September 18, 2003
Santa Barbara, California, USA

12:10am. I'm on the computer at the home of Joshua Bridge, a friend of Shannon's who I met at Burning Man. We've hung out a few times over the past week, meeting after the clubs, then I'd crash on his couch, and last night at an open Mike I checked out his hip-hop free stylin' with a Jamaican brother, and today over coffee we enjoyed conversation about responsibility-- one's ability to respond. He's keen to know about the powers that be, once known as the Illuminati, so I shared what I learned about the Council on Foreign Relations. He builds web sites for a profession, so we plan to work together on the Action Hero Network-- a web site for making connections with others doing good work through a resume listing and search engine to find out who is doing what or wants to go where.

Last night, as Josh was watching the last part of Bulletproof Monk which he missed by falling asleep the other night, I finished reading The Lazy's Man Guide to Enlightenment. These are the key points I pulled from it:

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.

To be enlightened is to be in a state of flexible awareness, an open mind. Enlightenment is the very process of expanding, not arriving at a different set of limits.

When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the ignorance that is other than the knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it.

It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways you can exactly predict. What happens is not important as how you react to what happens.

Also it is important not to judge others for their pleasures of the flesh. What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for yourself, all your words and actions define the world you live in. One of these laws for our relations as equal beings is this: What you say goes--but only for you and those who agree with you. If you say a man should not receive help undeservedly, it may not affect his life much, but it will hold for you: you will not get undeserved help. If you say other people's sexual pleasures are vulgar, it won't change their experiences, but your pleasures will become vulgar. It is precisely your unlimited power to control your experience that hangs you up. How much compassion and forgiveness do you want for yourself? Give it to others. Go to the extreme: forgive all beings for their karmic debts to you. Grant to others the freedom, the love, the consciousness you want for yourself.

Note carefully that when your vibrations are slow, events seem to happen fast, and you will feel that events are happening too fast for you to control them. And you may therefore feel impelled to try to control them. You may try to establish habits of orderly behavior, and you may resent disorderly people. This is the origin of the power trip. You may try to get away from disturbing events by moving to the country, or turning off your consciousness with hard drugs or liquor.

But the faster you are vibrating and the more messages you are getting back from your environment, the slower events will appear to be happening, and the more you will feel in control. The more you love, the faster you vibrate, then the less need you feel to control anything, and you are not fearful or change and variety. You experience everything deeper and slower and more lovingly.

If the world looks beautiful and safe, you are vibrating fast; if it looks gloomy, dull, or frightening, then you are vibrating slow, and you need to love yourself for vibrating too slow.

Inside yourself or outside yourself, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

No matter what others are doing, you are the only one who is responsible for what happens to you. There is nothing in the external event that in the least way determines your feelings and experiences: your life is entirely governed by your vibrations, what they tell you and how you respond.

The slower your vibrations, the more unpleasant your life: you will contend with more conflict, mass, and pain. Events will happen too fast for control, yet time will seem interminable because you can see no way out.

But when you raise your vibration level, you can neatly sidestep collisions, both psychic and physical, and quite literally change the world for the better. Love is the strongest magic of all.

When you learn to love hell you will be in heaven.

In an unstable relationship, we have basically two ways to go, regardless of the subtleties of the changes: one way is towards stability, reaching a common level of vibration; the other is towards disintegration, getting so far apart in vibration that we are no longer aware of each other at all. Since we are uncomfortable in the presence of vibrations higher or lower than our own, we tend to make certain "natural" responses. If the other person is lower, we will generally try to get him up to our level, to help him and cheer him up. But if the other person is higher, we will often, at first, try to bring him down and get him to lower his vibrations. Note that when you are trying to help someone you are working against his natural, perhaps unconscious effort to bring you down. The lower vibrating person (and this could be any of us depending on the circumstances) will appear to be draining the energy of the higher person, often with the best moral and social motives. This effort can take the form of exaggerated praise, sly pokes with problems, and showing fear and aggression, freaking out, starting an argument, quoting better authorities, and a thousand other forms, all the way down to putting the higher person in prison or killing him.

