To me, that is what the ancients meant by the purpose of existence and the law of existence. And I know that if we ask questions, we can go into more detail about what I have been speaking about, or something which is important in your understanding and your theology and philosophy of existence. We can spend the rest of the time here, unless someone, well... Just like she asked a certain question and brought out this particular answer. Raise your hands and ask some questions.
STUDENT: Param Gurudev, could you tell us some techniques to help us remain balanced 24 hours a day?
SHELLY: 24 hours a day is a hard thing to do, down here in this body, because when you're in a state of pure, Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, you're not functioning physically. In other words, you're not even breathing when you're in what they call Samadhi, or true Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness.
There are 4 states of awareness that you can be in: There's this state of awareness, which is called the world of Assiah by the Egyptians and the Hebrews, and called Pingala by the Hindus - and this is everything that you are aware of, from here to the quasars and back, and even beyond this. Then there's another world: the world of what is called Ida, or Yetzirah. (It depends upon which ones that you're speaking to.) And it is the world of the astral worlds, the spiritual worlds. I usually refer to it as the astral world, although the Spiritualists don't like this particular manner of expressing it, since they divide the astral world into many fields and areas of existence. But the Ida world is considered that which rotates to the left, as the Pingala world is that which rotates to the right. The Ida world is the world of sleep, the world of the dead. And then there's the world of balance between the two of these: they call this the world of Sushumna, the world of Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, the world of Briah. These are the worlds that you have in existence.
Let's explain what these two worlds are: there's a 4th world, and that's the world of God Consciousness, the balanced world, called Christ Consciousness - but the Pingala world, you all know what this is: this is what you're aware of here right now. The Ida world is when you are asleep, all the things that you're aware of. And many people, many here, because you are here, because your minds are awake, you go to what I call the fifth plane in the astral world. Here you have a lot of schools, you have all kind of places and beings who are well-educated and can teach you the things that you wish to know. Many scientists get their ideas from there, when the time is right on the face of the Earth for these things to come through.
As you remember, when the telephone was created, there were so many people who created the telephone, in so many different parts of the world, that it is really uncertain as to who did create the telephone. In the United States they said, "Bell created it," but there was somebody else that created it about the same time in the United States, and they had an enormous lengthy court case to find out who really was the beginner of the creation of the telephone. It was discovered in almost every part of the world simultaneously. So there's a time when things come through from the fifth plane in the astral world. And this is where the intellectually alive people move and enjoy themselves. You may not remember everything that goes on there, but this is where your intuition about things that are new really take place, and it helps in your understanding.
And then you have the balance between these two worlds, which produces a Sushumna state of awareness. In the Sushumna state of awareness, in the world of Briah, in the world of balance, you don't have form like you have here. In Ida and Pingala, in the astral worlds, the world of the dead and the world of the living, you have form. You have existence. And they say this is a world of Maya, the world of illusion. When you go over there, they don't know anything, and it is very difficult to express truth there. You can more easily find the truth here than you can over there. The truth exists in Briah.
Now in the Sushumna, in Briah, you have this: What is Love? Tell me how big it is, how high it is, how wide it is. You see, you're beginning to have a problem. How much does it weigh? Love exists, it exists in the Briah world in its pure form, not the love that most people are aware of down here on the face of the Earth. That's 1/12th of one's existence, and that is like, they tell me that 60% of all marriages fail. So this is a rather poor expression of love.
You might as well close your eyes, if you're a woman, and stand a group of men up, come to the first one, "Heads I marry him, tails I don't. Heads I marry him, ..." You've got just as much a chance of success as looking at him and marrying him [laughter]. So this is your physical world. I'm talking about real love.
Once upon a time, there was a young man - many, many years ago, back in the 1920s actually - and he didn't have too much money. He got married. And the minister, to help the people out in this congregation, offered ten dollars. (Now with ten dollars you could buy quite a bit back them. You could hardly carry the groceries home that ten dollars would buy you.) He offered ten dollars to the one who gave the best expression of what Love was. He won the prize and I memorized it. He said, "Love is something divine willed by the hand of God." Now this told you a lot. When you got finished, you knew no more about what love was than when you started! And this is what most religion does for you.
