Since a man, by and alone of himself is unbalanced, a woman by and alone of herself is unbalanced - by the very nature of the genetic coding and the nature of the spirit itself - marriage is a holy situation, let us call it. And the degree of marriage depends upon how many chakras are functioning.

And it also indicates what happens if more than 3 chakras are involved in the union between a man and a woman. If more than 3 chakras are involved, then the feeling of love is to serve.

Remember: when you tune in to the Cosmic Dreamer, the being that created this cosmos, the most important thing that you become aware of is an all-loving, giving force. In other words, it wants to give you everything it has, everything that it is to you, and it asks only one thing: let it. And actually, we don't let it because we're always tuning in to the wrong frequency.

And to show you how, when you really have more than 3 chakras functioning (which means you have 4 or more chakras taking place), let's say your husband - I'm speaking from the woman's point of view now - is a sports enthusiast. As we know on the weekends, there's a lot of sports going on. So there's also on this Saturday a love program: in other words, a nice love story which women usually like to watch. So she announces to her husband, you know, there's a really nice love story on this Saturday afternoon that she would like to watch. Of course, he's thinking about this here football game or baseball game or some other sports events that he'd like to watch.

Now we see who really loves whom. He gets to watch the sports events every Saturday, but this here love movie comes on, you know, it's not quite that often, maybe once a year or something of that sort. And love is the act of self-sacrifice: sacrificing yourself for another. So if he goes right on and sacrifices you for himself, he loves himself more than he loves you. And vice versa, under conditions of this sort: if a woman will sacrifice her husband for her own selfish ends, then she loves herself more than she loves him.

Unselfish Love is the main thing that binds two beings together and leads to balance. Because when you came into this cosmic dream of God, he is teaching you his technique, his love towards Self-Realization, his desire to help each and every being: an act of Unselfish Love. And this is what it's all about in this universe.

In other words, forgive the other person, regardless of what they have done to you. Forgive them. When you have forgiven them, you have forgiven yourself of them. Now this hatred, this anxiety, these disturbances which have caused the interference between you and this other individual no longer are affecting you. You can then reach balance. That doesn't mean the other individual is forgiven of the events which led up to the disturbances between you and him, or between you and her. They have to forgive themselves of you. But the important thing is: You must live with yourself. To live with yourself, you must forgive all others who are around you. For the slightest slight. For the biggest slight that can take place.

Remember: even Mahatma Gandhi forgave the man who shot him to death. Jesus forgave everyone because they were hanging him on the cross. He was forgiving himself of them, but as a cardinal once spoke and said unto me, "Ah," he says, "but the world was not forgiven of Jesus. And it was the duty of the Catholic Church to make sure that those who crucified Christ suffered". He said, "But the time of the suffering is about over." But he told me that about 50 years ago and it seems the time of the suffering is yet not over. So the Catholic Church must live some time more, because it has a lot of effort to do.

So the idea of Unselfish Love is very, very important in reaching towards Balanced Self-conscious Awareness. And forgiveness is very, very important towards reaching Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness.

There's another factor: Say you move into the presence of one with whom you have more than 4 chakras, 5 or 7 chakras functioning. Let's say that these chakras are not symbolically identical, but actually, literally identical. So that all 7 chakras are the same chakras, but the Male principle rotates to the right, the Female principle rotates to the left. Whenever you move into such an individual's presence, you will feel the currents of Kriya beginning to flow. You don't even have to breathe. In other words, what immediately takes place is that balance begins to take place. The Kriya currents begin to flow, and the Kriya currents are in the exact opposite direction of how they flow in nature. In other words, you are balancing out the forces of nature and you are becoming one unto yourself. You are beginning to awaken. And this is what happens when you come close to another person who is the counterpart of you.

There was a great scientist in Russia, whom I call "Krosygin". (That isn't the way he pronounces his name, undoubtedly: he's Russian. And I don't know how to speak Russian.) He found a method of measuring these psychic fields. He found that all plant life, all things that grow, all things that live, give off a noise level, because the currents are flowing through them, the psychic currents. And he created what was called an asymmetrical pendulum. And by it, he could tell how psychic a person was, whether they were a sender or whether they were a receiver. And he found out that with plants and all things, there are two ways in which the currents flow: clockwise and counterclockwise. Like in the spine to the right, which is Pingala, and in the spine on the left side, which is Ida, which rotates counterclockwise.

Now remember: when something is clockwise or counterclockwise, it depends upon your perspective. And the perspective is when you see any type of figure which is done and drawn from an occult point of view, the person looks as though he is looking in the mirror and on the paper that he is painting or that he is drawing, it is drawn in a mirror image of the person. So this is drawn here, this is drawn here, and it's always, remember, a mirror image that you're looking at. And that's the perspective that I mean when you say to the right and to the left.

The intensity times the duration of the currents which move to the right, and the intensity times the duration of the currents which move to the left: if they are equal, then they will move towards balance. In fact, the intensity of Ida times the duration of Ida must equal the intensity of Pingala times the duration of Pingala. When they are equal, they collapse into Sushumna, into balance.

