Love is the Test of Human Existence and Fear is the truth of your Existence

The motivations of religion eastern and western are typically founded on fear; the revulsion, the reaction to bodily existence, bodily experience, frustration, mortality and you all are looking for some message or other that will relieve you of this fear. You are all seekers. You’ve been made seekers by your fear by your reaction to bodily existence, and the traditions of religion and spirituality as they are conventionally communicated tend to support this search in you and give you answers, methods of seeking, alternative experiences that will relieve you of the pain, the creative struggle of this life.

People are offered utopian schemes of a perfect political social environment. They’re offered inward mystical schemes for absorption and internal phenomena and so forth. All of these oriental and western religious and spiritual messages are calculated to support you, to console you in your fear and this fundamental sub-human reaction to bodily existence.

If it were not for mortality and frustration, none of you would be here with me tonight. On the other hand, it is because of mortality and frustration that you are here for the wrong reasons (laughter from audience).

So it’s good that mortality and frustration have brought you here. My job is to help you overcome this fear so that you can be here for the right reasons so that you can make right use of my company, so that you can live a truly human life. You all for whatever reasons are born in bondage, born and grown into fear to the illusion of mortality of independent and threatened existence.

Most human beings apparently are born and grown into this condition. I for whatever reason created by this same mechanism of existence in which you have appeared have been born and grown free without this illusion of threatened mortality.

There are all the obvious mortal things about this bodily personality, all of the natural experiences and difficulties to overcome and so forth but the illusion of godlessness, illusion of separation, the absence of God, the absence of the realization of the Divine Person, the Transcendental Reality, you see, none of that has ever characterized my existence whereas in your case and in the case of most human beings, this is exactly and fundamentally what characterizes your existence, the sense of separation, of mortal weakness, being threatened by all the phenomena of existence.

Your motivation then is to escape, to be relieved of this mortal life either by having this mortal life turn out to be really pleasurable through it becoming a great utopia or self-indulgence awakening in you a sense of pleasure that makes you forget you’re afraid or on the other hand by your escaping into subtle mystical realms you may be relieved.

You seek release and this is typical of religion and spirituality since ancient times. People have always been offered means of release or consolations for their fear and those who offered those means of release and those consolations for fear were individuals who fundamentally were born into fear, born into this revulsion, this reaction to bodily mortality.

They through the struggle with that fear attained a kind of experience that felt consoling to them or that released their consciousness from meditation on the bodily life but I appear in a different frame of understanding. My work is not then to fall for your consoling belief or to offer you a path of inwardness that will release you from this life, even this bodily existence.

My work is founded on a criticism of fear, a criticism of the search itself, a criticism of this reaction, of this revulsion, this separation into self-possession. The mood, the creative motive of my life has not been to escape this life while others are busy trying to escape it, to go beyond it, to do all of the conventional things that produce a sense of ordinary release.

My motive has been to incarnate from the point of view of freedom, you see, the transcendental realization already free. There is no need for me to seek to be free. But what is there? For me there is this creative opportunity, possibility to incarnate, to live this bliss, this transcendental love precisely in the form in which I am appearing.

The lesson of all of our experience then is to transcend our fear, transcend our self-possession, transcend our flight from relationship, transcend our flight from the body and all of our longings for some sort of imaginary heaven or utopia, heaven above, utopia here. We must through self-transcending God communion, evolve and transcend the circumstance of existence and we must pass far beyond the human world before we live in anything approximating perfection or beauty or immortality, longevity.

The possibilities within which we are straining as human beings are modest. They’re the beginnings of the evolution of the manifest universe and our fear, our reaction to the bodily circumstance of existence makes us want to be merely consoled and free of all bother and have everything be secure and pleasurable twenty-four hours a day.

But our work as human beings is to be the body and to evolve, to be the body in love.

The test of human existence is not whether or not you can achieve some ordinary human knowing and power over the natural realm through some scientific or other worldly means. The test of human existence is not whether you can oppress your attention within and have all kind of magnificent mystical distractions to observe and become absorbed in.

The test of human existence has nothing to do whatever with either science or mysticism, worldly power or psychic power. The test of human existence is whether you will persist as love, whether you will transcend yourself; transcend your contraction, your flight from relationship, your limitation on love.

That’s the only thing that is going on here. There is absolutely nothing else going on that is of any consequence whatsoever. It seems like because we have through the method of science become capable of creating atomic destruction that there is the possibility that this earth could come to an end even very soon, but to man who is so unevolved, that’s not very probable (laughter).

There needs to be a place like this because if the world were blown up and there were no earth at all, everybody would be stopped in the midst of this incarnation. Everybody would be floating in space in this dense atmosphere of exploded earth matter with no place to collect and carry on their idiocy (more laughter from audience).

So the earth is perfectly suited even in its present limitations for what the mass of humanity is up to and everybody dies from time to time and simply falls into the subtler atmosphere of the earth and is born again. That’s just the physics of things this cycle of birth and death in which nothing really great is accomplished merely by dying.

It’s just a time of refreshment, something like going to sleep at night and you wake up and get bodily refreshed the next day. Death is a kind of sleep of the elemental part so as death you enter into the etheric or astral aspects of the earth plane and then return in another birth without much memory, without representing anything superior to what you were the last day you were alive in your last incarnation.

So birth and death is not the point except to those who are afraid. You are motivated in the conventional way based on fear reaction to this mortal in its limitations and your anger about the fact that that’s the way it is. You kind of feel that’s unnecessary. Why didn’t God make it all wonderful (audience laughter). If God is so omnipotent, then why didn’t God create a world in which you could just be happy and meditative and love God and enjoy your friends and why didn’t he do it that way you see.

Of course that’s a childish view of God. God is the kind of God that makes places like this. God is exactly that kind of God you see because God is the God of us. God is the kind of God that makes people like this that makes people in this state of limited understanding and self-possessed motivation.

What kind of God is God then? God is the absolute reality in which all possibilities are arising. To live in God, to commune with God while you are alive means that you enter into the creative and evolutionary circumstance of possibility. You must grow to be a lover of God and that means you have to suffer limitations and all the mysteriousness of a frustrated and ultimately mortal life.

So that’s what you’re all struggling with you see, love. You’d sit in caves or sit in meditation twelve hours a day long before you’d begin to get serious about the matter of love, do all kinds of things in life to get yourself pleasurably situated sexually, in work, in your household, your clothing, your automobiles and all the rest of the stuff. You work very hard to do all that. You work very fitfully hard to study and read about and think about, imagine and even perform meditative exercises but love is the thing.

It is most profound most difficult to perform but what you are most reluctant to do. It is most fundamental this matter because the whole reason why you want to be released and consoled by all other things of experience is that you have fallen from love. You have become contracted, self-possessed therefore you want to meditate.

You want to be satisfied, whereas if you could be released of your heart, could cease to be hardened, then the whole body would become full of light and bliss and it is from time to time. Every now and then you get a glimpse of it and grace is actually to be given this love awakening but you must become responsible for the matter. That is the discipline.