It reminds me of something that actually took place when Spain was ruler of the high seas and was coming over here, conquering this New World. They got caught in a heavy storm and the captain had important cargo on board. He wanted to know where he was at. The only other educated man on board the ship was a priest. So he called the priest into his cabin, told him what the problem was, that they were going into shores where there was a lot of, you know, like in the Caribbean where they had a lot of shoal water and they could tear the bottom out of his boat. The priest looked at him, and he thought for a moment, and he solved the problem for the captain. He said "The water in this area is as deep as God made it". It was the absolute truth, but it didn't do the captain any good.
This is what all of you have found out in your realization of existence: You have a lot of theological truth which you know is true, but it's not very practical. You have a problem, and you want to know what is the probable outcome of this problem. What should you do? How should you do it? What should you go about? This is where the Law of Symbolic Association comes in: the law of Astrology, or interpreting your dreams. This is where, with Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, where you don't have form as here, but where you have a state of awareness, where this state of awareness can help express and help solve the problems that exist in both other worlds. Now you have a 4th world.
Remember: you have the 3 worlds (the waking world, the sleeping world, the world of Christ Consciousness), and then you have the world of God Consciousness. Now how to explain to you God Consciousness, since I haven't met anybody who had God Consciousness? Yogananda was not in God Consciousness. But this is as close as you can express God Consciousness: Right now, each one of you are sitting in a seat, aware of everybody else, aware of me and aware of this building and everything else. In God Consciousness, you are this building, you're everyone else, aware of you. And so, all things exist simultaneously in God Consciousness. And maybe if you met such a being, you wouldn't know he was here anyhow.
And so, has this helped you in any way ? Make your statement again and I'll go on.
STUDENT: Could you tell us a little bit about "The watcher on the hill" and what type of balance that would afford us?
SHELLY: The watcher on the hill?
STUDENT: Was that the one you described, that Yogananda was constantly in the state of?
SHELLY: Yes. He was constantly in a state where he was sort of the watcher on the hill, the watcher at the Medulla Oblongata, which is the center of God Consciousness, and he realized that he was an actor. So long as you remember all the time, that you are an actor or an actress, and that you're on the stage of life, move towards Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, but enjoy being you.
Remember, your personality is not perfect. Everyone has the same basic symbolisms, but they're arranged differently. No one is greater than anyone else. No one is less than anyone else. I've seen a moron who had tremendous ability of juggling things and who the animals all seemed to listen to. He had an enormous amount of affinity with the animals. And if an animal was sick or anything, they seemed somehow or other, (they had a thorn in their toe, you might say) to "look him up." They somehow seemed to know that he would take care of them. He even hypnotized people, then came running to me, because he didn't know how to bring them out. (laughter) But be you, dare to be you. But remember, don't carry grudges, don't carry hatred.
Let me tell you what happens if you're angry: They take a man and he's happy. They play music (remember: an actor, has to really be an actor, and he has to feel what he's feeling. Otherwise you know he's a fraud, and he's not acting very good), and they take 10 cc's of his blood and they run it through a centrifuge, to get rid of the red blood cells. Now we've got the white plasma. And now they make him mad. About half an hour later, he's mad as they can possibly make him. He's actually feeling this madness. They take 10 cc's of his blood, get rid of the red blood cells. Now they take two guinea pigs, they're brothers from the same line. When he was happy, they put the 10 cc's into the guinea pig, nothing happens. From when he was mad, they take the 10 cc's, put the plasma into the guinea pig. No more guinea pig: it's dead. The reason you live, is because you have greater mass than that, and you can survive while the cells are being killed in your body. When you don't like somebody, you're producing stress and disturbance in your body.
Remember, if somebody's done something real bad to you, and you hate them, forgive them. When you forgive yourself of him, and he's not necessarily being forgiven of you, you're free. And if you're free, you're no longer destroying yourself. So it's wise to forgive. Even Jesus on the cross forgave everybody. He forgave himself of all of them. So he was free of them. But the world was not free of the sins which they had done in crucifying an avatar: that was an entirely different thing. But dare to be you. Enjoy being you. But have your teeth, your fangs pulled.
