CONVERSATIONS WITH RAJ
FEBRUARY, 1986
VOL. 3, NO. 2

QUESTION: People everywhere seem to be spending much more time and effort thinking about spiritual matters. What is happening?

RAJ: The simple fact is that there is a great deal of work being done within and around your planet. From time to time your planet is literally encircled with an energy pattern, which causes a refining of the energies of the earth as well as the energies of consciousness. This work is being done by your brothers—those like myself.

This process of raising the energy and aligning the energy of consciousness as well as the more physical energies of the earth is only being done because mankind as a whole is arriving at a point where he is capable of internalizing and integrating this raising of consciousness.

(COMMENT BY PAUL: How many people know about the hundredth monkey principle? Briefly, there were some studies done on some monkeys that exist on some islands off the coast of Japan. These islands are the only place that these particular monkeys live. I don’t know the story exactly but those doing the study would go in and drop cantaloupes or melons of some sort for the monkeys to eat. A lot of them broke in falling and hitting the ground, and at first the monkeys would just pick them up and eat them with the sand on it.

Some of the younger monkeys discovered that if they swirled them around in a river it would wash the sand off. Over a period of time they showed each other. The “kids,” we’ll say, got the idea real fast and the adults were slower to adopt it. But there came a point when the “hundredth monkey” grasped the idea, and suddenly all of them on all of the islands got the idea. Even though there was no communication from island to island this particular breed of monkeys got the idea and they all started washing the fruit before they ate it.

The hypothesis of the scientists is that when there is a certain point of critical mass reached in terms of the conscious awareness of something with part of the group, then the whole group gets it spontaneously.

Raj has indicated that in 1845 a similar point of critical mass was reached in terms of consciousness and that is the reason that since then there has been so much creativity, progress, and development, and therefore we are at that point. Out of all individualities who exist, whether they were incarnated or not, there were a certain number who achieved total enlightenment, Christ Consciousness—whatever words have the significance of being totally free of any distorted perception at all.

At that point, the critical mass was reached. So we are all enjoying a spontaneous process of enlightenment that we are not having to be personally responsible for in the sense of having to learn to get the idea to “wash off the melon before we eat it.” So, he wanted me to show you that in response to your question.)

The simple fact is that this shift has begun for everyone whether they are paying attention to it or not. This means that those who are aware of it should not indulge in any ego sense of pleasure at being the first. It also means that those who seem to be totally unaware of it have passed over the threshold where they are capable of recognizing it more gracefully and more easily if the opportunity arises.

So, literally, those of you who do feel that you are experiencing a process of awakening and a greater self appreciation that goes beyond the limits of the ego, have the opportunity to convey to those around you, who seem to be totally unaware, your confidence in Who and What they Really Are. You think that you will come up against a stone wall, but the shift is happening to everyone. It has happened to everyone, and therefore the potential for those who are insisting upon seeing themselves as an ego—the potential for them to let go of that, is greater than it was before the shift occurred. No one is in a better or worse place than another, and there really is present the opportunity of truly expressing brotherhood.

Your spiritual process does not require you to defend yourself against all of these ignorant egos out there. The ego in you will suggest to you that perhaps you need privacy to pursue your spiritual path so that these others “out there,” who are so ego oriented, won’t disturb you. But this is not the way it works. Do not retreat into your cave with your spiritual books and your spiritual thoughts. You see how that continues to substantiate the sense of difference, the sense of separateness, the sense of conflict.

If you and a friend have been riding a cable car to the top of a magnificent lookout point, and all the way up the friend has had his eyes closed and you have had yours open, and you have surveyed and enjoyed and thrilled at the beauty, and you arrive at the top and get out and stand at the observation point, your inclination would be to say, “John, open your eyes up and look at this!” It is the same here.