That's what we're all trying to learn. That's what we're all striving towards. You see, this is a uniqueness in Existence. This isn't the norm. The very law that expresses the way in which you are aware that you are, indicates that there's a state of unbalance. You cannot be aware that you are without there being a state of unbalance.

And so you try to bring this into balance because balance has a state of awareness. It has a feeling. It is both digital and analog in its expression. The digital is expressed naturally in the masculine being more so than the analog. And the analog is expressed in the female part of the being more so than the digital. That doesn't mean that a woman doesn't have digital expression. That doesn't mean that a man doesn't have analog expression. It does mean that there is more of a direction towards the analog in a woman and more of a direction towards the digital in a man.

Now, the man is very apt to kibbitz and solve everybody else's problems in the room with his digital mind, but he will insist on solving all his problems with his analog mind. So you see, it produces a little bit of a problem. We go forth and we solve everyone's problem by kibbitzing in a digital manner, and then we solve our own by an analog manner. Pretty illogical, and it causes all kinds of troubles with the other beings, because your wife will expect you to solve your problems in the same way you're solving hers. And naturally you don't. You only solve hers.

And then men always know "You just can't understand women". Well, they're a little bit more analog than what we are. But see, this analog nature in a woman gives meaning to existence. And if there is no meaning in existence, it's a rather poor world. The digital part, which is a masculine attribute, which is, remember, curving to the right, gives understanding of all things. So if we understand and we enjoy, then life is worthwhile. The two factors are very, very necessary in order to bring about a balance of existence.

This balance, remember, has a state of awareness. We call it bliss. And it has a feeling, a peace, a deep contentment. "The peace that goes before all understanding" is sometimes what it is described as. You feel real good within yourself. You feel continuously and constantly happy. You're coming from a state, a stationary point, and it seems very difficult for anything or any event to throw you off of that.

You don't judge anybody. Why? But for the will of God, there go I. Because the inner you and the outer you are an expression of each other. That means your outer environment is a representation of your inner environment. And you don't have to draw your horoscope to see your degree of balance or unbalance: you have to merely orient yourself correctly to the geophysical positions so the Earth and watch what takes place in that outer environment. Remember: you put your back to the North, your left hand goes out to the East, your right hand goes out to the West, and your face towards the South. The South is the tenth house, your back is the 4th house, the East is the 1st house, and your right hand is the 7th house. Now, you put the various events which are happening to you in the different houses. And you can then interpret the symbols, much in an astrological manner, or much like you would interpret a dream: the Law of Symbolic Association.

If you follow the pattern and know your destiny pattern and you go through it, you're beginning to reach towards Balance, towards understanding of yourself. If you breathe Kriya, you are of course reaching towards balance, towards understanding yourself.

Remember: the ancient sages have always said the first path towards wisdom is to "Man, know thyself". And this is the most important factor. If you know yourself, you begin to move in a direction towards Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness. And this is the uniqueness that we are all seeking. They say even the great Brahma is not completely balanced, but as far as we're concerned, he is balanced, compared to us.

They have now a new method to help those who like to meditate, where you go into a pool of water which is filled enough with salt so that you sort of float. And they cut out the light and things of this sort, and you pay so much money to stay in there one hour. Now if I want to brainwash you, I would keep you in there for 4 hours. If you're in there and you have only stimuli coming from the inside of your being instead of the outside of your being and you don't breathe Kriya - or you don't do much meditation - you mentally go sort of berserk. You even forget who you are. And then after 4 hours, I can bring you out and I can then brainwash you. I can make you think you've done things you haven't done and a number of things this sort.

In other words, it's a super form of hypnosis. You'd be surprised what you can do with just general hypnosis, but if you add this along with it, I can even get you to think you have committed a crime, and get you to confess to a crime you haven't even admitted. The Russians used to love to use this particular technique when they discovered the method of doing so. Only it became so obvious to everybody in the world exactly what they were doing, that they even they had to give it up. It became laughable.

But to those who have reached a degree of meditation - or to those who are already insane [laughter] - you can put them into this water and they are normal when they come out. See, an insane man is not rational as far as existing in this Pingala world, this world from here to the quasars and back, but he has listened to the forces of unbalance within his own nature and he's adapted to them. This means he's no longer really cognizant to what is going on outside of himself, so they have to put him away. He could hurt himself and sometimes hurt somebody else, which no one really wants to do. And so he has learned how to get along with the "dwellers on his threshold".

Now the dwellers on anyone's threshold are the unbalanced forces within oneself. So if you have unbalanced forces within yourself, you're not in a very blissful state. You're not in a very enjoyable state. You can see how it feels when you're angry. You can see what it does to your blood pressure, what it does to the beating of your heart, the poisons that are cast into your bloodstream. You're killing yourself. In fact, when you are really angry at somebody, you're hurting yourself a heck of a lot more than you're hurting the other individual. These blood conditions, these chemicals which are thrown into your bloodstream, are for one thing: fight or run.

