Well, what it means is that you are experiencing right now -- I mean right now -- your past. Everything that you have done has led up to what you are now. That's the theory of reincarnation. Everything you do now will lead up to what you will be. That's the theory of reincarnation. The wave that's moving along the top of the ocean has a certain formation. The reason it has that formation is because of what it has been through up until this moment. What it will go through will cause it to change form.

So you are a wave of awareness and you are in this world and you are aware of a certain amount of stuff (Rama laughs), of consciousness. If you wish to become more aware, then it's necessary to do something that you haven't done. Because everything that you've done, if you just continue to do it, will only make you as aware as you are now. If you don't do as much as you have been doing, you will become less aware.

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The most noble of all pursuits -- to become all that you are, all that you have ever been -- is to be enlightened, to know truth, to have knowledge and yet be beyond even truth and knowledge, to be God.

You are God. To be conscious of that, not from just the point of view of the human form. To be endless and beginningless, perfect being. Infinite awareness, beyond pain, beyond frustration, beyond birth and death -- that's enlightenment. A part of it, anyway. And we call the study of enlightenment, self realization or self-discovery. There are many paths that lead to enlightenment. There are lesser enlightenments along the way to a larger enlightenment, which is referred to sometimes as liberation -- the larger enlightenment, that is.

Not just being happy, not just having a peaceful mind or coming to a good understanding, which can change, but being perfect.

Perfect mind, the diamond mind.

Radiating all universes through your being. Each pulse beat is the universe. Each breath, eternity.

Enlightenment. Try it. You'll like it.

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How do you cope with stress? Well, from my point of view, from the point of view of Zen, of course, it's good to understand what it is you're dealing with. We want answers. We want quick relief. That's why we take the quick relief pills. The quick relief pills may give us some quick relief, but when the little pill goes away, the relief is gone because we didn't take a larger look at what it was we were dealing with and try to understand it.

Zen is the study of mind in all of its manifestations and permutations. And the power of mind directed at any problem will eventually overcome the problem. But it's necessary for you to bring the full power of your mind to bear in an unhurried way, and then you can easily overcome stress.

Why does a person experience stress? Well, to begin with, there is really no such thing as stress. In other words, stress is a popular word that indicates a condition of mind, not something that really exists in the world by itself. Oh, I'm familiar with all the popular theories, the fight or flight response, and all that sort of stuff. But that really has very little to do with stress.

Stress is a state of mind. It doesn't exist independently of itself.

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Our subject today is happiness. And the koan is, happiness is a warm puppy. As opposed to a cold duck? You're in the magical world of Zen, where anything can happen and usually does because it's your life! And in your life, just about everything happens all the time.

So sit back if you're driving in your car, or your car's driving you, or your mother's hitting you on your head, or, just about anything could be happening, I mean it usually is. Your wife left you, your kid just went to jail, you went to jail, they smuggled you in a Zen Tape. The Russian missiles are on the way and you haven't finished dinner. You're lying in the hospital and you've got two days to live. You've just made your first successful movie and everybody wants a part of the action, which is you. Your team just lost, and you missed the shot and the papers said it was your fault -- and it was.

Happiness. How can you be happy in a world like this?

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Next to meditation itself, next to the practice of zazen, I really can't think of anything more important than the development of your career -- because nothing has a greater effect on your awareness level. Whether your career is in the work force or your career is retirement and hobbies, looking after a family, a nation, a universe, it's all the same. We're talking about the major focus of your life, your time. Whether it's 40 hours a week, 60 hours, 80, 20, your career affects your awareness far more than you realize.

It is very important to be successful, successful in the sense that your career raises your awareness. It adds energy and power, clarity, beauty and stillness to your life. And it's not a distraction from your enlightenment. If your career is lowering your personal power or your approach to it, then it's got to change.

Let's face it, you just can't go on like that. It doesn't make any sense.

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What is power anyway? Power, as I define it -- personal power -- is something that's not necessarily visible. We can see its effects, but we cannot see power itself in the same way that the wind blows, and we can see the effect of the wind. We can see it moving a wind turbine or perhaps blowing the trees. If it's strong enough, a tornado or hurricane can blow a house over, capsize a ship. We can feel the wind against our bodies and in our hair. But we can't actually see the wind. We see its effect. Because we can't see it, that doesn't imply that it's not there. Of course it's there.

So power is very much like the wind. It comes and goes; no one really owns it. Some people are foolish enough to think that they possess power. You don't possess power; power possesses you. Power uses you. And you can't exactly see, unless, of course, you have very advanced inner seeing, if a person is powerful. A person can seem to be not powerful and be quite powerful. Oh, there's physical power and the ability to lift large amounts of weight. There's mental power, the ability to get an A on an examination or to give an examination. There's political power, power to make decisions that affect the lives of other transient beings.

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The initial step that a person must make in transcendentalism is to come to realize that the perceptions that they're having at this time are not so much created by choice as by a field of attention, a room that we've walked in. In other words, we're very happy, we're bright, we're in a good mood, and we walk into a room that's kind of dirty -- it's got a lot of rubbish around it, the curtains are old, the couch is faded and maybe a lot of unhappy people have been there and we can feel their energy. The room just does not feel perky and happy at all.