As you are going through your own process of awakening and the view you are seeing is being transformed because the conceptual glasses through which you have been looking at the scenery are beginning to dissolve, then those around you who are not sensing at all anything of their divinity and are insisting on being ignorant, are deserving of your encouragement and your faith in them and your confidence in What they Are. They are deserving of your extending that confidence to them and saying, “Open your eyes.” It is not appropriate to withdraw from your brother when you have something to share. Avoid, at all costs, letting your spiritual path become a process of isolationism, of ivory tower, self-righteous, wonderful ego satisfaction. Like I told Paul, keep your feet on the ground and your head not too far away.

QUESTION: There are so many different religious beliefs, including confirmed atheists. Will everyone become enlightened?

RAJ: It is inevitable, because, you see, everything that you can possibly become, you are right now. You are not a tiny organism that is the result of a chain of biological progress, which has arrived at a point of having developed the capacity to be conscious. Therefore, you are not a tiny mortal organism moving toward a divinity, which was never embraced in the original protoplasm from which the theory says your Being has emerged.

The Christ-Consciousness—the state of perfect Conscious Being—is present and constituting your Individuality at this instant, even though you are insisting upon utilizing, for the most part, only the data obtained through the five physical senses. Although your present sense of things is circumscribed, the Totality of Who and What you Really Are is totally unaffected by it and is continuing to function in Its infinite manner with absolute perfection. It is inevitable that you will eventually go ahead and dare to experience yourself in your Totality because your Totality is already present and, in fact, is insisting on breaking through your dense ego structures because it is Its intent for Its Totality to not even be divided off into any small part called the “ego you.”

QUESTION: The world will share this?

RAJ: Every degree of clarity, which unfolds with more presence in your conscious awareness is the removal of some density in the brotherhood of man, and all benefit. No one will be left out. In fact, it will have a snowball effect, in that as the movement of enlightenment increases it will compound itself and the process will become even more rapid. The less resistance the easier the forward movement.

QUESTION: Are there any techniques that we can use to put our self on that track of forward movement and to put down some of the self-defeating thoughts that come up; to accept that this enlightenment is really happening and not say, “It’s not really true—something also is going to happen”?

RAJ: Perhaps the most valuable tool you have available to you is the realization of the apparent power, which your thoughts have to obscure your clear perception of Reality. Your thoughts, in themselves, do not have creative power, only obscuring power.

The creative aspect of your Being arises from a point beyond any ego concepts, any ego belief structures—we could say from the ego-less level of your Being, your essential Self, which is far different from your cognitive thinking processes.

Now, you can talk yourself right down into a hole if you want, or you can talk yourself into a place where it becomes easy to trust. Through your use of logic and through your exposing yourself to ideas, which support Self-appreciation, which support the idea of the essential divinity of your Being, you can arrive at a point where it becomes relatively easy to become still and entrust your present sense of yourself to that divinity, which your logic has disclosed to you is there.

Your thinking will not do it for you. It is an act of trust. It is an act and not a thought. It is an inner act, an act of letting go of control and trusting into and leaning back into the fundamental harmony of your Being and your world. Again, you must recognize the apparent power of your thought and realize that by it you can bind yourself unmercifully. You can argue yourself right into extreme depression.

You must be willing to own the fact that circumstances are not governing you but your ideas are, and then you will be in a position of being able to do something about it. You can choose to enlarge your vocabulary regarding your divinity. You can enlarge your library of books regarding the fact that transformation and awakening is an inner process, a very private one, and that it is the most worthy area for you to expend your energy. Do everything you can to allow yourself to think with greater Self-appreciation.

Now, the ego will be very busy the whole time you are doing this, and will argue against it and justify to you your unworthiness and that you cannot do anything about it. But understand this, the ego doesn’t give a damn about you. The ego seeks only to save its own skin. And the moment you begin to make an effort to become unconflicted, the moment you begin to refuse to energize self-criticism, and the moment you begin to earnestly desire to move beyond any limiting ego concepts, it scares the hell out of the ego, because you are no longer honoring it, and you are its only source of life.