In our society, under most cases, you can't do either. By fight, you mean that you destroy the other individual utterly and completely so he isn't around. Society says no no to that unless it's the enemy of the government. Now that's perfectly okay. So as we say, murder is relative to whether it's right or wrong from a government point of view. If you do it for your own benefit, it's wrong. If you do it for the government benefit, it's right. But if you do it for God's benefit, it's naturally always wrong.

All life forces have a right to exist as much as any other life force. But if it comes to the point where you are going to starve, or that sheep is going to starve, it is wiser that the sheep sacrifices itself so that you might not starve. After all, the sheep was a created being. You basically are not. You are a self-existing one, which means you're made like unto the image of God.

The only difference between you and God, any being and God, is one thing. It's the degree of Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness. That is all. God is heavily balanced Self-Conscious Awareness. We are not. This is what we're seeking. Unbalanced Self-Conscious Awareness, our dwellers on the threshold, bring us pain, misery, suffering. When we reach Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, ah... now life begins to become worthwhile.

Let's take Yogananda. You think of Yogananda as a great saint. This, I will agree with. I lived with him. I know so. But that he was also a man ? Yes, I lived with him, I know so from this particular point of view. He had his Man conditions. For instance, he spoke to me a lot about organizations because he had a big organization, which he was always trying to get out of. He was always going to Mexico to meditate. In fact, he didn't even want to come to the United States and teach at all. He was going to go to the Himalayas and meditate. It was his guru who sent him here.

So he had this big organization, and he said to be a saint and to try to reach God consciousness and have an organization, he said, "It's difficult. You'd be surprised the problems have come up. There's always this problem, there's always that problem". And organizations always need money. This is how organizations feed: They always have a problem to solve. And he said an organization should never be run to make money. It should have to be run on a sound business basis or it's not long for this world. But to make a business out of it ? That is wrong. He said "When I look back over my past I have to admit that I've made a business out of it now and then". He said "The pathway between making a business out of it and running on a sound business basis is very, very small". And so he said "It's sometimes difficult to judge this particular point". And when he is getting involved with all the business and things of this sort, he said, "Sometimes it throws me out of balance." He said, "And then I become a man, instead of a spiritual instructor," which is what a Guru means anyhow.

So one who is a guru and one who does have an organization and who continues to teach and instruct: look what it is doing for his eventual balance. Before Yogananda's life was over with, if you listen to his tapes or to his records which he had put out, in the earlier part and towards the latter part of his life, you can hear even in the tone of his voice, even in the way in which he speaks, that he was steadily advancing spiritually, higher and higher towards Paramahamsa Yogananda.

I'll tell you the name of Paramahamsa to show you his nature: I have said it before since I've been here this week, but when he was over in India with his guru Sri Yukteshwar, for the first time in his life, Sri Yukteshwar let Yogananda meditate with him. You see, it's not too wise to go into deep meditation with other people around. Especially if they're a little bit more unbalanced than you are: their imbalance interferes, and you could say it somewhat might even annoy you. And so he let Yogananda meditate with him. What he really wanted to do was to see how balanced or unbalanced Yogananda was. And after the meditation, he gave him the name of Paramahamsa, which meant he was on the last path. Now it seems like in Yoga, like all other organizations, especially like the military organizations, the soldiers like to receive medals and so on. In the religious organizations, we give people names. And so Paramahamsa meant "He who was on the last path".

Since I think somewhat in an abstract mathematical sense, I immediately said to Yogananda, "Well how far along the last path are you then, see?" [laughter] And so he said to me, "Well," he said, "if you look from here to the farthest star, in the heavens that you can see," he said, "from here to there," he said, [indicating a small distance with his hands] "I've gone about that far." He said, "All the rest," he said, "is the way to go." He said that he didn't really think that he deserved the name Paramahamsa, but since his Guru-ji gave it to him, he would accept it. And so as he was going, he really was advancing spiritually.

But now the man in Yogananda, I had an enormous amount of fun with. Especially during the time that he was jumping out from behind trees with 3 strands of hair from a Donkey (a Jackass as he said) which he was going to combine with my hair so I'd fall in love with her. [laughter] He chased me for about a month, and he had a glorious time, you know [laughter]. So this was Yogananda the man.

And another thing I have told you before, but this is one of the things that always intrigued me and tickled my sense of humor no end: There at Encinitas, he had a temple which had two lotus buds and one lotus blossom. And they were gold leaf, so they showed up quite nicely in the sunlight. And every other Sunday, he was down there in Encinitas where he liked it. He had 3 acres there on the southern end of Encinitas. And it was like country from there on down to San Diego. And from the temple, there was, like at the Taj Mahal, sort of an artificial lake, which was a large rectangle, in which he had catfish and he had lotus blossoms there. He liked that particular effect of it. Then he had his ashram. Every Sunday, just before 12 o'clock, since he started his sermon at 12 o'clock, he came out from the ashram, and he had on a bear skin coat.