Another story that Yogananda gave: there were children, and they were playing at the waterfront. A cobra was hissing and trying to strike them and the children were running and screaming. A saint came and looked at the cobra and says "That's no way to be." He says "You know, you're not advancing spiritually by doing all this particular factors, scaring the children". He says "Lead a nicer life. Don't go scaring the children". Well, about six months later, he comes back and here is the snake. He sees the same snake. The snake's almost dead, beaten up, bloody, and things of this sort. He says, "Well, what is happening?" He says, "Oh", he says, "savant", he says, "guruji, deva, since you have come the last time, I have been having a very bad time. The children come. They throw rocks at me. I can hardly survive". He says, "You can see I'm dying". And the saint, the deva says, "Look: I didn't tell you not to hiss!" [laughter]
So remember, there are times when you can hiss, and you need to hiss, but your fangs can be pulled, you know. So, towards Self-Realization, towards your existence, be of even temperament. Forgive. Don't hold grudges. Try to feel love for everything, for everybody, for every thing. Remember, even the little insects have a right to live. But then they don't have a right to bite you either [laughter]. It's like when Mahatma Gandhi said that he believed in non-violence, but he gave each one that came to his ashram there, a fly swatter. He said he was unable to teach the mosquitoes this [laughter].
So you be the watcher on the hill and remember: Your unbalanced forces in the occult are called the "dwellers on the threshold". These are the beings within you that are unbalanced. All force fields are personified, all states of awareness are personified, and you see them as a being. They will attack you: it's you attacking yourself, your unbalanced forces are attacking yourself. By feeling unselfish love, you bring this into balance.
And remember, any state of awareness likes to make everybody else feel the state of awareness. When you're good and disgusted and angry and mad, you wanna make everybody else angry and mad. If the wife is angry and mad, she sure soon makes the husband angry and mad, then look what happens! But if two lovers fall in love, and they feel this wonderful love pouring from them, they want the whole world to be filled with love.
You are the one who has the state of awareness. Control your state of awareness. If you don't like to be mad, stop being mad! Who has a better right to do it than yourself? And who wants to go around being mad all the time, killing yourself off? They have come to the conclusion that most of all of our physical trouble is due to frustration and stress. They cause all kinds of problems with ourselves. And if you don't like somebody, you're in a state of stress. Like everybody. Forgive everybody of everything. You'll get along real well with yourself, and then other people will begin to like you.
There was once a woman, in the small town where I came from. She was a Scorpion, and as they say in the ancient textbooks, there are no good Scorpions. I know, I'm a Scorpion myself. And she had married a man, but all of his relatives: she couldn't get along with them. They hated her. So she wanted a magical formula, so that she could control and make them like her, see? So I told her a magical formula. The magical formula was the first technique that Yogananda teaches you to reach God Consciousness, to move towards Balanced Self-Consciousness. It's a very simple technique. She thought it was an act of Magic. After 30 days of doing this, she thanked me for giving her this magical formula, whereby she could control the states of awareness of these relatives, because they started talking to her and they began to come to her house.
I made a terrible mistake by telling her it really was not a magical formula, that they hadn't changed, that it hadn't controlled them at all. What she had done, was that she had altered herself. People began to see that she was more pleasant to be around, and this is what she didn't want. She stopped doing it immediately and became her nasty old self, so to speak. So if control your own state of awareness, if you're nice within yourself, you feel good within yourself, you radiate this to other beings. And other beings then will radiate back the same thing.
The Law of Awareness is to become aware of. They become aware of whatever is stimulated: by you, or by anything else. And if you radiate peace and contentment and happiness within yourself, everyone that comes within your presence loves this radiation, becomes peaceful, becomes happy. And they might like you so much, they want to move in with you, and then you have to go out and tell them no. [laughter]
Any other thing before I go on to the next question?
STUDENT: Shellyji, were we ever, as a species, balanced?
SHELLY: No. This is uniqueness.
STUDENT: We started unbalanced?
SHELLY: Yes, the very act of Self-Conscious Awareness, in its very laws, is a state of unbalance.
STUDENT: From the beginning.
SHELLY: From the beginning. The beginning is transfinite. It's beginningless and endless. If it had a beginning, anything that has a beginning of necessity must have an end. The spirit itself in its very original part is unbalanced. The Christians used to say you were perfect, that you became unperfect, that you might become perfect again. Why go through such a foolish state? [laughter]
STUDENT: You were talking about the different states: waking, sleeping, Christ Consciousness, God Consciousness. The avatars that have been - Jesus and Buddha, Yogananda and all the great teachers - are they in Christ Consciousness, waiting for us to come, to fulfill, so we can all be in God Consciousness at once ? How do the levels work?
