that’s what the flash is in some measure is the here-and-nowness of it. MNC107

49.

So then come to here and now, and then see what distracts you from the here and now. That’s a hole in your bucket. MNC107

50.

One really good way to practice plugging up some holes in your bucket is to do Tantric balling. It’s really neat, Tantric lovemaking, Tantric yoga. How many people are hip to that? Yeah. Tantric yoga is the yoga of the nervous system, and as a subheading of that is the yoga of sex. Because sex – I don’t know what we think sex is, some of it is for babies, some of it is for manipulating your nervous system. For being able to do to your nervous system what you want done, and you need somebody to help you, because you can’t even tell if you are uptight if you are by yourself. See? Because uptight can be zero for you, and you can have a wrong zero at that level. MNC107

51.

When you are doing Tantric loving, you want to feel each other’s field, and know how to feel your way to get right into it, to be one with it, to be right there. While you’re doing that, your attention will try to wander. MNC109

52.

Your attention is not impressed by anything… much. It’ll try to wander from anywhere, until you get it trained. MNC109

53.

So while you’re doing that thing and your attention wanders, you’ll be there and one minute you’ll be making love and you’ll be all involved in that, and the next minute you’ll be thinking about that cat who said that funny thing to you yesterday. And then you notice that you’re thinking about that cat who said that funny thing to you yesterday. And then you say, “What in the hell am I doing thinking about that thing now? What am I thinking about that thing now for, this is much more exciting than that was.” And then you’ll come back to the here and now, so you come back to here and now – Bang! Aaahhh, that’s good, so here you are, and you find yourself thinking about your mother-in-law. Mother-in-law! Far out! What am I doing out there? MNC109

54.

So you grab your attention and here is the thing. If you just grab your attention and rip it off those wandering things — your attention is like a tentacle, you know, it’s going to look for something to grab on. Well, when you rip it loose from one of those attachment places, like take it loose from that one, grab it, and bring it down and involve it in the situation at hand, right? MNC109

55.

Look around and see which part of your relationship in the here and now is not getting enough attention. Where are you shorting out, where are you touching someone and not knowing it? See? And take that thing and say, “Well, my-my, here are a couple of knee bones that are together that I hadn’t noticed were together.” And pay attention to those two knee bones, man, and turn them on. MNC109–110

56.

And hang on behind that because pretty soon you’ll find your attention wandering again. And you have to snatch that piece of attention and fasten that down. In time you get all of your wandering attention tentacles grabbed and fastened back into the system that you were working on. Right there, when you get all of your tentacles plugged back into the system, you got the holes plugged in your bucket, because most holes in your bucket is your attention wandering. MNC110

57.

That’s a really good way, because you can assume that anything else you’re paying attention to is secondary, when you’re in that situation. I like to make love to get my energy together. It’s my favorite meditation; it’s what I do more often than sitting in a lotus position. MNC110

58.

The classic case of [an attachment to an attachment] is like writers who don’t want to get straight because they feel if they get straight they won’t be able to write anymore. That’s a really classic trip. It’s also really wrong. Hangups don’t help us function any better. It’s just that attachments to attachments are bullshit and you let them go, whatever they are. MNC110

59.

[What about excluding vibes?] Here’s a thing about vibes. The vibes are going to happen anyway. The vibes are going to behave according to their normal laws of field behavior. No matter what any of you say about that. See? MNC110

60.

In the old frontier colonies, the square-dance trip, they had the Virginia Reel. That’s all the men in the community lined up in a line and all the women in the community lined up in a line. And the dance called for each member of the community to do a little dance with each member of the opposite sex in the entire community, you know, swing your partner in front of you and swing the one next to you, then you go down the line and swing every lady down the line, and your old lady comes back, and all that jazz. MNC110–111

61.

Look in the Sufi trip, for instance; a lot of the transmission of magic or baraka or vital energy or life forces is done through dance. And the way it’s done is the dance doesn’t have to be fancy, all you have to do is get several people together, stand there together, and go through the same motion at the same time. The dance neither has to be pretty nor graceful [it would be helpful though 2005], nor anything else. All that has to be done is to do it in unison [with good vibes 2005]. MNC111

62.