Now oftentimes, by this time, it was 95 degrees in the shade. I don't know what it was in the sun because where he walked it was in the sun, and then he had a derby hat, which he picked up from when he was in Great Britain, and a cane. He was slightly lame in one leg, and he would see sedately walk very slowly down the pathway towards the temple. When he got there, he'd give the cane to one disciple and took off his derby hat and gave it to him. Then he took off his bear skin coat and gave it to another disciple. The disciple always would go down like this, so this bear skin coat was heavy. It must have been tremendously warm inside that bear skin coat, but he never failed to wear the bear skin coat because some disciple whom he liked gave it to him as a gift. And whether it was favorable or not, he wore that bare skin coat, regardless whether it was rain, shine, snow or otherwise.

These were some of the peculiarities of Yogananda the man, who wasn't exactly always practical. I'm telling you he had an analog point to his nature also. And he was not always perfect. Remember, he was born of a very wealthy man. He was arrogant. He was emotionally unbalanced. He would get angry. Once, he tried to strangle an Englishman to death. He was Yogananda the man. And from all of this came Yogananda the saint. One time, when he had breathed an enormous amount of Kriya, not realizing the power of Kriya, he got angry at another man and he pushed his hands out. Instead of the Kriya going down through his spine, he brought it down through his hands to the other man to curse him. The man caught on fire and burned up. It was then that Yogananda decided he's got to do something about his temper. He said that was the last time he got mad. Now he could get away with that in India because after all, no one's going to go after a saint, you know, who burned somebody down. [laughter]

So, Yogananda was like all of us: just an ordinary man who was very arrogant, emotionally out of control, and thought he owned the world. When he went to Sri Yukteshwar, was he happy? What did Sri Yukteshwar do ? He saw this haughty individual coming, but he also saw all the spiritual possibilities within Yogananda. When he put him to work, the first task that he gave Yogananda was to do the pots and the pans. This was for untouchables. This was the lowest thing that you could do to an individual in an ashram. Yogananda figured, this was no place for him. He was going to leave. He was going to run away. But then, the spiritual part within him wanted God Consciousness. We wanted Self-Realization. So the balanced part in him was stronger than the unbalanced part that was in him.

This is the same truth for each and every one of you who are here. If the balanced part of you was not directing, you wouldn't be here. You'd be someplace else. Oh, there's a lot of things you could be doing now, instead of sitting down here on the floor and listening to me talk. And so it was this state of balance that's within you, that was within Yogananda, that brought you here, that indicates to me that each and every one of you can be a Yogananda. Each and every one of you can be like Babaji himself, can reach Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness in this lifetime.

Of all the techniques, Kriya Yoga is the fastest technique towards Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness. And there are two types of Kriya in existence: Direct Kriya, which is what is taught here by the various gurus, and Indirect Kriya. All other techniques which are done are Indirect Kriya. Now all techniques lead to God consciousness. All paths - even the path of atheism - leads to God consciousness in God's cosmic dream. And of all the indirect paths of Kriya Yoga, teaching is the strongest. So the two strongest path and the two fastest paths to Self-Realization to God Consciousness are by breathing Kriya directly and the next one is by teaching.

After you have advanced for a while on the path of Kriya Yoga and you say, "Behold, have I advanced far enough? Am I balanced enough that I can teach somebody? Surely I'm not". Never judge yourself how far you've gone along. You don't know. You're with yourself day after day. You don't know. Look at the other people around you. Look to the lineage. Look to the cosmic power of God himself who created this cosmos. This is what you do. If you wonder how far you have advanced: In your meditations, after you have finished meditating and then you're contemplating in the quietness of your soul, of your spirit, of your being, since Kriya brings you down to a deep inner peace, then say to the Cosmic Dreamer, say to the lineage, "If I am worthy, send me a disciple. If I am truly worthy to teach." But don't say it unless you're willing to take the disciple and start teaching. And if they send you one, teach.

Don't worry about whether you think you're balanced or not: of course you're not balanced [laughter]. But you're balanced enough that you can start teaching and when you start teaching, ahh.. it's going to help you to balance and it's going to help you to understand - because you're going to find out that your disciple is going to ask you questions you don't know the answer to. So now you're going to struggle to find the answers. Look how wise you're going to become ! And remember: if you run into a problem, you have a guru. Ask him. Let him struggle to find the answer for you [laughter]. And you might be surprised. Sometimes your own child might suddenly ask you to teach him. This is how you find out if you're worthy or not. How much more balanced you are than what you think you are.

Even Yogananda, in the days when I knew him, was not perfectly balanced. By all means, if a person was perfectly balanced, he wouldn't be functioning in this world. The greatest of all his critics was his secretary, and his secretary said very definitely there was two Yoganandas. She said "There was Yogananda the man. He wasn't worth knowing. There was Yogananda the saint. And he was worth knowing". Very definitely he was worth knowing.

