On Sunday, August 9, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.193.53 said:

"It's useful to understand the various levels of reality, to examine the perceptual fields that different beings have, to see what different realities look like. Imagine that you have a little dial right next to your eyes and that you can change the channels of your realities. These channels of course are not to be confused with the chakras. Set it on the first channel and you look around the room and you see men and women. You see that some are tall and some are short and some are light and some are dark, some are beautiful and some are not beautiful, some are blonde and some are brunette, some are fat and some are thin, some turn you on and some don't. That's the physical reality. Somebody says, 'Who was in the room?' You say, 'Well, there were about an even number of men and women. And they were mainly young between the ages of . . . ' If you were a social scientist you might say, 'There were so many endomorphs, so many ectomorphs, and so many mesomorphs.' If you're in social action, you might say, 'There was a minority of blacks, there were so many Protestants, there were so many etc.' If you were primarily sexually oriented within that domain, you would see everybody in three categories, either potentially makeable, a competitor with you for someone who is potentially makeable or irrelevant. And that's a very dominant theme in the Playboy, Penthouse, Oui clientele which involves a large percentage of this society. That's what's real for them, the rest is all trips. When the dial is set on the first channel, when you look at the world, you see the physical, material environment.

If you're in the clothing business you walk down the street and you see what everybody's wearing. That's the reality for you. And if someone asked, 'Who was it that just passed?' you'd say, 'I passed a gown from Bergdorf's,' or 'shoes from Sak's and a hat from Filene's that was on sale last week.' Or if you're preoccupied with your body when you walk down the street, you know what you see? everybody else's body. People who are busy being short are preoccupied with how tall everyone is. People who don't like their noses notice everybody's nose."

On Sunday, August 9, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.193.48 said: "Flip it one flick, the second channel, and we're in the psychological domain. If you were a very technical person you would look at everybody in terms of the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory or the Rorschach ink blot test. We are now looking at happy, sad, achievers, anxiety neurotics, manic-depressives, enthusiasts, spiritual seekers. Eager, depressed, hearty, happy, sad, lucky----a whole lot of psychological attributes. For many of you that is the reality in which you live. And who you are is your personality. You spend time analyzing and therapizing it, patting it, damning it, feeding its guilt, its shame, its unworthiness. It happens that the psychologies come in bodies, but you don't even notice the bodies, you're too busy with the psychologies and personalities. When you meet people you say, 'Our personalities do well together.' It's the only reality. They don't notice bodies. They don't look up, they don't look down, they're all psychology. That's the personality level.

On Monday, August 10, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.196.52 said:

"Then there's another channel. Flick. Now the world is twelve categories and their various permutations.There's a Leo, there's an Aries, 'I know you're a Sagittarius, I can tell by the way you walk.' You've now done an astral fix, a new game of individual differences. You now know people's sub-game of individual differences. You now know people's subtle body which is inside their physical body and you know something that lies behind their personality, a planetary reality. It's another game of individual differences. But the third channel allows you to re-perceive the first and second channels. You're now using one set of individual differences to free you from another.

On Monday, August 10, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.193.42 said:

"What do you say, once more? Flick, fourth channel. Now when you look into another person's eyes what you see is another persona looking back at you. 'Are you in there? I'm in here. Far out. How did you get into that one?' Now we see another being who is just like you, another entity trapped inside the illusion of all these packages of individual differences, body, personality, astrology. And the eyes, the windows of the soul meet and you say, 'What's it like being in there?'

You'll notice that when you meet other people, you're meeting them at all these levels. If for instance, you're a girl and you're on the personality level of reality but you happen to have a very beautiful body from a cultural point of view and everybody sees only your body, you might say, 'Why doesn't anybody want me for my personality?' That's because you're such a strong stimulous on the first channel nobody can get to channel two. Or you're sitting on the fourth channel, which is just soul inside all this stuff, but most people are busy responding to you as a personality, a body, an astrology. Though every now and then you'll walk down the street and you look into somebody's eyes and there's somebody else who's looking back at you. They're not coming on, they're not trying to seduce you, change you, buy you, collect you, proselytize you, reject you, judge you or anything. They're just there. 'You're here, I'm here. Far out place to meet is'nt it.' It's just beings meeting inside these packages of individual differences. And no longer are these individual differences the reality that is so solid. They're just like shirts and jackets and sweaters. 'That's a pretty personality you're wearing. Where did you get that one?' 'I bought it in Gestalt Therapy. It's primal scream.' But it's still separate. You're still separate from another."