SHELLY: Well, all beings in God's cosmic dream came into his dream, into his cosmos, by his divine grace. By this, I mean, God created a cosmic dream. This is how the Brahmins have said it, that God dreams. When he breathes out, the Cosmos comes into existence, and when he breathes in, it's dissolved. Each time he breathes out, the Cosmos comes into existence again and is more balanced than the time before. So each time that he creates a cosmos, it's in better balance. Eventually he will breathe a cosmos into being and it will remain. And this world, the scientists will call a "steady-state" universe. At this time, it is not steady-state: it comes into existence and is withdrawn out and comes back into existence again. So it is not in a balanced state.
God, the cosmic dreamer who created this cosmic dream, is not in perfect balance, but as far as we're concerned, he is in perfect balance. In other words, the difference between us and him is a tremendous amount. So he allowed us into his cosmic dream, that we might learn his technique of Unselfish Love, his technique of Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness, of bliss. And through this technique we find and reach balance within ourselves. Now this technique is extremely good - because when you move towards God you feel this love, this all-loving force flowing towards you. And from a military point of view, you can call it a thought bomb. It is very difficult to conquer, because the closer you get, you want to be what the thing is. This is all Unselfish Love. You want to give all of yourself to him, because he wants to give all of himself to you, see ? I haven't found a way of overcoming this particular force field.
STUDENT: Does it seem then, that when conflict starts to arise, when the closer you come, you fight off what you need to let go of?
SHELLY: It might seem that conflict arises. You merely become aware of these states, but all the time that you're becoming aware of these disturbed states of unbalanced existence within yourself, you are moving more and more towards balance.
Let me state, as an example, that the difference between an average individual and a saint isn't too great. But if you see somebody that goes by and he says, "Behold, I am a saint", know that a sinner has passed you [laughter]. Because a saint does not know that he is really more balanced. He's aware of how unbalanced he is yet. And this is important. In other words, you will never be able to judge yourself. Never judge yourself on your way towards Self-Realization, towards balance. You should judge yourself by how others look upon you. Remember, you're within yourself. A saint does not know he's a saint, but other people around him may think he's a saint. It's his behavior pattern. It's how many people he hates, and how disturbed he is by his outer environment. So if someone does something to you, this is what I say: forgive him. For but by the grace of God, there go you. And you don't want to be that. Always look within yourself and seek peace. Be calm.
If you are disturbed, breathe deep and slow. Remember: there's a relationship between your heartbeat and your breathing, about 4 to one. The average person breathes about 18 breaths per minute. The heart is 4 times that, which is about 72. (This is roughly speaking, unless you're an athlete or something. This is just the average man.) And so if you come into a state of stress, breathe slow and deep. This brings your heartbeat down, and when your heartbeat comes down, it helps calm you off. And when you breathe slow and deep, like in deep meditation, it increases the oxygen in your bloodstream. The increased oxygen in your bloodstream, burns up all the other types of chemicals that your glands are secreting, and helps you in existence.
Normally, when you run into a problem of difficulty, you have a secretion and the secretion says, "Run or fight." Today we can't fight too well. Because of our culture. Because of our civilization. We can't even run too well, so we're going into a state of stress. So we have to control this state of stress by learning some technique of meditation. As you advance forward, the amount or degree of your unbalance begins to diminish. But you will never know how far you have diminished. Other people around you will notice it.
STUDENT: Before this question, I had a 3-part question, and now another one has come up, and I wonder if I could ask all of them.
SHELLY: OK.
STUDENT: Does our evolvement affect God's evolvement, or is God not in the process of evolving?
SHELLY: God is in the process of evolving, and as you evolve, of course you affect God. Everything has an equal and opposite reaction. Remember, I said that if you go into the wilderness and you reach God Consciousness, you lift everybody else up a little bit. If you teach a technique to somebody else, how to reach balance, the very act that you have taught them, helps you to reach balance. So it's important to help others. Remember: this is Unselfish Love. This is the best war weapon that I know. And if we could bring it around the world, we wouldn't have World War III. People who say, "What can I do about a situation like this?" Meditate, pray, get together, and do it really in an unselfish way, (not in a selfish way, remember, not because you're afraid to die or anything of this sort, but with unselfish love). Love the enemy, pour love to them.
Of course, you can get together and then wish bad luck upon the enemy, and you strengthen the enemy and eventually it brings bad luck to you. See, whatever your state of awareness is, this is what you're bringing to you. This is what you're creating in your outer environment. So control your state of awareness. Meditation is controlled awareness, so you're aware of what you want to be aware of.