So each one of you, man and woman, as a man and a woman, naturally you're not worth knowing. But as the saint, the Balance within you? Yes, you're very definitely worthwhile. And you will notice that the animals, even the flowers and the trees and things that come within your presence: when you're in a degree of balance, right after you have finished meditating, look and watch how they react to you. There's a slight difference. The greater your degree of balance, the greater is the effect upon them. They have said in the Bible, I forgot who it was, when they were thrown into the fiery furnace, that they had enough degree of balance, even a fire didn't disturb them. (I wouldn't like to practice that particular technique). But then we have some beings who have learned the technique of awareness, wherein they control their Martian chakra enough: they walk on fire and things that sort.

Of course, we have the scientists who try to explain it because they put a thermometer on the heels of the individual who is walking on the fire and they say, "See: the temperature has not risen up enough to burn the flesh". But if they put the thermometer on a mechanical thing that goes across it, the temperature rises up enough to burn the flesh. So there is something else than just a mechanical gadget walking on hot beds of fire that's involved there.

Each chakra has its own effect. Each chakra has its own degree of balance. Remember: the Earth chakra, which is at your coccygeal center, has to do with things of the Earth and it brings things in balance. A person, undoubtedly, dealing with the Earth could do a lot for growing things. Then in the next one, the chakra of course is the Jupiter chakra and that's in this sacral region and has to do with Water. And so it gives you a certain ability and knowledge and when you reach balance over Water. Then the next one is Fire. That's of course your Martian chakra in your Lumbar region. And then there's Air, which is the Venus chakra and this is the first chakra which is above and is the balancing chakra and is beginning to be spiritual. And this is why we're looking for the new planet to come into our conscious awareness. It's already in our subconscious awareness, but for our conscious awareness, this is a planet which really indicates the coming of the Aquarian Age. This is a planet wherein mankind beings to triumph over the flesh and all of us begin to become really teachers and bearers of the light. Because this is a planet of balance.

Look: if I have 3 chakras above and 3 below (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, then Mercury, the Moon and the Sun), Venus is the balance in between the two of them. And so Venus is very, very important to seek balance. Venus is also the symbol in ancient Egypt of immortality. If you're immortal, it doesn't mean you're necessarily immortal physically. Immortal consciously. This is the important point. When we are immortal consciously, we begin to see life in an entirely different manner. We begin to have an entirely different perspective. We're beginning to reach to enough balance that our Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness is beginning to very definitely affect the way we behave towards one another, the way we behave towards other living creatures in existence.

One thing I like down in Florida, is that a lot of people down there take very great interest in all the bugs and little things that are taking place. They leave one third of whatever land they have to grow wild. They have a fence around it. They mow the lawn and everything else within the non-wild state, you know. But they leave one third of their land so that the bugs also have a place to exist, because with all the spraying and everything else and the clearing out of the land, a lot of these things are dying off. And they have a right to live also. So naturally, I live a little bit more than one third of my land to go fallow, as they say. It also saves me the trouble of mowing the other parts [laughter].

All life, regardless of where it's at, are symbols in our outer environment to teach us, to show us the direction towards Balance. If we see something in our outer environment that annoys us, this is a very good indication that we're in a state of unbalance here. We'd better take a good look at it. And if you really want to know where your samskaras> are, where your unbalance awareness is, where the "dwellers on the threshold" are in you: Right now, think of somebody whom you hate. You just dislike their character, their personality somewhat, and you'll go right of your way in order to avoid them. Behold, you're looking at the mirror of yourself. These are the things within you that you don't like and you see them in somebody else. Fortunately, I don't find anybody I don't like. [laughter] It's annoying, see? So I have either steeled myself or something, so I don't have to look at them and feel an adverse nature. Besides, if I look, everyone's got something nice in them. Everyone. That doesn't mean I want to live with everyone. I get tired of living with me!

So when you go towards deeper balance, you must bring to rest the dwellers on the threshold, your un-balanced forces. These are the forces oftentimes called the Mercury Chakra, the Ether Chakra. Remember: in the Western world, we have the 4 states of matter: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. In the Hindu states, we have the 5 states of matter: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. Amongst their scientists, they call it the Plasma state of matter. Matter is in a Solid state. It's in a Liquid state. It's in a Fiery state. It's in an Airy state. And it's in a Plasma state. The Plasma state of matter was just discovered not too many years ago, and it indicates matter in which the electrons, to a very large extent, the outer shell of the atom, have been stripped off. Now, it's in a very highly agitated state, and it doesn't behave like matter in the other states. And so this implies the nature of the Mercury chakra.

Your 5 lower chakras are dual in nature. The Sun and the Moon are singular in nature, and the currents flow differently from the Sun to the Moon. And then in bringing balance, I'm going to show you the difference that takes place between the Kriya and Hong-Sau techniques. In Kriya, of course, they come up the Ida through the center of the cane, as though your cane was hollow and they come up through with a sound of "Ah" (cool, Ida, female) to the point here - and then warm over the cervical processes down your cerebral spinal system. Sometimes standing in a shower and leaving the water rippling down over your backbone as you say "Ee", it helps the currents to go down. Because it usually seems that with most of the disciples and most of the students, I have noticed that they find it easier to withdraw with the energy upward and get the energy up here, but they have a little bit of difficulty in getting the currents down to the very coccygeal center.

