1957
In order to leave high school, I had to pass certain exams. I was in an “Intoxicated”, Exalted State, and did not have much attention for the tests. Thus, I had no concern about passing them.
I got among the top marks. I was in such an Exalted Condition—it was just how it was supposed to be. For the sake of everything I had to Do, 1 had to go out of that circumstance into a realm of education and ideas that I had not heard before. Therefore, it did not make any difference whether I had studied or not. I was going to get good marks, and go on to Columbia University, and that was it. That is how I went from high school to Columbia.
There were far more exaggerated requirements than I could have imagined at Columbia. I did not lack intelligence in high school or at Columbia, but I was also in a constant Exalted State.
My time at Columbia was a Submission to the mind, the culture, the life that needed to be addressed. It was about becoming that life, having it fail utterly, and having to work out of that pit. In My early Life there had been the necessary support of religion, and that vanished virtually overnight at Columbia—after just a little bit of checking out of the literature of the scholarly evidence, which I had never even heard of before.
Suddenly, almost in the space of a single day, My sense of there being a foundation for life was totally gone. Having grown up in Franklin Square, how much support do you think 1 would have, for the task of dealing with the realities of modern intellectual life? The propagandizing of My early Life may have not amounted to much (it seemed), because it was delivered in Franldin Square, but it covered everything. It covered totality, it covered the universe. When I went to Columbia, all of that was evaporated in a matter of days.
Nothing about this new awareness could possibly feel good. It began My “Consideration” from scratch, from nothing. My bodily vehicle was a good vehicle for the Ultimate Purpose of My Work—however, I was without a culture, without any content. It was not amusing. Within a matter of days, the propaganda machine of the university completely brought an end to any vestige of a sense that life as human beings were living it was anything other than a mummery. Life had no meaningful basis. There was no Great Truth underneath all of this that we are now supposed to feel good about and go forward into the future about.
All these people were smiling for no reason whatsoever, like the crickets rubbing their legs together in the dark at night. Crickets make a chirp—everybody likes it. Human beings smile, and radiate on TV. The smiling personality looks like everything is feeling good, selling human life as a utopian idea—that you should be occupied with fulfilling the impulses of the body-mind—rather than entering into some examination of what is Exalted Beyond the bodymind.
Going to Columbia brought an end to all the foundations of My human upbringing, all the common presumptions about what you are supposed to go out and do. All of a sudden, all of that was utter nonsense—the religion of it, and everything altogether. It was all seen as total nonsense. It was clear to Me that life was entirely mummery. There was no basis whatsoever for life as it existed.
There was no basis whatsoever for just going out and getting a job, having a wife and family, participating in this smiling utopian plan that I saw on TV and in the movies. I could not do life as a mummery. Therefore, it became necessary to examine Reality altogether. This examination was forced on Me because of My Intuition of the Realized Condition. My Samadhi of the “Bright” was without this impediment.
I was entirely focused in the Process by Which I had been Carried since Birth, and all the implications of what I was studying. It was a profound Confrontation.
My time at Columbia was not about education. I was just there involved in My “Consideration” of the “Bright” and the Struggle with conditional existence. That is what My time at Columbia and My entire Life was about. Nevertheless, I did get a profound intellectual education. Therefore, I can talk with the best, with great educated discrimination. I did not use any of that education for a career. I had no notion of that whatsoever.
Passing My exams and going to Columbia were fortuitous, fortunate, spontaneous circumstances that were inevitable. It did not matter in the slightest what I did in the midst of them—it was going to happen anyway.
That is how it has been with everything in My Life. My entire Life has been a Spontaneous Leela.
From:
Out of Stock at The Dawn Horse Book Depot