Like Yogananda said: A real saint, if he's stood up against the wall, and the firing squad comes there, he's not disturbed. He can even leave his body before the bullets hit him. But this is a state of existence he would not like to have take place, where he could feel the practice of it. It's quite unnerving when a state of this takes place. So the theory of it, and the practice of it, are two different things. But for normal life conditions, you can easily accomplish it through meditation. As he said: "Meditate, meditate, meditate". And you've got an excellent guru, who can teach you how to meditate right here in Chicago, all the time.
STUDENT: Don't go.
SHELLY: OK. [laughter]
STUDENT: I have a 3-part question: Have you read the Course in Miracles? It's 3 volumes.
SHELLY: I don't think so.
STUDENT: Oh, OK. Well then, I can't ask the other two.
SHELLY: OK.
STUDENT: Can you speak more about origins? Origins of separation, origins of karma, origins of disharmony?
SHELLY: From the beginning?
STUDENT: From the beginning.
SHELLY: Well, since Self-Conscious Awareness is a spirit, first, to express what a spirit is: A spirit is a self-existing one. And this is its law: It has no beginning, it has no end, it is transfinite. The best way to express this is to take a triangle: a triangle has a number of factors. To show how many factors it has: It has 3 points. That's 3. It has 3 sides. You already have six factors. It has 3 interior angles. It has 3 exterior angles. The sum of the interior angles is 180 degrees. The sum of the exterior angles is 900 degrees. I can keep on going. I think there's something like 32 factors associated with a triangle that mathematicians are aware of.
But the most important factor of a triangle: it divides spaces into two parts, that which is inside the triangle from that which is outside the triangle. The space within the triangle is finite. The space outside the triangle is transfinite. Where the spirit is, is transfinite, but it is locked in finite existence, that it might seek balance. By this cosmic dreamer who has created this particular cosmos, and we exist within his soul, within his memory banks. And the spirit, by its very nature, is without beginning, without end, and lives in transfinite existence. To express this is rather difficult.
I'll go through the basis of transfinite existence. For instance, how many numbers are there? You can count from now to Infinity. Now, when you reach the largest number that you can think of, you can always add one more to it. This is the first infinity. But they found that one infinity is not the greatest of infinity. They found out that the number of points, on any line, any line of any length, is greater than our numbers to count it. This is Infinity Two. And they have used the Hebrew letter, Aleph to indicate Infinity One. That's Aleph 1. The second infinity, they call Aleph 2, and then they found that the number of curves in space is greater than there are points in a line, or they're greater than there are numbers to count it. This is Aleph 3. Now, as far as Science goes, they can go up to Aleph 4 and they don't know anything beyond this. This is Transfinite Math, and there must be Aleph to the Aleph power, but we aren't wise enough to understand all these particular characteristics.
But we know that in transfinite existence, the spirit has no beginning, has no end. And so it is a god in its own right, or a goddess if you will. And it's in a state of unbalanced existence. And there are beings that have come into existence who have created cosmoses, and the cosmoses have ceased to exist. And this is one being that came into existence, which is more, instead of a father, a coexistent one. And this is what the New Age is going to begin to teach you. Remember, we're entering out of the Piscean Age into the Aquarian Age. In the Aquarian Age, God the Father is no longer permissible. God the Coexistent One, God the Brother, comes into existence because we're entering into a new brotherhood wherein we realize a new state of conditions, and a greater degree of balance is going to take place.
From this Earth, most of the high states of unbalance will no longer be here, and instead of all the grades which exist here... In other words, down some street in India there can walk a mahatma, and can walk an aborigine: two tremendous differences in spiritual awareness. One, who has knowledge of Sanskrit (and Sanskrit is equivalent to the German, the French and the English all put together in its understanding of words). And, you have the aborigine who has a vocabulary of 300 words, hardly above that of a gorilla. And they rub shoulders together. Now, I like this kind of a world, because you have a tremendous contrast. But in the new world, you'll have, in the Aquarian Age, you'll have only about 3 levels, 3 stages in the school. We all know that practically all your wild animals (there's nothing can be done about it): they will no longer exist. Your biting insects as a whole will not exist.