See? And if you do some thing at the same time as somebody a few times you pick up their vibes a little bit. Your field meshes with theirs because you’re both varying at the same kind of variable at the same kind of time, right? And that’s how you transmit magic in the Sufi tradition.

63.

Well, dig about a square dance then, like the Virginia Reel kind especially, where you got two lines with everybody there. You go out and you run through a real magical riff, man, and dance dance dance, both do the same dances together, whang-whang-whang, wind it up with each member, man, you vibe with everybody, all the way down the line. And all those chicks vibe with all those cats all the way down the line too. MNC111

64.

They call this a mixer, I think, in a square-dance trip, and it really is ’cause it strokes the vibes. The early Puritan communities and the early Western communities were so small they couldn’t afford a lot of shopping around and stuff, because the karma was too thick and too heavy, you got bad feeling trips, so they worked out a little ceremony, man, a little ceremony to stir up everybody’s vibes, soak ’em all around together, then everybody could be cool about it. MNC111–112

65.

Also, this thing right here [Monday Night Class] is Tantric lovemaking, to be really accurate, because we’re sitting here splitting fields and relaxing together, you know, and it feels better and better as we sit and do it. We get really stoned. MNC112

66.

In an energy relationship if you feel that somebody’s on a negative trip, first, you have to be accepting and free enough to say that they can do that if they want to, because they got free will, everybody’s got free will. The next thing is that you have a choice in the matter and that’s whether you pay any attention to it or not. And if you pay attention – this is some thing I’ve found out so many times trying to take care of people who bring me a bad trip to sort out for them – you can straighten them and let go of them and they’ll dive right back into it, cause they’re looking for it, really. People who really want help, you just make a suggestion and they do it, and they get straight. I’ve seen that happen lots of times. If you put a lot of attention and energy into a down trip, then you’re stepping on a down elevator. And the vibe may be exhilarating for a while, but it gets pretty funky the farther down you go. MNC117

67.

I’m quite interested in [starting a school for children]. What I had in mind is like a school where the teachers believe in vibes, so the kids will be held responsible for all the planes they’re operable on. These beatnik kids are telepathic, and they’ll turn into terrible rip-offs if you don’t teach them. They’ll just raise hell if you don’t teach ’em. They got to be held responsible for every plane of communication they have. MNC139

68.

[Reading the signals from a kid is] a very heavy trip. Kids learn subtle plane and facial gesture and mudra stuff, way pre-verbal, in their first few months of life. When a kid learns to smile, then he is in communication. That’s usually one of the first ones, to smile or pay attention. So, I’ve seen a kid who never had any attention paid to him, and it was like nobody ever reached out and grabbed on. The kid was just flopping. It took a long time and quite a bit of work to be able to just get the kid’s attention enough to say hello, to say, “Hey are you there, are you inside there, what’s happening?” MNC143

69.

I know grown-ups like that too, because nobody ever did get their attention, and so their attention belongs to whatever sign-board is beside the freeway, if it happens to be painted day-glo. Their mind belongs to whatever professional mind-copper can cop it. If you don’t know where your attention is, then you’re wide open to having your head copped by anybody that can cop a head. That’s like the advertising industry, politicians, gurus, college “experts,” etc. Head-coppers of one kind and another abound. The idea is that if you know where you’re at [and you are honest 2005
], it can’t happen to you. MNC143–144

70.

I get the use of a lot of psychic energy and sometimes, and people say “you can do what you do because you get to use all that energy. “Well I didn’t have any energy when I started doing it. I got the energy from doing it. I learned how to handle it. I didn’t spring out of a load and blossom, knowing where it was at. MNC157–158

71.

I figured out where it was at by paying attention for a long time, sometimes when it was really hard. That’s what works. I paid attention to the here and now, not to somewhere else. I didn’t pay any attention to prophecies, I didn’t pay any attention to things that were supposed to happen some other time and some other place. I paid attention to what was happening in the here and now, and took care of business in the here and now. I got straight with the people who are closest to me in the here and now. MNC143

72.

Buddha said that you had to have right vocation, and right vocation to us translates as something that is useful and doesn’t bring you down to have to do it. MNC174

73.

The attitude that you bring to work makes a difference whether it’s bringing you down or not. MNC174

74.