On the other end, if you are faced with such behavior, the remedy is to keep on out flowing love, to have no resistance in your mind, the lower vibrating person may reach farther and farther to bring you down, but when he finds you will not come down, when he senses that you have no internal resistance to him, he will have to rise to your vibration level to feel stable and comfortable, it is too painful to stay where he is. And he will rise, unless of course he goes the other way, and disintegrates from the relationship; you are not, however, obliged to wait him out: if you sense that he is not going to do anything but try to bring you down, you are free to effect the disintegration when you choose. In current language, just split. Don't dwell on it, and don't feel guilty about it. It's the natural order of things.

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment.

The principle of equality is a safe guide, both in saving us from foolish condescension to disturbed people, and from self-limiting awe towards superior people.

The solution to all our push-pull tensions is to treat everyone, every being you recognize to be alive, as equal to yourself. Always look deeper than any evidence that you are unequal. If another person displays great wisdom or genius, produces great paintings, or even inflates himself to writing books of advice like this one, just DON'T BELIEVE it is any evidence that his potential is higher than yours. Know that anything he has done you can do--not in the sense of debasing him but of elevating yourself. Don't "admire" him excessively--that separates you. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, enjoy what he produces, treat him as an equal. And whatever you see on a psychedelic trip, just say, "I'm equal to that: we are all equal to that."

On the other side, if a person displays sickness and insanity, degradation and emotional distress, helplessness and despair, just don't believe it is any evidence that his potential is lower than yours, know that anything you are doing, he can do. Don't blindly agree with his game; don't react as though what he is doing is real. Let him be what he is, love him as your brother, have compassion for him, treat him as your equal. Begin with the knowledge that he can bring himself out of it. Don't ignore him necessarily, unless you know he is running the same movie over and over and are bored with it. Your attention is always life-giving; it will make him feel stable and loved, and he can go up from there if he wants to. You can even tell him in words that you don't believe his game: do it while you are bandaging his wounds or feeding him or giving him money. Don't act superior to him: you aren't, you're his equal. Ignore the sin and love the sinner.

It is not a personal affront to you when someone is being discordant; it is measure of his pain. He's showing you how much he hurts, and how much compassion he needs. But keep in mind, too, that not all victims are innocent. In a certain karmic sense, no victims are innocent, but that doesn't mean we should help them, for it is our fate to exist in relation to them, and how we behave determines our own karma. But we should give help in a way that does not extend out attachment to low vibrations. That means we should give what we would expect to get, good or bad, in the same circumstance, and begin with the knowledge that all beings are equals.

While we still believe there are people greater or lesser than ourselves, we will tend to hang on all the more tightly to our current vibration level; we will be fastened to the people who make us feel at home. We will be stuck with our ideas, our emotions habits, our jobs, our bodies. We will be afraid to change because we will fear the unstable experiences we have when we try to reach a "higher" level. We will be afraid of falling to a "lower" level if we let go of our current stability.

Once you begin to behave in the knowledge that no being is greater or lesser than you, then you are free to change, because you will feel stable no matter what level you are on. You will feel calm and sure of yourself with or without a body, with or without a job, a brain, a book to read, or a book to write.

Since every being is self-determined, you cannot change anyone else's vibration level against his will, nor are you obliged to. You cannot in reality hurt or help others without their agreement to play the game, nor can anyone hurt or help you without your agreement.

Indeed, your perception of others is colored by your own limited vibrations until you reach the higher levels, so you have no way of knowing exactly what you are trying to change. On the other hand, you do control you own vibration level absolutely, and that's all the freedom you need to govern your own relationships and experiences.

You have an infinite choice of worlds to live in.

Whatever your choice, whatever vibration feels right to you, you will tune in and stabilize with others believing the same thing. On the space level, like usually attracts like.

You can tune your vibrations to Christ Consciousness or Buddha consciousness and experience supernal compassion. You can tune yourself to black magic and live in a world of weird shapes and violent forces. You can tune to Mickey Mouse or Mr. Natural in the comic book. You can become one with the Divine Mother and dwell in incredible sensuous luxury.

You may have all these experiences and more when you meditate or take psychedelics. You may not remember this book then, but you will be able to remember two words: No resistance. These two words apply even more importantly on those levels than on this one, if anything. Remember them especially when you are dying.

Since we aren't going anywhere, with stability, any faster than our love will take us, and we have to love it where we are first, there is something to be said for not getting too ambitious about the infinite possibilities.

But it's nice to know that there is more to it than what you see in front of you now, and that you can experience your present reality on much deeper levels of pleasure and ease.

The state of mind that needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened.

The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners.

What we see is always ourselves.