Now, I am speaking of “it” and “you” as though there is a split, and this is because there really is a difference. However, as you begin to earnestly embark in the direction of Self-appreciation, the arguments against it will not seem to come from a point separate from you. You will seem to experience yourself as saying, “This is crazy. I’m being stupid.” You will use your tongue to verbalize the ego, and it will seem to be you. So, you must be alert, and when your mouth and your mind begin to express these ideas you will find you have the capacity to stand aside and say, “Oh, there goes the ego!”

You will find yourself quite capable of observing it doing its little jig, and this is the beginning of the process. Once you realize that you are something different from the accumulated ideas and beliefs about who you are and the picture you present to others, and that this part of you—this body of ideas and concepts about who you are that you present to others—is not the governing portion of your being, even though it will defend itself mightily, then you are on the path of freedom.

Your process of arriving at greater Self-appreciation is what will bring you to an increased experience of trust in the fundamental, divine nature of your Being. That trust will allow you to let go even more, and as the more substantial experience of your Being results from that letting go, your level of trust will increase more, and so it becomes a self-affirming process. It really is no more complicated than that.

You can, of course, argue yourself into great complexities and seem to bind yourself. But, they are only words; they are only ideas treated as though they were true. And I will give you a clue. Observe whether your words are binding you or whether they are freeing you, whether they are conflicting you or whether they are bringing you peace, whether they are tiring you out or unleashing your natural energy, and then choose consciously which ideas you are going to insist upon entertaining. You are in charge the whole time. Negatively or positively, you are in charge, and you bind yourself or release yourself, depending upon what you are insisting on doing.

QUESTION: You spoke of the two people on the mountain, one with his eyes closed and one with his eyes open. Isn’t it “pushy” or proselytizing to tell another to see the world the way you do?

RAJ: In effect, you have the obligation to extend to that other one the same quality of appreciation that you are learning to give to yourself. It is impossible to truly appreciate yourself on the basis of ego concepts and an ego self image. Self-appreciation grows out of the inner experience of your divinity. It is not an intellectual head trip at all. It is an experience of the peace of your Being. It is the experience of the absence of conflict. It is the experience of the joy of your Being.

What you learn about the infinite nature and Actuality of your Being at an experiential level involves a confidence unlike any confidence you have yet experienced—a knowingness that you and your world and your universe are, at the bottom line, One—that it’s all You as Conscious Being. This involves a substantial change in the way you perceive yourself. It naturally involves a greater Self-appreciation—and when I say Self-appreciation, I do not mean ego self-appreciation. I do not mean egotism.

Knowing this about yourself teaches you about every other one in your experience and it would constitute an inconsistency, a division within you, for you not to extend that same appreciation, that same honoring of the other’s Individuality. Individuality is indivisible, and it is unique. Yet, it is in no way in conflict with any other Individuality because all Individualities are the infinite manifestation of the one infinite intelligence, Mind, God, or Life-Principle.

There is only one infinite Reality and one is either seeing it through the distorting lenses of the ego or one is seeing it perfectly. There are not ten thousand conflicting ways of experiencing Reality except through ten thousand ego lenses. There is not a reality for you to see clearly and another for someone else to see.

If someone is insisting on looking at everything through the ego lens—if he is insisting on being nothing more than an ego—it is not necessary for you to tell him how he ought to be seeing. But you do become obligated to honor his Individuality rather than his ego. Honoring another’s Individuality constitutes the extension of Love. Love is the seeing of what is really there right where the ego sense is seeing itself. It is not reacting to the ego but responding to the Individuality.

Responding to the Individuality in an honoring way provides the conditions under which that apparent ego sense may more easily shift within himself or herself to an acknowledgment of his or her divinity, simply because you are not coming across as an opponent. The respect, which you are communicating, makes it more reasonable for that one to engage in self-respect. It is impossible to be perfect all by yourself because your perfection extends to everything you experience. It becomes shared. Your clarity clarifies and your prior ignorance no longer adds to the confusion.

So, it is in the sense of not withholding the acknowledgment of the divinity of everyone else—once you have recognized and have begun to experience your own—that equates to the example of saying to the one with his eyes closed, “Open your eyes and look at the view.” You are not telling him what to see. You are simply not engaging with him or her at the level of his or her ego, and the opportunity is increased for that one to be able to respond from the level of his or her Being.