Or, you can say that something is going to take a certain amount of energy and you’re gonna call it an energy investment. I find that it works like this for energy, that if you put out enough energy, you get back enough to keep you going, if you keep putting it out. It may not come back directly from the place that you put it out. MNC174

75.

Like making tractors – an assembly line job is awfully hard on your head. I think it might be better if you just hand-built each one. For the sake of the sanity of the race, it might be better to abolish the assembly line, and if you want to build a tractor, drop down a case of tractor parts, and about seven or eight people get together and build it. Because when they got the tractor built, they would have a piece of their head built, too. You’ve got to really make decisions and judgments about that kind of stuff, about what you can stand to do. MNC174

76.

People who tend to have the majority of their attention into what people think about them, how people treat other people, one-upmanship, who did what to who on a social level, all sorts of symbolic things, will usually not have a lot of attention into the material plane. That’s an extreme thing, but it doesn’t have to be extreme to make a lot of difference. MNC174

77.

[People] can get stoned on being a carpenter or a mechanic really good, because if they come in and start paying attention to putting things right at that level of detail, it will get them high. MNC175

78.

People who are already into the material plane, with an everything has to be perfect, got to polish out all of the buffing marks, get all the brush marks out or it’s a flawed, one or a reject attitude don’t need to be putting their head into the material plane, because it will hang them up worse. They need to pull their head out of that and put attention into human relationships and understand the trip that’s happening. MNC175

79.

That’s where I’m at — no violence. No violence. Psychic violence is just the same as physical violence, you see. That’s the riff. People put psychic violence on the cops, and the cops respond with physical violence. Then the people say, Oh, looky what they did to us. But, man, look what they did to them. They are doing it to each other. MNC182

80.

Jesus said, “Resist not evil.” Resist not evil. It means that if you put juice into it, you stir it up and make it worse than it is. MNC182

81.

You don’t oppose it. That’s it. It thrives on being opposed. If you don’t oppose it, you pull its plug, and it runs out of juice. But if you put your juice into it, head on, it multiplies and floats loans to buy guns to meet you. MNC182

82.

What you do about it [violence] is you get your head together. What the country is dying of is a lack of good vibes. Man, I hate to say that. MNC183

83.

Here’s the thing. Emotional energy comes out of the tap unflavored. In the drugstore you’ve got like carbonated water and syrups. The energy comes out straight, and people put emotions like flavoring into it. Give your energy to people with as little flavor as possible. Try to give it to them energy-flavored. MNC184

84.

Everything that you do mentally matters, just as much as physically, and if you be kind of violent in your head it’s just like being violent with your bod, it’s not any different. It’s the place where Jesus said, “The prophets of old told you, Thou shalt not kill, but I say, Thou shalt not be angry with your brother.” Psychic violence is just like physical violence, and if you find that you can’t have any communication with anybody’s head, the thing to do is to start establishing communication and learn to get a little love happening. Every little bit helps. C31OCT70

85.

What happens is, if you be psychically violent long enough, sooner or later it’ll get into physical. Whatever you keep running your head over, over and over again, will sooner or later manifest. That’s what causes what they call the obsessive-compulsive cycle, where somebody gets afraid something’s going to happen, then spends so much time thinking about it that it happens. You just have to stop it at the level of thought. You can’t have the violence in your head, because it will out. It will come out and make things happen. C31OCT70

86.

I feel like beatniks have been spaced long enough, and that we know where it’s at, and that it’s time we got off welfare, gave up food stamps, and began to produce with this energy which we say we have so much of. C5NOV70

87.

They don’t deny that we have a lot of juice. They just think it’s a little strange to see people taking baths in energy while there’s other people dying for lack of it. That’s why they think we’re funny about the way we use energy. C5NOV70

88.

Understanding that you’re one with all mankind means not only breaking down space barriers, in that you’re one with men on the other side of the world and other countries and other planets, but time barriers, in that you have to realize you are one with all men and with all men that will be and that it matters what we do. C5NOV70

89.

Karma is the law of cause and effect. Now it works like this: Karma is like leverage. On the material plane there are laws about leverage, like you push down this side with a fulcrum in the middle and something comes up on this side, and how far you slide it back and forth makes a difference. And then they have the laws of hydraulics, which turns out to be the laws of leverage again, only working through liquids. Then they have the laws of electricity, which are the laws of leverage again but running through an electrical mode, and Boyle’s law of gaseous expansion and all that is leverage again. So the whole material plane comes down to being leverage finally, and leverage is nothing but cause and effect. Push down on this and it causes that to go up. That’s all leverage is, is cause and effect. C5NOV70

90.

