Welcome to this sacred space
This is a sacred space and we’re here for the most sacred reason. We’re here for liberation. Liberation is the realization of who you are; it is the unspoken transmission and the formless teaching of the Leela School. Liberation is really just being quiet: being quiet long enough and listening deeply enough that you fall back into yourself, so you can be yourself.That’s the living possibility and it comes from the lineage of Ramana Maharshi to Papaji to you.
Whatever mysterious reason brought you here, it’s deeper than the mind can understand. Something more fundamental brought us together. This is what’s essential and it’s all you’re here for. You’re here for that silent transmission of the Truth of yourself and the realization of the Truth of yourself just by being quiet. There’s nothing to do here and now: just let everything stop.
You may sit quietly by yourself or you may stay exactly as you are doing whatever you’re doing. What’s essential is that you trust yourself and you’re quiet. If that means retreating from the world, then you retreat from the world. If it means staying in the world, then you stay in the world. There are no rules for silence – just be quiet. The quieter you are, the more deeply you listen and the more deeply you hear. When you hear this overwhelming roaring silence, that’s the living presence of your own being and you merge into yourself. You’re absorbed into yourself. This absorption into Self is what true happiness is; it’s where fulfillment, freedom, and love are. It’s where you are.
In this moment, you don’t have to change, fix, go anywhere, or do anything – you simply stop: all of your going, all of your doing, all of your past, and all of your future. You just keep quiet and listen. Don’t listen to the talking in you head – it’s not useful. Instead of listening to the talking in you head, listen deeper and eventually the talking your head become trained to settle down. When there’s no one engaged in this dialogue, the talking winds down and this incredible power of mind is then used to go inside. Mind is now used to go deeper into the silence of your own being, instead of jumping back and forth from thought to thought.
Instead of talking to yourself, you find what’s undiscovered. It’s the same mind, but with a different function. What I’m speaking about is all about function; it’s about what works. It’s not about theories, beliefs, ideas, or practices – just function. In this silent transmission, you stay true to yourself. You stay true to your heart and to silence. In staying true, everything will arise to test you. Quite naturally, the world arises to pull you back, and that’s the play, that’s the leela.
You pass some tests and you fail others; that’s also natural. When you pass a test, there’s a blissful elation that arises and the temptation of inflating back into a “someone” who passed the test. If you fail the test, there’s deflation and suffering for having failed the test. That’s the teacher – the one who’s suffering. The one who failed is the obscuration that needs to be examined. In this examination, you tell the truth about the one who’s still attached and still imagines itself to be a “someone” doing something.
Passing the test has benefits and rewards, and sets up the next test of inflation. Failing the test also has benefits and rewards, and sets up the next test of staying true to yourself. Wherever you fail, it gets repeated over and over again in other particular moments of your life. It may seem like you’re walking in a straight line, but you’re not. You’re walking in a circle, spire, jire, or spiral; hopefully it’s a spiral. For most people, it’s not a spiral, it’s a donkey track, and it just goes round and round and round. While there are different face, different places, and different things, it’s still the same old donkey track. If you’re an ant on the donkey track, it seems like you’re walking in a straight line. It always seems like you’re walking in a straight line as you’re walking around the donkey track, but somehow events keep recurring: crises, betrayals, and losses keep showing up. These are the tests that will reappear once you’ve realized the Truth of yourself. If you don’t realize the Truth of yourself, you’re just a donkey on the track trying to have a better course. You can improve your course – you can make it a better ride, no doubt and no problem – except if you make it a better ride and settle for it, you’ve missed the essence. Why not make it a better ride? Be as happy and fulfilled as you can be, but don’t use that to settle without the final bliss of tru realization. That’s the formless teaching of the Leela School.
The teaching in form is also a sacred teaching and it comes to us over thousands of years. It brings in different spiritual roots: Buddhism and Hinduism (with Papaji as a clear Hindu). In historical terms, Hindus are actually Arians and Arians are Persian, step-nomads, who invaded North India and brought their cows, cow worship, and fire worship. That’s part of you, part of us, it’s part of this teaching, and it goes back to ancient Greece. Something else I just learned is that the word “enchantment” seems to have Pythagorean roots.1 Pythagoras saw that everything in the universe had a number and was vibrating, and that it’s all mathematics. And if you knew the mathematical patterns, you would understand how things work. Pythagoras observed that each one of us was vibrating and that we needed to be tuned; he saw vibration in terms of hot and cold, dry and wet, and the different humors that were then known.
This discussion of Pythagoras and vibration elicits the question: How do you tune your vibration? You tune vibration through enchantment. Enchantment is the chant of the tone that you resonate with, which puts you into an altered state. You’re here to discover the secret teachings of enchanment. This is where you’ll learn how to sing another’s song. You’ll learn how to enter the vibrational field of another and harmonize with it. And in harmonizing with it, it becomes in tune with you. You’re going to learn how to tune yourself and how to then receive the tuning of others. We all know this: we all feel when someone’s giving off bad vibes and we all feel when someone’s giving off good vibes.
What are “vibes”? Vibes are vibrations, and a vibration is a particular sound. Every vibration has its own sound and if you can hear it, it’s called hearing the mystery music of the spheres. Can you hear the plants vibrating? Can you hear the celestial harmony or the oneness of being, which is the being of all? By starting with the cosmos inside, you become better attuned to hearing the cosmos all around. When you become fully attuned to yourself, you realize the unchanging silence or stillness that’s the core before all movement and vibration. In realizing this changeless core, you tune into yourself.