QUESTION: I have been told to trust my inner feelings. How can you trust them if the ideas, which generated the emotions most likely arose from the intellect or ego?

RAJ: That is an excellent question. As you have well stated it, most of what you call feelings are ego reactions. The reason being, that you tend to gather all of your data about life through the five physical senses. As you begin to take time to become still and attentive within, you will begin to experience your Soul. You could call Soul “Mind’s capacity to sense Its infinitude.” Soul is the sensing organ of Mind. Therefore, feeling—experiencing the Meaning of anything and everything—is an inherent part of Conscious Being.

To be in touch with your Self is not to be simply at peace. That would be boring. There is Meaning to everything, and that Meaning has, for lack of better words, a feeling to it. It is not at all intellectual and the Meaning that everything has equates with its contribution to the infinite manifestation of Life, or the Life-Principle.

Since you are the direct expression of the Life-Principle, you are the Life-Principle expressed. You are not something different from It. Therefore, the Meaning that any given thing has is part of the infinite Meaning of your Individuality. Everything you see, hear, taste, smell and feel constitutes some aspect of the infinitude of your Being/Meaning. Therefore, when you are experiencing Its Meaning, you are experiencing Your Meaning. If everything expresses the Life-Principle in Its process of Self-fulfillment, then incorporated in the Meaning of that thing is fulfillment, and fulfillment is joy. But, it is an easy joy. It is not an exciting conflicted joy.

Most of what you call your feelings are, indeed, not trustworthy. They will tell you exactly where you are coming from, but where you are coming from most of the time is arising from a false basis. When you are willing to tap deeply into your Self, you will find yourself being able to respond to anger with whatever appropriately dissolves the anger, which may be firmness. It may be warmth. It may simply be a hug. And yet, from the surface level, your spontaneous response would most likely be self-defense.

Let there begin to be a constant desire on your part to be connected with the Meaning of anything that is going on. You can listen with your ears to what is being said or with your eyes to the way someone is behaving, but learn not to take it seriously on the basis of the way it sounds or the way it looks. Understand that there is an underlying dynamic there. Reality is going on right in that place. Desire to be in touch with the Reality. When you do that, whatever the discrepancy is between the Reality and what is apparently going on from an ego level, will be illuminated and you can then, from a centered place, deal more effectively with the discrepancy.

Usually, the discrepancy will not have anything to do with what you are hearing or seeing, and your ability to deal with the actual discrepancy will almost invariably cause the individual you are dealing with to feel understood and touched, even though there will have been nothing audible or visible to base your response upon.

Life is full of Meaning and its Meaning is experienced through your Soul, and It is full. Therefore, I encourage you to trust into the Meaning of anything that is happening and the feeling that accompanies it, and learn to hesitate before acting upon your spontaneous emotional reactions.

QUESTION: I smoke and I drink a lot of coffee and I sometimes feel guilty because I know those things aren’t good for me. Are these addictions a way of hanging on to being in the sense of the illusion, the image?

RAJ: They are a way of grounding yourself in the illusion or the image, yes. They will have to sooner or later be given up, in order for you to function more easily at the subtler levels of consciousness. It is not any worse a habit or addiction than the addiction that most of you have to the body, and for whatever it is worth, I will share with you that reincarnation is the result of an addiction to body.

QUESTION: Are you saying reincarnation doesn’t happen, or it will happen if we stay addicted to our body sense?

RAJ: It is not natural to your Being to subject Itself to the ignorance, which occurs as a result of the birth process, or of incarnating. The five physical senses are stimulating. They are so stimulating that they attract the attention away from the conscious experience of one’s infinity as Consciousness, as Conscious Being. Now, the simple fact is that you will always have that which identifies your Individuality. Your Being would be nonexistent if it were not identified to consciousness as a conscious experience of something specific. Therefore you will always have body.