So cause and effect continues through the entire material plane and on into the spiritual planes. That means that not only does your pushing down on a lever make a direct effect happen on the other end but the way you be to somebody makes a direct effect happen on the other end, and you create your universe out in front of you by the way you run your end of the levers. C5NOV70

91.

Now people say, “You hear about innocent little kids getting wasted, what kind of karma is that?” Here’s the thing about karma: Karma is not about deserving, karma’s about cause and effect. And if a puppy runs in front of a truck and gets wasted for it, it’s hard to say that a puppy gets wasted for being dumb enough to go in the street. It’s a hard thing to say that. But it is most definitely cause and effect. Well, cause and effect is how everything works. That’s the name of the interaction. And that’s karma. C5NOV70

92.

So good karma means that you’ve been doing good enough for a long enough string that your odds are very good that you’re going to continue doing good, because things are working for you and you’ve got good cause and effect stacked up. C5NOV70

93.

Now the astral plane is spaceless and timeless. That’s what they say — the Kingdom of God is eternal… spaceless and timeless. That means that if you understand Socrates right now that it doesn’t matter that he was then and you are now. You and him are right there together on that thought plane, because when he thought that he made it timeless, and when you thought it and knew it with him you got timeless too, and then you’re both timeless. If you speak Buddha’s thoughts, then you are Buddha. That doesn’t mean that you can play a tape-recording of Buddha and be Buddha. It means that if you come on to a situation and you have to work it out, and the way you work it out is like Buddha worked it out, and you come to the same conclusions through working it out and say the same thing, you’re being Buddha while you’re doing that… although Gautama Buddha lived twenty-five hundred years ago and you live now. Because it’s synchronous — same time, right now, here and now in the astral plane. That’s why Jesus is always with us. Jesus is eternal because there’s no space/time on the astral plane, and that there was a Jesus ever means that there always is one. That there was a Buddha ever means there always is one. Sometimes I say, You seen one Buddha, you’ve seen ’em all. C5NOV70

94.

Here’s what I like about the mandala: They have fire engine contests, you know, and they have these old pump fire engines. They bring out the old fire engines and they pump them up as hard as they can pump them, and there’s men that design nozzles for fire engine competitions. They design a nozzle that’s going to make a clean stick, they call it. It means that the nozzle is so perfect that the water comes out with not even fluted sides or anything — just comes out a straight shaft of water for a long time. That’s how they can get a long distance with those. The mandala puts out a clean stick of energy to me, like you can just throw anything in it, whoosshh… and it comes out, sheeooww… You can let it collect you. You can use it like a parabolic reflector to throw yourself back in your face till you notice you’re there. That’s a meditation. It’ll work. C5NOV70

95.

1 believe that we’ve got separate bodies and semi-separate souls and we have identical spirits. It’s body, soul and Spirit that we’re made of. C5NOV70

96.

[We each have separate souls] because it’s the normal laws of field behavior. Your soul is the electrical field that surrounds your equipment, and your brain is a field generator, it’s not just a hunk of meat with wiring in it. Your brain is not like an adding machine with gears in it and stuff, it’s a field generator, and your finest thoughts are the plays of the field — how the field moves, not just the mechanical tracing inside here — and that field is your soul. Your spirit is a fraction of God and is identical with all other fractions of God and is exactly identical — the same. Souls differ insofar as they interpenetrate; our souls all interpenetrate, and our bodies are not even apart, not even geometrically. C5NOV70

97.

Linear means in a line . . . has to do with space, because the idea of a line is a space thing. You’ve got to have space to have a line. That’s how you can determine what space is — by lines and planes and solids and stuff. The astral plane doesn’t have anything out of it to use for measuring sticks, it hasn’t got any time for you to tell how long it took you to get from here to there in. It just doesn’t work on those rules. Non-space/time rules are none the less just as real, no more illusion or less illusion than the other kind… than the space/time kind, and in fact most of the heavy decisions are made in the non-space/time one. See, the material plane proceeds from the spiritual plane, not the other way around. C8NOV70

98.