And remember: in order to truly reach balance, the intensity times the duration of Ida must equal the intensity times the duration of the Pingala currents within your being. The currents go up and they go down.

Now, why are there 5 duels and two singulars? It is this: To show you the difference between what takes place between Hong-Sau and Kriya: If you have 12 houses, or 12 signs of the zodiac, and you have them in a circle, and you compare one of them to all the others, how many ways can you compare it? You can compare it to itself. That's singular, that the Sun aspect. Then you can compare it to the two on either side of itself. That's 30 degrees away: this is a Mercury aspect. Then you can compare it to 60 degrees on either side (remember that's dual also). This is a Venusian aspect. Then you can compare it to 90 degrees on either side of itself: this is a Martian aspect. Then you can compare it to 120 degrees on either side of itself: that's the Jupiterian aspect. Then you can compare it to 150 degrees on either side of itself: that's a Saturn aspect. And then we have one left, the Opposition: that's a singular aspect. You see, the Sun and the Moon are singular. The other 5 are dual in nature. So they sit here on your spine, dual.

But in Hong-Sau, you have the Sun here, you have the Moon here. And in Hong-Sau, your breathe and as the air of and by itself flows up the nasal passageway, you mentally chant "Hong". As it flows out of and by itself, (you are only on an observer, you're making no effort whatsoever to control the breathing), you mentally chant "Sau". So the current is going back and forth between the Sun and the Moon. But in Kriya it's going up and down. Now, between the Kriya breath and the Hong-Sau breath, we produce what is known as harmonics. Those that were here yesterday, I showed you how the harmonics cause the Caduceus. It makes it look like the two serpents intertwined around your spine. And this is a result of the harmonics, but Kriya itself is the fundamental frequency.

Every state of awareness that you have, has many factors associated with it, like every jewel has many facets associated with it. And so we can take the Kriya, and we can divide it into many of its factors. The Hindus like to divide it into 50 factors. Though, if I run it out mathematically, it comes out to 52. And so they say that we're breathing down and breathing up. Since they put each one of their letters of their alphabet to each one of the petals of the lotuses around your body, then after they have gone around and reached the 50, then they go up and then they come down, and this makes 52. And so in some way they have combined the basic ideas. If you were here yesterday, there's the two systems of expressing the laws of Self-Conscious Awareness. And they are always trying to combine these two systems, which is necessary.

Oftentimes they consider the 52 system as that of the Devil, and the 12 system, (which is really a 33 system, when you mathematically calculate it out) to that of God. But if you balance it, then neither one is the Devil, neither one is God. In Balance, all things are in harmony, all things are in unity. But remember, you can paint nothing, you can understand nothing unless you have contrast. Now, because something is in contrast, does not necessarily mean one thing is evil and one thing is good, though it might seem so before you have reached balance. And remember, there can be an equation and have two truths, and there are a lot of equations which have two truths, and both of them are true, and both of them are real. In fact, you have, with one question, more than just two answers to it, and both are real and true.

One of the greatest truths that there is to show that the truth has two answers to it is: look how many women are here, that's one of the answers. Look how many men are here: that's one of the other answers from the basic equation of Self-Conscious Awareness. So it has two truths. So you should all go out and seek your other truth and be balanced with it.

I like the Greek idea of expressing it symbolically. And that is, they said there was a ball that had 4 legs, 4 arms, and two heads. And it was rolling down the hill of time and it hit an object and split up into two legs, two arms, one head. And the other one, two legs, two arms, and one head. Both the particles are trying to find one another. This is pretty much what is taking place even in Nature. This is what the physicists state, who are closest to God Consciousness, closest to the realization that God is really important.

In nature, you see your physicists see everything in balance. And they see the whole cosmos as in a state of beautiful balance. Even the astronomers are moving more and more to the concept of balance. And when our sciences are reaching towards this, they're going into mysticism. If you don't think physics - advanced physics - is mysticism, you should study it. I'm telling you, they're more mystic than the mystics are, in the way that they are solving their problems or trying to solve their problems. So when you get in to start talking with them, and they really know what you are talking about, they go right along with Yoga and some of the other religions. So in our outer environment, and our inner environment, there's a tremendous movement towards Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness.

Yogananda says that in the future, when beings live in their body and one incarnation lasts for maybe 50 or 60,000 years, balance will be at a very, very high state. And the bodies will be more etherial, really. We're rather materially corrupt, as we might say. And spiritual atoms will be taking the place of a lot of physical atoms. Now, I'd like to say that one of the things for a state to indicate a saint, is that he doesn't decay as rapidly when he dies. As you remember, Yogananda was buried and they found out after about a month, when someone had looked in, that he was not decaying. That because of his spiritual nature. His atoms, many of them, were spiritual atoms, rather than physical atoms and they prevented the decay from taking place. It was in many magazines and things of this sort. That indicates one of the symbols towards balance, one of the symbols which indicates that he had reached a high enough degree of balance, that he was a saint. Now remember because somebody is a saint (which is a higher degree of balance than when somebody is not a saint), it is not that much higher a degree of balance. We can have what we call low-level saints. And it doesn't take too much to become a low-grade saint, so to speak [laughter]. And once you have reached this, you can advance up, you know, and become a little bit higher-grade saint.