In tuning into yourself, when it happens originally, the outside could still be discordant. But it will eventually come into tune, the quieter you are, and it takes as long as it takes. Eventually, the inside and the outside become congruent. And when inside and outside are congruent, you’re in service. You’re happy, fulfilled, and you’re in service with love. That’s what you’re here for – the sacred Mystery School teaching of love.
Once you have the formless, then you have the form, and the form is called skillful means. Skillful means is the ability to move through the trance of the world without being entranced, distracted, or withdrawn, instead you become fully embodied in service. In other words, you’re fully embodied in yourself as yourself. And since you are love, you naturally love to serve.
Service doesn’t ahve a particular face. It doesn’t mean you go do something in particular – it doesn’t mean changing anything at all. You can wear your turban or not, it doesn’t matter. You can wear whatever clothes you like, it doesn’t matter. You’re just in service. Although my teacher Papaji said to me: “Do you know if you shave your head and call youself ‘Swami’, you’ll have a much bigger following. You’ll be more successful.” Papaji also said: “But if you do that, then people will think that you’re different. They’ll think you’re a Swami.” He told me to: “dress like everyone else and be like everyone else. No difference.” That’s our mission – that’s the mission of the Leela School. Don’t shave your head or do anything special, just be as you are. Be in the world as it appears, so that those who meet you become attuned with you. Not because you’re singing at them – but just by being yourself. In being yourself, those who resonate with you will naturally come into tune with you. If you miss the silent transmission and only get the form transmission, you’ll come away with the secrets of the universe. Youu’ll come away with enchantment. You’ll come away with the possibility to have a much better life.
If you miss everything else and you don’t realize yourself, you will still be served. It’s not like there’s something to attain – there’s nothing to get. There’s nothing to grasp, search for, or look outside yourself for, and there’s no judgement or comparison. You can’t tell what’s happening with someone else, you can only tell what’s happening with yourself. You stay true to yourself: on whatever level it is, you tell the truth.
At first, you start to tell the truth very superficially, and then you start to notice where you’re not telling the truth – where you’re lying. You lie to your partner, kids, and friends. Wherever you show up, there’s a lie going on. Why is this? Well, because, that’s how animals work. We’re all camouflaged to different degrees and camouflage is a lie. We all take on certain masks – a mask is a lie. It’s maybe useful and functional, but it’s not the truth of yourself. If you know this, then there’s no problem with the mask. If you don’t know this, then it’s a lie. This is where you tell the truth and in telling the truth you disengage from the lie. Then, the mask continues or not – it’s not your business.
Whether the mask remains or disappears – it’s no problem because it’s not who you are and you know the mask isn’t yourself, so you’re not lying, you’re just playing your role. Whatever the role is – mother, daughter, child, artist, president, or street sweeper – it doesn’t matter. That’s your role, and if you don’t take it personally, you’re happy. You don’t have to stay in the role because you have the freedom to say: “No, I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not right.” Or the freedom to say: “Yes, this is a really good fit. It works for me.” You’re free to be who you are as you are.
There’s a structure to the Leela School. You’re going to be doing certain exercises and discovering different things about yourself and each other. You’ll be discovering skillful means but don’t be afraid of it, and don’t fight with it, reject it, accept it, or believe it – just have an open mind. Discover for yourself. If you try to do skillful means mentally, it’s not going to work.
That’s the first teaching. You can’t figure this out; it’s not about understanding skillful means or any other part of this teaching. Wisdom is much deeper than understanding. Wisdom needs true knowledge, which is the source of understanding. If you go for understanding on a superficial and informative level, you may understand a lot, but that’s not what we’re discovering here. Computers have enormous capacity to process and understand informational patterns that we can’t begin to understand. They are much smarter than we are on that level, but luckily we don’t have to be on that level. Everything is provided here in a way that you don’t have to think about. You can just participate and show up.
You can always ask for feedback and for help. And you can always ask questions. It doesn’t matter what you understand: if you don’t understand, ask. If you need to understand, find out. There are no rules here. When there are no rules, we tend to feel fear: What might happen if there are no rules?We fear that no rules might lead to chaos, immorality, and destruction.
It seems like we would return to the primordial chaos of entropy when there’s no rules. But it’s not like that. If there are no rules, there’s a deeper harmony. This harmony is so sweet and so attuned – it doesn’t need to follow a particular rule. It expresses itself as art, poetry, music, and dance. It expresses itself as you. You don’t need a rule because you are love. As love, you naturally avoid violence – it’s distasteful and unpleasant. You naturally avoid hurting others as it doesn’t feel good to anybody. What great luck!
I was a failure in my life because I didn’t become a college history professor; I didn’t fulfill my parents’ dreams. I didn’t do what I was slated to do or what I had the potential to do in the world. I was a failure on that level. That’s the great luck. The great good luck of failure. Now you can forgive yourself for your failures. It’s all useful – it brought you to this moment.
Then you look back on your life and you start to see the failures that you still hold: where you’re blaming someone or yourself for what they did to you or for what you did to them or for what you did to yourself. You’ve victimized yourself in ruminating on what should have been different: the man or woman you lost, the job you lost, or the wrong choices you made. Then you see forgiveness in the realization that those losses or wrong choices brought you here. They brought you to the potential to hear the secrets of the universe and to realize the Truth of yourself. You wake up from the enchantment that you’re in and then you serve others who are already enchanted.
1Pythagoras was a brilliant philosopher that lived between 570 B.C. and 495 B.C. He informed Plato and Aristotle and many that came after them. His teachings have survived in the Mystery Schools of the different Eastern religions.