Your personality is your junk heap — that’s all the spare parts you picked up along the way. Your soul is your electrical field, which is generated by your body-mind complex. Like if you have an obnoxious bod in the material plane you’ve got an obnoxious soul. Or your soul can be so out of communication with your consciousness that it doesn’t know about you and you don’t know about it, which is the technical description of a “lost soul.” The Spirit is non-space/time and can’t have any personality or ego or anything like that. The soul is the electrical field that’s created by the interaction within yourself of yourself and everybody else in the universe, and it’s a direct result of this life. C8NOV70

99.

Like Gandhi… his title was Mahatma, remember? Well, maha is great and atma is soul. That’s like describing Gandhi’s soul, which was so great that thousands and thousands of people could inhabit it at once, and the way that they got India free from England was because there was something in India that could be one thing any time the Mahatma would spark it. He could go into a random crowd and his soul was so great that he could make it be one thing. C8NOV70

100.

When they say that man does not live by bread alone they mean that we’re kind of vibratory amphibians, and part of our amphibious body lives here in this medium, but part of us is electrical and vibratory, and that’s a whole world there, and we live in that world too. I don’t know hardly what to call that world. Carl Gustav Jung called it the collective unconscious. The yogis in India called it the astral plane. To me it seems to be a continuum of vibrational planes that continue in degrees of subtlety and purity until you reach one of absolute purity, of spiritual purity, and between the material plane and the plane of absolute spiritual purity this continuum exists where the illusion gets thicker as you come down away from Spirit. This is fairly thick illusion here. [Knocks on platform] There’s some just a little thinner than that. It’s not quite thick enough that you can bang on it, but if you’re stoned enough you can see it, and it goes on out to where maybe you can’t see it so much but you can feel it with other perceptors. C12NOV70

101.

I had one perfect trip, where I saw how it worked. I got to shinny all the way up the flagpole and hang on to the top of the flagpole long enough to get a good look. You know, found out how the universe works. Now that’s an outrageous thing, but I’m prepared to sit here and tell you how the universe works, and I can impart that knowledge to you: As you sow so you shall reap. It’s a wiring diagram of how the universe works, and you can do anything in the universe knowing that. So when I understood that I realized that on one level that wasn’t a very big thing to understand – Jesus has been saying that for years. They always tell us that. But what I found out on that trip was that it was true… here and now, all the time. And I thought, Well, if that was such an outrageous surprise to me, it may be interesting to other folks. C12NOV70

102.

Anger closes people up. I used to know a fellow who was an anger magician, and he got his way by being angry at people. One time I watched him come on that way to a dude who was stoned on a psychedelic, and it curled the dude up like a fishworm, reduced him to tears and stomach cramps just by being angry at him. That’s where anger’s at. Jesus said, “They told you of old, Thou shalt not kill, but I say unto you, Thou shalt not be angry with thy brother.” C13NOV70

103.

If [Jesus got angry], you know, it’s because part of him was human. But he told you don’t do it, and for you to say that Jesus got angry is irrelevant and tries to make it look like it’s cool because he did it. Even if he got angry lots of times, if he still said that thing, that thing is still true. Maybe he didn’t even say that, maybe I said that, it’s true because I said it. But Jesus said it. C13NOV70

104.

In traveling around I’ve found it’s better to let everybody know what we’re going to do first and then they’ll be more inclined to join in. The idea is that everybody is supposed to join in. We’re going to chant the OM. Some people consider it an old Hindu chant, but I consider it much older than that. I think it’s the first monkey chant, because it’s the simplest chant. Just open up your thing and let it all flow out. Don’t be afraid that you can’t or anything, just open up and pick out a good note that you can let it out on and listen to the music we make and feel how high we get, because anybody who wants to can get high right now, whether or not you ever took any psychedelics or anything like that in your life. That’s not the only way you get it on. You get it on because you try to be open to one another, and you can get it on right now. C16NOV70

105.

Now the vibrations are prettv strong in here. Here’s how vou can learn about what’s perceivable by various people: To how many people is the vibration in here perceivable? Would you raise your hands? Yeah, that’s pretty good . . . pretty good number. Now it I say there’s a vibration in here perceivable, and you don’t perceive it. what am I saying about the nature of our universes? That should be something of real interest to every person in this room. Now that vibration that those people raised their hands and said was perceivable to them is a function ot the spirit world. C16NOV70

106.