Many people might like this in the Aquarian Age and the Brotherhood of Man. And death will have lost its sting. They will have found out when they find this new planet, that mankind will advance scientifically enough and spiritually enough that he will no longer be afraid of death, and he'll be able to even communicate with those who have gone through transition. So it will be an entirely different universe. The world of Psychotronics, (that's how I call other psychic phenomena), will be manifesting, in existence. Look what about 200 years is done with Electronics. Think of what it's going to do with the new field of Psychotronics. There will be an entirely new field, a new world of existence, where really there is an expression of a much greater degree of balance, but not a very great existence for anyone who has a very high degree of humor. So I won't be around in that world. [laughter]
Does this help express what you wanted to know, or is there something you still...
STUDENT: There's one aspect also, and that is the origin of suffering, per se: the idea of suffering.
SHELLY: Suffering ? Any degree of unbalanced awareness is suffering. Suffering is natural. Balance and unsuffering is the unusual. If you meditate, you don't suffer. (I don't mean that the body that you inhabit might not suffer. Yes, it had a beginning, it must have a necessity to have an end - and when it dies, you would call this suffering.) You'll find out that when you meditate, and you're in a Sushumna state of awareness, you don't feel pain. It might be there, but you're not feeling it. They've even found that if you have a toothache and you suddenly take a deep breath and you hold your breath, you don't feel pain.
See, at the top of your breath, at the bottom of your breath: these two points are the closest that you can get to where you're wide awake to Sushumna. And there is no pain at those exact moments. It doesn't last long, but for those moments that pain ceases to exist. But if you can enter into Sushumna Awareness, there is no pain.
STUDENT: Why are we ever without it? What is the origin and the beginning of the imbalance?
SHELLY: The origin or the beginning of unbalance is: There is no beginning of unbalance that always was. Balance is uniqueness. As soon as you reach balance in certain states of awareness, I can come along and give you another state of awareness that you haven't balanced yet, and start the problem all over again. This is Ad Infinitum. If you can maintain your state of balance, and I can't press any buttons to upset you, you're a saint. But I have many techniques to upset people's states of balance. [laughter]
STUDENT: God too, then, is imbalanced.
SHELLY: Yes, God too. But He has reached a much higher state of balance than we. That's why we're in his cosmic dream.
Now, there are some beings who say that God sold us a snow job. Of course, we know which side they're on. And they don't agree. Remember, you're an immortal one. You have no beginning, you have no end. If this is true, where are your memory banks? While you're in this body, you have been programmed not to remember them. Now, I can hypnotize you, and I can also take away some memory banks that I want to take away from you, and you won't know that I've done this. These are some of the things that you can do with a mind, to show you how it can remember.
I used to hypnotize people, especially women. I like to hypnotize them, for this one particular experiment: You see, women have a kind of shoes which they put on, and if you change their shoes from the right to the left, and from the left to the right, it's uncomfortable to walk. So I would hypnotize them, and I would say that when I pulled my earlobe 3 times here, you'll take your left shoe, put it on your right foot, and take off your right shoe, and put it on your left foot. And then I would see how long it would be, between the time that I would be able to do this and they still would do this. So a year, maybe a couple of years would go by. When the same group of people were together, I'd do like this, and 3 times, of course, they would put their shoe, you know, change it. And so I would say to them, "Why did you do that?" And they'd always give me a very logical reason to them, which was illogical to everybody else. They would say, "Well, they did it because it rested their feet." (Now, you watch a woman who changes her shoe and tries to walk. It's not going to rest anybody's feet at all. A man might get by with his boots, if they're a little bit large, but not a woman.) And they wouldn't believe that I had given a post-hypnotic suggestion at all. So then to do this more, I would take and write it on a sheet of paper, and have others write it too, and then put it in an envelope, and put it in my pocket and then go through the same procedure. Then I would hand it to them after I had hypnotized them, and the years had gone by and they did that. They still didn't want to believe it. They thought that I was a magician and, you know, I had found some way of slate writing like in the seance. You can even send them into the astral world, and you can even send them back in time, and talk to Socrates. I have done that, and they actually believe they had talked to Socrates.
In Czechoslovakia, they hypnotize people and they send them back to some other great artists and they talk to them (or sculptors) and they learn his technique, bring it back, and it improves their technique and in their art. Some of them really believe they have gone there and actually talked to the individual. If I can do this, these beings are much, much better than I am, and you'd be surprised what they can do with you. But if you go into Balanced Self-Conscious Awareness by any technique, you begin to waken up, and then you get more control of your own dream, rather than being controlled. Almost everybody is controlled. Who wants to be a slave forever and forever and forever ? But then, forever is relative anyhow. It varies all over the place. What might be an infinity here, someplace else, is a fraction of a second. It says in the Bible, the Christian Bible of God, what a thousand years is in the awareness of God: a thousand years in the awareness of Man is about a day in the awareness of God. Mathematically this says the difference in the time-scale of God to man is 365,250 to 1. This means that it takes you 4 and almost a quarter days to equal one second in the awareness of God. Now remember, if you can get God's awareness, he will grant your wish, to speak. But you have to really get out there and do something to get his attention.