However, as the ego sense is released, you will not entertain such a private sense of it. You will come to know and experience the walls or the trees or the stars or any other individual as some aspect of the infinitude of your Being, and therefore some part of your infinite body. There will not be an amalgamation of all of you into one seething mass, but there will not be this artificial sense of separateness, and above all, you will not identify yourself as that which appears. You will identify yourself as that which is conscious, as that which is experiencing all that appears. And yet, there will be no sense of differentness or separation from that which appears.

There are ten million reasons for feeling guilty. Cigarettes and coffee are two of them. But, are you going to energize guilt and thus keep your ego healthy and alive? Or, are you going to be willing to be “idiotic” enough to claim your guiltlessness on the basis that the Christ-Consciousness is what constitutes your Individuality at this moment and is blemish free. And it is only the ego, which is projecting an image of distortion and blaming you for it?

You must, of course, learn to recognize when you are doing something that is not contributing to your peace and then you must ultimately choose to do what substantiates your peace. There must be transformation, but transformation will not arise out of guilt. Peace does not arise out of conflict. Peace will arise out of your willingness to assume that there is something absolutely divine about you, and a willingness to begin to honor whatever that divinity is, more than you are honoring that, which produces guilt in you.

QUESTION: If our Being is constantly unfolding and ever growing, then what are “lifetimes”?

RAJ: First of all, Being must be understood as a verb rather than a noun, else you will conceptualize Being with outline, separation, division, and an enlarged ego sense. As a verb, of course, it indicates movement, life, and so it is, therefore, forever unfolding itself, you might say. Past lives and future lives are ego projections. You must understand that Being occurs in the instant of consciousness in its entirety. Being infinite It is not moving in any direction.

QUESTION: Is that where you are, Raj?

RAJ: That is where we all are at this instant. But, when you are looking at it through the lens of the ego, it becomes conceptually projected on a time line—past to future—and the ego sees itself as moving toward the fulfillment that is actually going on at the moment. The ego takes infinity and stretches it out onto a “line of progress.” Do not try to grasp this intellectually, but just listen.

When Awakening occurs and the ego distortions are gone, you will find that the apparent past lives that seemed so real to you were as illusory as the ego, which projected them. And, like the dreamer on the bed, who has dreamed a life experience during the night, who has subsequently gotten up in the morning, you will discover that You never went through lifetimes, that You never went through a process of progressive awakening. Again, do not try to grasp this intellectually.

All that the ego is projecting is illusion, including the sense of time, the sense of progress, the sense of achievement. The ego thrives on achieving and becoming, especially in the face of adversity. But, the wholeness of your Being is functioning totally at this instant. If fulfillment is the movement of Being, then there is nothing for the ego to take credit for. This is why it defends itself so strongly. It is bad news for the ego, for you to experience the fulfillment of your Being. Past lives are an illusion, but nevertheless they are illusions, which have been experienced just as dreams that you have had at night were experienced and remain for you to remember and recount.

QUESTION: Sex can be possessive, or it can be free. I just want some guidelines and hear Raj talk on this subject.

RAJ: We will always get into trouble if we start from the ego level, because from its stand point there is no escape. Each one of you is the direct expression of the Life-Principle, or God. Therefore, you are absolutely divine, and your nature is Love.

If you are in touch with your Self, if you are choosing to be at peace, at one with Who you Are and What you Are, everything you do, just as with the Midas touch, is imbued with your nature—as Love. Thus, whether it is a caress, a smile, or intimate physical intercourse, it is first and last, the extension or expression of your divinity. Separated from that and seen purely as a physical act of pleasure, it takes on an illusory sense. It seems to be an attempt at communication from body to body by those who think they are the bodies. And, it becomes particularly unfulfilling or unsatisfying because the act is not arising out of one’s Being, but is arising out of the concept one has of what he is and what he must do.

This is what causes the compulsiveness, the obsessiveness and the strangulating manipulativeness that comes into what is called a loving relationship. If you are insisting upon coming out from your Center, then you are coming from a place of perspective, a place where you know something about the person you are with, because you know something true about Yourself. And the relationship becomes one of honoring what is real about the one you are with. It is a sharing of what is already true with nothing needing to be communicated, but simply shared, and so it ceases to be communication and becomes communion.