That’s what we call it in English. Spirit world. In Sanskrit they call it the astral plane. I’ve been trying to find out what are the English words tor things like that because they’ve dropped out of English so much from lack of usage that they almost don’t have any value in them. It’s hard to find out what do they mean or do they have any juice or not because this culture has become several generations removed from Spirit in a lot of ways. C16NOV70

107.

Now, not only is there that place, that world where those vibrations are, which is intercontiguous with here and now, but what’s going on there makes more difference about what happens here than what happens here does, here being assumed to be the material plane, although I’m never sure of that anymore. C16NOV70

108.

Here’s how it is: If you try to move the material plane from the material plane, it’s just moving the furniture around. But if you learn how to move from the spiritual plane, you can make changes in the material plane that stay changed. Making changes in the material plane that stay changed is how you can create growth, and you can’t make anything heavy except what you grow, including yourself, your family, your culture. C16NOV70

109.

I find the benign indifference of the universe to be a complete blessing. I’m very glad to know the universe can’t be rigged. No way to rig the universe, man, it’s fair and square. Input, output. You do your thing, it does it back to you, just like you ordered. That’s really one of the heaviest things I have to say — that you get it back like you ask for it. C16NOV70

110.

You don’t have to put yourself into an arbitrary universal pattern, but there is a normal way that the energy works, which … I use the word karma. I don’t like to use words out of the language, I’m not much of a great one for italics and stuff, but I use karma because we don’t have a word in English that means that quite good enough. C16NOV70

111.

Here’s the way you have to write karma in English: cause and effect. In English we break those apart like they’re somehow separate, but they’re not. They’re like space/time. They’re that kind of a trip. They’re not separate at all. Now cause/effect is just the wiring diagram of how it works, that what you put out you obviously get back. C16NOV70

112.

Yeah, [you can make somebody feel better by just doing tantra on a vibrational level]. You can heal anybody a lot just by doing that. C16NOV70

113.

But here’s the thing about the way uptightness works: Uptightness has kind of a decimal scale to it, because a person can be uptight and say, “Well I can’t face this right now,” and squish that whole uptightness into a little brick and stash it, and then something else comes along and makes them uptight and they can take that whole uptightness and kind of stash it and forget it. Then when they go to relax what they do is they say, “Whew, now I’m relaxed,” except they still got four bricks of uptightness over here they ain’t relaxed yet. They’ve got to take those bricks out, unwrap them, whsht, fills you up uptight, shew, relax that one. take out that other brick, open it up, accept it, and relax that one, and you’ve got to go all the way back through your transactions, anywhere you got uptight, and relax each one. C16NOV70

114.

See, that’s what your evening meditation is supposed to be, knowing every transaction that happened to you all day long and relaxing the uptightness out of it. And if you do that your health’ll stay good and you’ll get smarter and go toward enlightenment and that kind of thing. And you don’t like have to sit up to do this kind of a meditation. You can do that as you’re lying in your bed just the last thing before you go to sleep. C16NOV70

115.

I do several [kinds of meditation]. What I’m sitting in now is kind of like the Oriental meditation position. I’m not sitting up very straight, I could do that a little better. You’re supposed to keep your back straight and all that. That’s an Oriental meditation position. Kneeling on your knees—like you do in a church, where they got a little knee rail there, and you kneel down and all that— straightens your back the same way, and kneeling is Christian meditation position, except Christians call their meditation prayer. Now in Egypt they have… you’ve seen those pictures of the throne of the pharaohs — great big high-backed thing and arms up like this? That’s the Egyptian meditation position sitting up in that kind of a chair with your back straight. C16NOV70

116.

We do one that we’ve been doing for a while, which we haven’t done much lately because we’ve been so busy doing an engagement every other day or so, but when we’re in San Francisco we do a Sunday morning service every Sunday morning and we do it standing, which is another way of keeping your back straight, and we meet about half an hour, forty-five minutes before sunrise and face which way the sun’s going to come from and watch it go through its changes in silence, standing together, and get higher and higher and higher. Usually by the time the sun cracks over the edge we’re really stoned, and when the sun comes over the edge we OM together for a while, and anybody anywhere who wanted to have a kind of a meeting where you could be with other people and have communion and not be afraid of having your mind copped could agree with a bunch of people to meet on some hilltop and do that, and nobody would have to be a preacher or anything even. C16NOV70

117.