As Yogananda says, "Go out in the wilderness and yell if necessary". Don't do it here because they will think something's wrong with you, and put you away. But you have to have a gimmick. For instance, you want to be a burlesque queen? You can go to any beach and see more than you usually see in a burlesque show. So you have to have a gimmick: like have a tiger slowly take your clothes off, or something like that. Does that answer your question? Anyone else?
STUDENT: You've discussed the importance of forgiveness in attaining a balance. Could you talk a little about practically what you mean by that, and how?
SHELLY: Say somebody has... You're married?
STUDENT: No.
SHELLY: Lucky. [laughter]
Say a friend of yours, is really angry. He's called you some pretty bad names, or hit you on the jaw, knocked you down or something like that. Your natural instinct is to get up and hit him back, right? Don't. Forgive him. And immediately when you do that, you have forgiven yourself of him. Now, you no longer feel anger, but he hasn't forgiven himself of you. He still must suffer the karma of his action.
I should say that the very basic law of Self-Conscious Awareness is this: Whatsoever you do unto another, you do more so unto yourself, but at a different time and a different place. If you forgive someone, someone will forgive you over an act that you really shouldn't have done. But whatever you do, remember, to another, remember: The energy, the transmitter, is in you, and it's always stronger in you than it is someplace else. So whatever you do unto another, you do more so unto yourself.
For instance, like I say (and I like to bring up this, especially where a woman is concerned): We're back now several hundred years ago, and there's two women. The husband has been ornery in both case, undoubtedly coming home drunk, tearing up what furniture they have. So both of them are real mad at their husband, see. One has a frying pan in her hand and the other has a skillet in her hand. The woman with the frying pan hits her husband over the head and she, of course, has got a karma: Mercury in adverse aspect to Mars, symbolically expressed. The other woman had a skillet in her hand. She hit her husband over the head, she broke his skull and killed him. It's the same symbol, Mercury in adverse aspect to Mars.
Now they both are reincarnated again into the future. (Of course, remember, the karma is not person to person, it's symbolic. Instead of person to person, you don't have to meet the same husband or anything like that. You just have to meet another man or another woman, depending on whether you have gone into another type of sex condition.) Let's say both have become a woman again. And now the time of the karma is due and payable. The woman who hit the husband with the spatula, so to speak: he's liable just to knock her down. Nothing much has happened to her, except maybe her feelings hurt quite a bit, or a sore jaw. The other woman is going to get killed. She has killed, now she is going to get killed. She has opened herself up to this karma. But if each one had forgiven the husband and decided "You can't live with him, so go home to Mama", it would have been much better. Find another man to torment. [laughter] That of course is my humor, you know. [laughter]
STUDENT: You mentioned about hypnotizing people and they go back and they think they talk to a famous artist, and then they come back and their technique is improved: What actually happened? Who did they talk to, or how was their technique improved?
SHELLY: Well, let's take for instance one of these cases. You can hypnotize a person, and some people have a natural innate musical talent. So you can sit them down at the piano and behold, they will play music. Never having played a piano or a musical instrument before. If the person does not have musical talent, you can sit them down before the piano and they are unable to play the music. When you train a person, they have been trained in a field of Art. They have studied the field of Art from the past to the present. In other words, they're learning how to be a painter, an artist. So now when you hypnotize them, they are calling upon all of the memory banks within them, concerning what everything that they had learned of the past artists, what they have seen in his pictures, how his brush strokes are. (Remember, every artist has like a handwriting which is different than any other artist, and you can tell who he is by the way he uses his paints and his strokes.) All this information comes through to them in a much-clarified way. In other words, all you're doing is, you're gathering together in this individual all the memory banks that they have studied about this other artist, and they have talent. As a result of this, in their talking to the artist, it has given them a greater enthusiasm for the Art, because they have been in the presence, as they think, of a master. They have been in the presence of their concept of a master, which helps them.
It doesn't matter which Art or which field. Remember even most scientists get their best ideas from dreams or from intuition.