Even if the one you are with is coming from an ego place, your defenselessness, your peace with yourself and with this other one, provides the environment, again, in which that one can dare to become defenseless also, and in that defenselessness be free to feel loving, to feel Love.

It is easy to understand why, from the ego level sex or the intimate physical sharing of love might be construed as something needing to be overcome in the process of spiritualization. But, from the stand point of Reality, it becomes obvious that everything one does is capable of being an act of love, and that intercourse should not be set apart from a smile or a hand shake or a hug or a kind word or an honest business dealing.

Compulsiveness and obsessiveness always arise out of a sense of incompleteness and an attempt to possess, and this is all ego. Do you realize that when you take the time to become centered and to sense into your divinity, that you not only open yourself up to the experience of your peace—your immovable peace—you also open yourself up to the experience of your Wholeness, where you know that you need nothing, and you need do nothing in order to be completely What you Are? You do not realize how marvelous that is because of the absence of stress related to having to achieve it.

When you are not stressed, when you are at peace, when your very Being is extending and sharing Love, non-defensiveness, everything around you responds. It knows it is not in danger and it can relax and blossom. You cannot achieve Wholeness by union of things. You can only experience it by opening yourself up to the incredible Wholeness of your Individuality, which is whole because it is the complete expression of the Life-Principle.

So, let us not get caught up in side trips of rising above sexuality, rising above the world. But let’s do be willing to give up the idea that a sense of security, a sense of well being, can be achieved from a bottle or from a cigarette, or from a bean. It can never be added from the outside, but it can be accessed from within. Let us give up the idea that we can achieve Wholeness through the union of bodies, so that all relationships and all activities become an expression of the completeness of one’s Self. When one is complete, manipulation is unnecessary, and yet manipulation constitutes the greater part of relationships, whether of individuals or businesses or countries or nations.

QUESTION: Raj said earlier that he did not advise isolation or seclusion, and I was puzzled about that because many spiritual teachers, including Jesus, have indicated such things as coming apart and being separate. I know that you told Paul, earlier, when you started speaking to him, that it was necessary for him to isolate himself for a time, at least. I was wondering if you would speak to that?

RAJ: There is an aspect of the process of spiritual growth or awakening where the ego comes in and sees itself/you as something quite a bit better than everyone else, which becomes impatient with the shortcomings of others, which sees others as intruding upon one’s peace with all this ego clamor. And so there is a tendency to be inclined to go away, to see one’s Path as requiring further separation. It is even in vogue in some very specific ways on the earth at this time as a part of the religious practice of spiritual growth.

There are, indeed, times when it is necessary to be able to be still and be away from the clamor, so that you may get your bearings. This is only because of your lack of skill in maintaining yourself in a centered place. It should not be understood to be a part of a religious practice that must be exercised in order to Awaken.

As soon as you have regained your equilibrium, let us say, it is essential to participate in life. You see, in the end it is necessary for you to be able to be out from Who you Really Are at every moment, centered, with an immovable equilibrium, in the market place, on the freeway, with three small children and a husband yelling for dinner. There is no other place for you to be or experience Reality. So, any sense of isolationism, as though that were the epitome of your spiritual growth, needs to be squelched right from the start, even though from time to time you may need to “go into your closet” and take a period of time to regain your equilibrium. But, understand that the more skillful you become at being centered, the less you will come apart from everyone and isolate yourself.

Let me address one other point here. If you are insisting upon acting and being out from your greater capacity to be aware, you will be behaving quite separate and apart from the ego masses. To be the light by just being Who you Really Are does constitute coming apart from the world and being separate from its basis—meaning the ego’s basis—but you can do that in the middle of a crowd. It does not mean remove yourself from the opportunity to love your brother by going into a far place where no one is but you.

Printed in USA. Copyright © 1984, 85, 86 by Paul Tuttle. All rights reserved.