Now in a meditation, when you pacify your body first and then while you try to get your head together, thoughts are going to come through your head that’re going to be a hassle to you, and it’s going to be, “What am I doing here,” or “Somebody really put the blocks to me yesterday, I really felt bad about that,” or something you think you did wrong, or worrying about, “I forgot to pay that parking ticket,” whatever. Well all that stuff that’s kind of like garbage that comes up in your head is your subconscious, and that’s the meditation is meeting that stuff and taking care of it, which is looking at it and saying, “Parking ticket, pay the thing next time you see it,” or, “Did I blow it yesterday, who cares, forget it.” And clean up your head until you can stand there and actually get serious, which may take you twenty-five minutes or so, and you get to where you can get actually serious, where you can look at the sun coming up and you can start thinking about things like the sun being the giver of all life to the planet, all the energy we use—like coal is just somebody else’s sun, but still sun, just stored in the ground…. Realize that we’re all one, that what you do to your brother you do to yourself, and mainly, as you sow, so you shall reap. C16NOV70

118.

And if you can get to a serious place of mind and think about that stuff and then realize what it’s like at its full value… truth can become an old proverb and an old saw and everybody’s heard that a million times and it doesn’t have any weight in it, but in a meditation place you can go to a place where that stuff has its full value and you realize that it’s the bread of life, it’s what makes it possible for us monkeys to be together on the planet is those old saws — love your brother as you love yourself … Now see, that was kind of a meditation we did just then…, just going along … talking about how you could get serious and get real. C16NOV70

119.

Sex is cool. You can have sex and get high. You can reach satori and enlightenment making love. Anybody who says that making love will specifically keep you from getting on doesn’t understand the nature of monkeys or something. C22NOV70

120.

I don’t think there’s anything to giving up sex, but I do think there’s a thing to giving up lust and desire; I think lust and desire will hang you up. But people can have lust for ice cream that will hang them up. The thing that hangs you up is lust, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s for sex or ice cream or candy bars. C22NOV70

121.

You can make love in a way that does not expend energy. If you make love in the ordinary Western man-on-top position, and the man goes bang-bang-bang and gets his jollies like Beethoven and the lady’s still waiting, well, that’s an energy-loss trip. But if a man and a woman are really together and really move that energy back and forth between them, it gains instead of loses. C22NOV70

122.

You can take the energy that you start with making love and subtly, vibrationally push it back and forth, and it’ll get you higher and higher and higher till it puts you right into the void, just flash you right out on just pure loving juice. C22NOV70

123.

What your body is driving for when you have body sex desire is that you have a charge of a certain kind of energy which is just like when the clouds are going overhead with positive charges and negative charges are on the ground and as soon as a tree or a church steeple closes the gap a little bit, it’ll spark it and there’ll be a lightning bolt. Well, men and women build charges that way and sometimes you just meet up with somebody who’s got your charge. Well that’s that electricity wanting to neutralize. C22NOV70

124.

You don’t have to neutralize it in a flash. You can neutralize it over a period of a few hours and make love so it lasts a long time —two or three hours maybe. Actually if you’re pretty compassionate it doesn’t have to be that long. You can get to where you can get tantric pretty fast with somebody who knows how to do it with you. C22NOV70

125.

[Da Vinci said, “I come to this world very rarely.”] Kind of a spacey thing to say, isn’t it? We cycle with the God stuff eternally and every so often it comes through in interesting-shaped lumps and stuff. Normal bell curve of distribution of lumps of God stuff. C22NOV70

126.

The purpose is tripping, not where you’re tripping to. And mankind is here on the planet to groove — that’s our purpose. C8DEC70

127.

We went to tremendous psychic and spiritual effort to create this universe for us to come here and groove in with all of this fantastic grooving equipment that we have. We’ve got eyeballs and ears, touch, and so on, and then we’ve got a whole set of telepathic senses for all the material-plane senses. We’re supposed to get out and interact with the universe and groove. C8DEC70