STUDENT: Isn't it possible to time-travel though, to go back into different times?
SHELLY: Oh, absolutely it is. It's just more difficult. Remember, the inner mind will fabricate, whenever possible, if the time and space continuum is not quite right to do so. But you can actually go back. Yes. But it's still more difficult.
STUDENT: Can you, by going back and forgiving what happened in the past, do you not then change the future, your own future?
SHELLY: Yes. In other words, this is the Law of Karma. The intensity times the duration of karma (of the cause, we might say) must equal the intensity times the duration of the effect. When you go back, if you start doing it, it's like even praying or meditating: meditating begins to diminish the karma. It's maybe not completely alleviated, but it does help to reduce it. So it is possible, even by contrite prayer, not to get out of the karma, but to satisfy the law of intensity times duration. So if you know any certain event is going to come up in the future, and you meditate towards it with sincere effort, you can satisfy it because you have done it by prayer, mentally. You can express it mentally, spiritually or physically, see. It's suffered out pretty much where you want. You can actually go back and make adjustments if you really want to. But it must be sincere. This is why I say that to find out your karmic patterns and to know yourself, in a symbolic way, is a help to solve your nature. You can do this through dreams, you can also do it through Astrology, or sometimes you find people who are quite psychic and they can use any modality: a crystal ball, throwing the coins up in the air, throwing sticks up, using astrology, it doesn't matter. They are able to help you accomplish your own spiritual salvation.
STUDENT: Nature basically is balanced, isn't it?
Nature is truly balanced, but it is not in the way you think. If you go into Sushumna and you look at Nature, nothing is moving. If an airplane is traveling at 600 miles an hour and you go into Sushumna, the airplane is standing dead still. You are like a needle in a record which is moving. This is what it looks like when you're in Sushumna: time has ceased to exist. It's like this: See this cane? This is the beginning. This is the end of your life. These are the events of your life. You are going this way when you are in Ida and Pingala. When you are in Sushumna, you are moving this way [looks at cane length-wise]. All these events are happening at once. So your state of awareness is different. And as a result of this, you can begin to alter things. This is why the sage, when he had the cancer, was able to alter it. And in the same way, you can alter events. But you must do it in a symbolic manner in the world in which you are aware of.
Like you say, you can time travel: this one way of accomplishing it. Or you can do it in a number of different ways. By knowing, for instance, in Astrology, when you know you're running into an adverse aspect, start neutralizing it. It was said of Babaji, who is the father of Kriya Yoga (the techniques which Kriyananda here teaches) that in the Himalaya Mountains, one of his disciples was passing by a fire, and Babaji pushed him into the fire. The other disciples were aghast at him doing such a thing as that. He said it was his karma to burn to death, but he only got a slight burn. In other words, being there, meditating, he had alleviated enough of it, but there was still some karma left. And so he got a slight burn, which was neutralized then. So you might be satisfying a lot of your karma, but who knows what the intensity is?
By Astrology you can never tell what the intensity is, and sometimes a psychic cannot tell what the intensity of it is. You might have suffered out a great amount of it, and then it won't be as bad. The woman who hit the man with the frying pan - if she had suffered a great amount of it - she wouldn't be killed.
STUDENT: Is there a specific way to neutralize a bad aspect ?
SHELLY: Yes. Understand it, and then understand what the symbols mean, and then start going forth by prayer and by meditation to neutralize it.
STUDENT: This is probably a grotesquely insipid question, but do people who attain Christ Consciousness end up getting crucified?
SHELLY: How is that? Can they avoid getting crucified? Is that what you said? Well, if you hide your sainthood under a bushel basket. Remember: If you are in Christ Consciousness, and you go about, everybody sees you. You're judging yourself from his light, you might say. He's in the balanced state of awareness. You come in contact with him, you realize what an evil demon you are. You can't afford to have such a being around, to realize how bad you are all the time. The best thing to do? Get rid of him! This is why they have gotten rid of all the avatars. So if you're an avatar, hide your head in the basket. [laughter]
STUDENT: Was Adam the first disciple, and God the first guru? Was he was the first button pusher? And were there different truths transmitted then, than there are now? Any different lessons?
SHELLY: You can symbolically say it is true. It might not be literally true, but who knows what is literally true? But symbolically, it's alright. And remember: Even symbolically, Adam's first wife was not Eve - it was Lilith. You can look it up in any dictionary. But this is symbolically true, too, remember.