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by Thaddeus Golas, 1972
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CHAPTER THREEHow To Feel GoodIt's all right to have a good time. That's
one of the most important messages of enlightenment. We should try to
comprehend the highest pleasure level, the pleasure of God, so to speak, in
all that we perceive. No one in higher consciousness wants any of us to have
a miserable time on earth. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you
don't even have to make a move, not even lifting your eyes from this page.
You can open yourself to the diamondlike perfection of everything you see and
feel. If you don't think it can happen that easily, just be loving, moment by
moment, and trust that it will come to you. No one on the space level ever puts barriers or tests in the way of
someone who is trying to raise his spiritual level. Hindsight may make it
look as though you were being tested, but in truth you are always being
allowed to decide for yourself, to define the universe that is real to you. Higher beings are only too happy when you show yourself loving enough
to rise. You will be given every help and chance when you ask for it, whether
you ask by taking LSD or any other way, be it simple prayer or writing a letter
to Santa Claus. You are never asked to torment or frustrate yourself. You
don't have to prove anything. You can't prove anything: your
vibrations always speak true, you can't lie about them. And it is easy to rise on the wings of love. No matter how convincing
any perception of any level of reality, no matter how overwhelming, intricate
and complex, you are still seeing only a fragment within our true reality:
being just us, unresisting, unattached, loving all. It is also all right to have a good time in sexual relations. In
truth, a satisfying orgasm is a spiritual realization more than a technical
accomplishment. The flesh is not apart from the spirit. The body is an
ecstatic creation of many beings vibrating on other levels of consciousness.
A deep orgasm is a realization of love on many levels, including those which
many of us now think of as "animal." Love, getting into the same
space or on the same vibration with others, is the ground of our being, and
takes an infinity of forms. As in all other experiences, we always have the
sexual experiences we deserve, depending on our loving kindness towards
ourselves and others. The ecstasy of sex can be considered a mirror to our psychic
dissolution in the space of our divine brothers and sisters in the higher
levels of expansion. Making love is one demonstration of how space relations
ask us to surrender in love, and absorb the differences and imperfections and
beauties of other beings. If this is so, why is asceticism so often recommended as a spiritual
path, and why does it sometimes appear to work? As we saw in the preceding
chapter, when you push hard in one direction, you are likely to be swung into
a state other than what you intend. When you insist on having only sensual
pleasure, you will, unless your mind is open, be thrown into a state where
asceticism seems like the right course. And when you go far enough in
asceticism, you may be thrown into bliss and ecstasy, as many saints have
told us. Also, if you complain loud enough, you will be given a flash of
insight into higher consciousness. If you deny yourself food, sex,
communication, or sleep, you are in a way reporting to headquarters that your
life form isn't working, and you may be allowed a brief return to space to
check it out. But such flashes, though they presently make up most of what
humanity knows of space, are not the entire light, no matter how convincing
they feel. And these flashes are unstable, they are not the most comfortable
way to get home. You will not be able to stay on higher levels when you get
there through such negative emphasis. No matter what high-minded rationalizations you comfort yourself with
for coming back to earth, asceticism will keep bringing you back to the
physical plane until you love enough to rise above it on a positive path.
Indeed, it is love itself that is the positive path to space. There is no
wisdom or holiness that is ever an excuse for the failure to love, in
ourselves or others. And in sexual relations, again, love overcomes the pendulum effect,
the yin-yang of concepts, and at last we have a rational way to explain why
love must be the first motive in sex. But love in this intention is much
broader than romantic passion, and it must begin with loving yourself. If you
love everything you feel and do, including your emotionally dry and empty
moods, your pleasure will keep coming back. If you find sex unrewarding, it
just means that in this lifetime or another you insisted too much on the
other side of the balance. It is the action of contracting your awareness
that makes any condition compulsory. Also it is important not to judge others for their pleasures of the
flesh. What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason
that you are always legislating for yourself, all your words and actions
define the world you want to live in. One of the necessary laws for our
relations as equal beings is this: What you say, goes—but only for you and
those who agree with you. If you say a man should not receive help
undeservedly, it may not affect his life much, but it will hold for you: you
will not get undeserved help. If you say other people's sexual pleasures are
vulgar, it won't change their experiences, but your pleasures will become
vulgar. It is precisely your unlimited power to control your experience that
hangs you up. How much compassion and forgiveness do you want for yourself?
Give it to others. Go to the extreme: forgive all beings for their karmic
debts to you. Grant to others the freedom, the love, the consciousness that
you want for yourself. Music shows us how to maintain pleasure and ecstasy. Normally we tend
to think of a moment of euphoric realization as unbearable and impossible to
continue. It slips away and then we pursue it again. It does so because we
are unwilling to let it go, we are unwilling to conceive of being away from
it. But if we take the example of music, letting go of one note to hear the
next, then our pleasure can be constant though the vibrations change. If we "listen"
to the world, and let it act on us without either-or judgments and ideas,
then we can learn to comprehend each flash of pleasure as a tone in the
infinite harmony. The orchestra of the world plays the familiar melodies
again and again, and the old folks stand around and tap their feet while the
young ones dance. [ Contents | Next Chapter ] the leisure party | top of page Last updated: 16th Feb
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