But there's one thing. When somebody becomes a low-grade saint, you know, and he walks by and says, "Behold, I'm a saint", know that a sinner has passed you by. Because don't be too arrogant like Yogananda was, you know, in his early stages. He quite well knew that he was a saint, until he realized what a saint could do, and that wasn't too good. When you burn somebody up in particular. So don't try your sainthood out, to find out how far you have advanced, by this particular manner.

Question

STUDENT: What do you visualize in Hong-Sau Kriya?

SHELLY: You don't think of the lower chakras at all. All you think of is that you are sitting here, an observer. Gently focus the eyes to this point. If you're straining in any way manner shape or form, you're doing something wrong. You mentally focus your awareness here and you're watching the air that comes up and down your nasal passageway. That's all you're doing. You're just watching the air You if you are trying to control your breathing, you're doing something wrong. You are an abstract observer and that's all you are. When the air goes up, of and by itself (because your body needs air to live at this particular stage) you mentally chant "Hong," which is saying, "I'm observing the air going up my nasal passageway." When it comes down and goes out of your nasal passageway, you mentally chant "Sau".

STUDENT: What do you see ?

SHELLY: You picture nothing. You just picture the air going up and down the nasal passageway. You don't picture anything else.

Any other thought that comes into your mind is extraneous. After 3 other thoughts have come into your mind, then you stop and you think about these thoughts. In other words, say a horn blows like you're here in Chicago: this is a disturbing element while you're doing Hong-Sau. So you say, "Yes, I know you're important, but doing Hong-Sau is more important". Then you continue doing Hong-Sau, see? Then maybe you hear someone falling down the stairs. [laughter] You say, "Yes, that is important, but I'm doing Hong-Sau now. I will think about that later.", see? [laughter] Then after the third thing has taken place, then you stop and you think about these things. And you bring it to your conscious mind.

See, never lie to yourself. Yogananda says, "If unto thine own self thou be true, thou can then be false unto no man." Or the equivalent. That's how Yogananda quoted it, and I accept his quotation.

And so then if you want to, you can go back and do Hong-Sau. All you are aware of, all that you want to be aware of, is the fact that you are aware of the air going up and down your nose and it changes direction. In fact, it changes direction roughly about 36 times per minute. Then it can go slowly. Don't even bother to try controlling how many times the air changes direction as it's going through. It's in and out, it's about, you take about 18 breaths per minute. And you don't worry about all this math or anything about it. All you're doing is: you're sitting here and you're watching the air go in and out.

Now the one nice thing about Hong-Sau, it doesn't matter where you're at, if you're in a bus, a street car, an airplane - except if you're driving a car, I don't advise you to do it. You can sit there and you can breathe Hong-Sau. It would be wiser if you sat like you do it meditation: facing the east and with a wool blanket over the bottom of the floor and the chairs so you're isolated, but it is not absolutely necessary. And it can be used any place for meditation.

Remember, according to Kriya Yoga, this is what meditation is: It is reducing the amount of things that you're aware of at any given time, until they become less and less and less and less in number. So that now maybe you're aware of 30, maybe 40 things in this room. You're aware of the temperature, you're aware that I'm talking, how I'm dressed, how you're dressed, and everything is around here. These are a bunch of states of awareness. And as you meditate more and more, you decrease the number of things that you are aware of. And this is the important point: the less things you are aware of, the greater is the power of spirituality. Now when you reach a certain point and a high degree of meditation, an inversion takes place. When this inversion takes place, then you are meditating upon the Self instead of upon a thing, and this generates spiritual power.

"Power" is a misnomer. It doesn't mean spiritual power, but it indicates Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, the bliss of spiritual Self-Realization. While you're aware of things, here, this consumes your spiritual power, so that right now, most of us are about 98% aware of things, 2% aware of Self, and this is why we're so weak spiritually. This is why we have so much unbalance and so much disturbance. But in Ha-Tha, or Hong-Sau, (Ha-tha is just another way of expressing the same thing, the Sun and the Moon is what it basically means in its translation), you are merely focusing your awareness of the air going in and the air going out and you think of nothing else. And it will work.

Question

STUDENT: You stated that in 10 million years of healthy living, a person can naturally reach God consciousness. Is there a difference in quality, between that natural state of God consciousness and the state for the person who is breathing their Kriya?