On Tuesday, August 11, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@152.163.201.192 said:

"Once more. One more flick. Now what do you see when you look at another person? It's as if you had two mirrors facing each other with nothing in between. It's itself, looking at itself lokking at itself. In that reality there is only one of us here in drag. One is appearing to be the many in order to play out this game. We are all the Ancient One. We are the One. And the One becomes the many for the play, for the sport, for the dance and you can get lost in the many in realities one two, three, four; but in channel five, there is only one of us, not intellectual or metaphorical, in that reality, we are one. Every reality up to this point is an equally valid, relative, symbolic reality. They're all real, but they're all just relatively real. One of them is no more real than the other one. The way in which we're the One is no more real than the way in which we're the many."

On Tuesday, August 11, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.193.181 said:

"Flick to the next channel and what happens is that everything out there disappears and you disappear and there's nobody looking at anything. The whole television disappears, it all goes back into the Void from whence it came, it returns to the formless---to that which lies behind the One. It is what God is, not the concept of God, but God Itself. It is in Buddhism, Nirvana; it is in Hinduism, Brahma; it is in Taoism, The Eternal Tao. It is the Aum, the unmanifest universe. It it why the Hebrews write God as G-d, because it isn't speakable, it is the unspeakable source of it all. When you flip to the sixth channel, the whole subject-object universe dissolves. And all just is, but without form. Because in order to know form you have to be separate from it. To enter into the formless that lies beyond the form, out of which the form comes, and back into which it returns, is to touch upon the reality out of which all relative realities arise. As you enter into the realm of channel six, the last moment of recognition of any kind of self-consciousness is the realization that all of channels one through five were creations of mind. A liberated being is a being who is free to be in, but not attached to, any of the realities. It is a being who can enter into the ocean of channel six and yet return into form. It's a being who has all of the channels available at once, though he may attend to them somewhat sequentially."

On Wednesday, August 12, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.196.29 said:

"Every one of those flips is a reality. But when you're totally in one of those, it is your absolute reality. You're somebody sitting here reading this book, that's a reality. But is that any more or less than the reality that there is only one of us reading itself? It's just a different level of reality, a different flick of the dial.

Part of the process of awakening that we're going through is the recognition that the realities which we thought were absolute are only relative. Since as we flip the dial we go towards more and more energy, and more and more fineness of vibration, when we meet a new reality we experience an intensity that makes us think that the new reality is more real than the old reality. We are living simultaneously on a number of levels, living out the karma of your separateness on plane after plane after plane. But you as a self-conscious entity are identified at any one moment most likely with only one of those planes. Thus to define yourself as being within any one plane of baklava is to impose a limiting condition, and you are then less than free. And even considering channels one through five as real is just an imposition of the intellect, describing structures. The intellect goes up only a few levels, and then it becomes a limiting system. When you go back about three or four planes, there are no time or space dimensions. Past, present, future, here and there, are all here. The Buddha looked back over his last ninety-nine thousand incarnations, just like that, and saw them all clearly and simultaneously, because he did not have to be limited by his linear mind. So part of the key to acknowledging your other identities is the process of allowing other kinds of knowing to be real for you, other than the ways you know through your five senses and your thinking mind. Heinlen called it grokking."

On Thursday, August 13, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@152.163.201.206 said:

"Now the fact that you were born into this plane that exists in this place at this moment means you were born into channels one and two though you also exist on channels three, four, five and six. Most of the people around you that you have grown up with take channels one and two as absolute reality. Thus when you go into channels three, four, five and six, they say, 'Come back to reality. Get your feet back on the ground. Be realistic. You aren't being realistic.'