When we sit in that room over a period of time, we will begin to feel those feelings -- they'll begin to saturate our consciousness and that original happy mood that we had will begin to mutate a little bit, it will begin to transform, transmogrify, and we will begin to absorb some of those feelings, and soon those feelings will take a place in our being. While we might have been very happy or perky, suddenly we'll find ourselves getting a little bit discouraged.

Naturally, we will attribute that feeling, or those feelings and the thoughts that would generate from those feelings. So for example, if you're feeling discouraged, a project you might have been very jazzed about and excited about might now seem difficult or impossible. While it seemed relatively easy when you were in a more open and enthusiastic state, now you might not even do it. Choices we might make, feelings we might have, a whole list of activities in our life may or may not occur according to the attention fields that we're in. In other words, our own volition is not ultimately important, but it's the sphere of attention that colors all of our perceptions.

Well, the earth consists of a variety of different spheres of attention. Each physical location has one or more different spheres of attention. Transcendentalism seeks to see the individual sphere of attention and to note it as a part of reality, as a part of creation. That is to say, we can see that -- well, OK, this is one part of life or God, this is another part of life or God, this is another part of life or God. But then there's something that is beyond all of these individualized spheres of attention which, you might say, is their authority. It is the kind of divine ground that they come forth from. And that's what we would refer to as transcendental -- that is to say, not limited to any singular interpretation, not limited to the physical world but not necessarily excluding the physical.

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Power. Power is what's required to change the universe -- to change yourself into what you might like to be. If a rocket seeks to put a space ship, a satellite, whatever it may be, into orbit, it has to have power. The more velocity it has, the higher the orbit will be of the satellite or the space station or the space ship. A great deal of power is required to go above the earth's gravitational field. If there's enough power, then an orbit is gained above the earth, above the world. Eventually gravity will pull the object back down. The higher the orbit, the longer it will take. If there's enough power, then one can break free of the earth's gravity field. But then again, one can get trapped in the field of another heavenly body, so to speak.

So it's necessary then to store power to be free. Right now you're in the gravity field of many different people who are in your life. Each person you feel attached to is a planetary body -- perhaps a heavenly body -- that is exerting a certain force in your life, and in order to be free you need not attraction or repulsion -- you need power. That way, you can pass through this world, through the cosmos, and enjoy the universe but not be trapped by the gravity fields of others. Power. Unadulterated pure power.

There's an art, naturally, or a science, or both -- maybe it's the same -- to gaining power. And to be honest with you, there's a natural force or inclination in all of our beings to accumulate power. The problem that we come into is conditioning -- our own conditioning and the conditioning of others. Now listen carefully. This sounds simple but it's very complex. It runs deep into the psyche.

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Kundalini yoga is the yoga of transmutation. The principles are simple. At the base of the spine there's an access point that leads into another world, another plane of attention, another dimension. It's possible to access the energy through that secret doorway, that lowest chakra, and bring that energy and power up through yourself into your being. And as you bring it into your being, it will spread and radiate throughout your entire body.

There is a particular path that the kundalini follows -- the shushumna. The shushumna, as I mentioned before, is an astral nerve tube. It's the central nerve tube. There are two others, the ida and the pingala, on either side of it. In most persons, the shushumna is closed. It's a highway that's been shut down. The continuous energy flow that gives us life, that sustains the subtle physical body, takes place in the ida and the pingala.

Just as the blood is constantly flowing through your veins through capillaries -- bringing oxygen to the cells, moving nutrients and wastes around -- so the kundalini energy is constantly flowing through our subtle physical body, our etheric body. It sustains it, heals it. Without that energy, the subtle body grows ill, gets injured or it dies. And when it dies, the physical body dies. We are completely dependent upon the subtle physical body in this world.

The more energy that we have in the subtle physical body, the higher our psychic receptivity is. So kundalini yoga is, in many ways, the study of energy -- its management, its flow, its highs and its lows. But specifically, kundalini is a flow of power. And when we diagram it, we say that it runs from the base of the spine up to the top of the head.

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A network is a tribe. And a tribe, as I mentioned before, is connected by its secrets. A tribe is not a loose collaboration of beings who just get together in a powwow, who live together or work together. A nation is not a tribe. A family is not a tribe. A racial or ethnic group is not a tribe. Ancestry does not create a tribe, at least not bloodline. What creates a tribe is a bond, a sharing of secrets. Not a secret that could ever be told in any words, but a secret that's much too wonderful for that -- a secret that can only be told by the unfolding of one's life, specifically, your life.

This message is addressed to those of you who are part of the network, the tribe of awareness. Those of you who seek to find yourselves. You lie in other dimensions. You live there. This is only a small fraction of your being that's here in this body, in this time and space, on this planet.

There are different members of the tribe. The tribe is, of course, divided into male and female in this world. What is male and female? Is it just a physical condition, hormones? No. The energy runs very, very differently in a woman than in a man. What is a woman? A woman is chaos. Complete chaos. Chaos is the naturally perfect state of all things. A man, as we see a man in this age, in this world, is chaos, but he doesn't recognize that fact, so he tries to bring order into everything. And order is disorder. Order creates disorder.

Chaos is not disorder. Chaos is the totality of existence. You could call it God. You could use the term, the Tao. I like chaos. It means more to us in English. Chaos is all things -- wild and wonderful, connected perfectly by the life force. And a woman is more in touch with that chaos because of the way her being is.

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