SHELLY: No. When you have reached God consciousness, it's the same, because all of his memory banks are at your disposal anyhow. But on the way, you experience different experiences. But the different experiences aren't necessary. In other words, if right now, if I say, "What were you doing when you were 3 years of age at this exact time?", you don't remember, right? It's in your memory banks, and if I hypnotized you, or I put you in this water and brought you back, we could find out exactly what you were doing at that time. It hasn't been lost. Well, in God Consciousness, all these experiences which you don't remember are there. And they're at your disposal. You remember them. But you remember them in a slightly different way. So it doesn't matter what path that you lead towards God consciousness, the end result is the same. And you see, awareness is dimensional. [Holding up his cane]. You feel that all the things along this line are important. Well, all the things along this line are important. [Rotating his cane] But when it's moving this way, they're all happening simultaneously and you have them all anyhow, don't you? You haven't lost anything except the time scale of going this way. And if you like the time scale of going this way and want Karma Yoga, it's okay with me. But when you get there, it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference really which path you chose, as far as the Cosmic Dream is concerned: they love you just as much.

Question

STUDENT: You were telling me about the time that you had a communication and asked about the balance of this plane. You were meditating and God told you that he had them "coming and going". You wanted to know how balanced this plane of existence was. God told you that this plane was pretty balanced - and that even the people that seemed to be going as far away from him as possible (or her, it, or whatever), were actually approaching God Consciousness. They just were going in the back door. So God had really told you that he had them "coming and going".

SHELLY: Yeah. I guess you all heard her. She said it for me. [laughter]

STUDENT: Shelly told me about a meditation that he had where he wanted to know about the balance of this plane. And God said, "Pretty much this was at the peak of balance." And he said, "Well, why does it seem so unbalanced then?" And the answer that came in was, like in a hurricane, the winds that are the fastest are the ones closest to the eye, which is still. And then he saw that even the beings that were fleeing as quickly as possible from their idea of God were approaching because space is curved and consciousness is curved. They were also approaching God consciousness. And then, with more than a little humor, the idea came into Shelly that, well, really, God had them all "coming and going". So it doesn't matter what way you go, you're going to get there anyway.

SHELLY: So long as you're in the cosmic dream of God, he's got you. All paths, remember, all paths lead to God Consciousness here. And it's a good thing. And if someone gets lost or seemingly gets lost, there's plenty of helpers. There's a lot of beings that go into the astral world and there's an enormous number of different religions and different denominations and they get caught up into these denominations.

Or there's people who think that they have committed terrible, terrible sins while they're here and they have an enormous guilt complex. (If you're looking your horoscope to see where your guilt complex is, these are 150 degree angles, what is called the Saturn aspect.) They get caught in the astral world, and if you ever get caught and you think you're so terrible, call for help. There are always beings ready to help you. But if you don't call for help, they will watch you, try to help you, but we mainly reject this. But if you call for help, they will come and aid you. There's a lot of beings that like to help someone else. Look, you come here, Kriyananda is always willing to help you. This is part of the path of being a guru. This is part of the path of being a priest.

Question

STUDENT: You've been talking a lot this week about meeting one's soulmate. And I think probably a lot of people will be going out the next week or two to look for them [laughter] and various other sundry, you know, patterns. And speaking as one who has a very afflicted 7th house, and speaking as one who has also learned from you that everything is just force fields and things like that, aren't we really just trying to unite with ourselves?

SHELLY: In a matter of speaking.

STUDENT: And isn't the idea of soulmate, one of really finding your self? Or of bringing the Sun and the Moon together?

SHELLY: Yes. But in uniting yourself you'll find that your self has expressed both in the masculine and feminine body on this Earth, the same you. So that when you meet him, you realize you are him and he is you. And then you're going to find some difficulty in separating who you really are. Since oftentimes his thoughts will be in your mind, and you'll be looking through his eyes, and he'll find difficulty because he'll be looking through your mind, and through your eyes, and he will especially be feeling what you feel when you feel things. After all, you both will be the same being. You will be expressing this same chakras identically: not symbolically, but literally.

But you're moving to the left, and he's moving to the right. And you'll find it's very difficult to separate the way in which you think. You become part of each other. When it happens, there is no doubt in your mind what's taking place. There's no doubt in your awareness what's taking place. Now you can both stand back to back. And when they shoot a gun, you can run as fast as you want in opposite directions. And you know what happens? You end up in one another's arms. So this is when you're meeting your own particular one. Now the probability of this is very remote.

STUDENT: So don't you feel it's better to think of this idea of soulmate in a symbolic sense?

SHELLY: Yes, as a whole for the average individual. But every once in a while, somebody's very, very fortunate and they find such an individual.

STUDENT: But like you say, that's one in a million.

SHELLY: Yes

STUDENT: Isn't soulmate, isn't it like a symbol of the 7th house, the Not-Self? Is that another symbol of it, when you're looking at your horoscope ?

SHELLY: Yes, the Not-Self, that's right. Your salvation is through the Not-Self. The balance of you is in the 7th house, because through the 7th house is the sacrificing of the self. When you're madly in love with a man, look how you're willing to sacrifice everything for him. You see? You reach balance through the Not-Self, by sacrificing yourself for the other. This is why God symbolizes that he's going to give you everything that he is, everything that he has, providing you marry him. This is where the Christian nuns are really marrying onto Jesus. And this is what they're symbolizing. The Catholic Church is loaded with very favorable symbols of the reality of things. That the people understand it, that's another point.