People that acknowledge channels three, four, five and six are often treated as psychotic. 'You have flipped out of conventional reality.' For someone who sees through the game of relative realities, you see that the clinging to any reality at all as 'the reality' is really the definition of insanity. I once visited a brother in a mental hospital. I sat in a room with him and his psychiatrist. He thought he was Christ and the psychiatrist thought he was a psychiatrist, and each of them was convinced that the other was insane.

Most of the experiences that you have sought in your life have been an attempt to enter the universal oneness of channel five----total orgasm; the moment in which there is no longer somebody having sex with somebody, when it's merely the universe happening, that moment of perfect flow in which all separateness has disappeared, is the moment when you have returned into the One, when all of the tension that is created by the separateness has for a moment been dissipated. And most of you know at the moment of orgasm all of your neuorsis is irrelevant, not the moment before or the moment after, but for that exact moment. For somebody who is capable of living in channel five, that moment of orgasm, of total merging with the One, is a reality all the time."

On Thursday, August 13, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.196.44 said:

"In order to be open to this merging, many of you have smoked dope or taken acid, or had other vehicles for overriding your programs, know that you can set aside your program for a moment and enter into the higher channels, but after awhile, you come down and as a result get very frustrated. And what brings you down is your attachment to the models or molds or programs about who you think you are, and how you think the world is----these habits of mind.

Many of us are getting to the point in our spiritual journey where we are no longer trying to get high, for we know how to do that, we are trying to be. And being includes everything. We now recognize that if there is anything at all that can bring us down---anything---our house is built upon sand, and there is fear. And where there is fear, you aren't free. Thus you become motivated to confront the places in yourself that bring you down; not only to confront them, but to create situations in which to bring them forth. That's quite a flip-around from a mentality which says, 'I just want to get high.' That's the mentality that says, 'I want to get done; I want to be liberated in this very birth. I've seen how it could be; I'm tired of just seeing the previews of coming attractions; I want to become the main feature.'

That mentality is quite different from the mentality we had ten years ago. For now when there is depression, instead of running and hiding from the depression and trying to grab the next high, you turn around and you look the devil in the eye, and you say to the depression, 'Come on depression, do your trip, because you're just depression and here I am.' Because you are just a little bit connected to channel four which lies beyond channel two, and the psychological channel is where depressions are.

To a being who is living on the fourth channel, what do you suppose sexual anxieties are all about? 'Was I good? Was it enough? Did I satisfy her or him? Will it happen too soon? Can I get it up? Should I fake it? Am I frigid? Will it be real?' Those worries are on the first and second channels. They're not, not real; but how different it would feel if your identity was rooted in channel four. If you were able to say, 'I am a soul that has taken incarnation in a body that has this particular sexual habit.' You even arrive at the space where you are able to look back at your entire life of neuorsis and suffering and say, Look at how perfect that has been in bringing me to this moment."

On Thursday, August 13, 1998, Carol (NEVNO96@aol.com)@205.188.196.37 said:

"So we have the paradox that on channels one and two and three is an incredible melodrama going on, and you are an actor within it. There is a great deal of suffering, and when you're locked into channel one and you're hungry, and there's no food; that's suffering, it's not fake suffering. But from channels four and five you can look at one, two and three and all the individual differences and all of the melodrama and say, 'Look at the perfection of the dance. Look at the perfection of the flow of the Divine Law---including the will of man which can go against the Will of God. Look at the perfection of it all.'

But it's not freedom for the being attached to channels four or five who, when you are hurting, says, 'It's not real, don't worry, you're the Buddha, it's all illusion.' That's no more liberated than the person who's caught in one, two and three and says, 'There's only pain and suffering everywhere and it's hell, life is terrible and ugly.' The free being lives within all those realities simultaneously. He understands paradoxically that when there is suffering, you must do everything you can to alleviate it. While at the same time, the suffering is perfection itself and your doing everything you can to alleviate it too is part of the perfection. Because ultimatly you understand when you are free to move without attachment from level to level of reality, that the only reason you stay in form is to alleviate suffering or bring others to the light, to consciousness, to liberation, to God. What a paradox! Is it perfect? Sure. Is it hell? Sure. Both at the same moment.

And all this too is at only one level of exploration."

Grist For The Mill
Ram Dass

~~Carol