See the joke

The fact is that still the higher the ideal you set up for somebody to live to the bigger the threat they've got, is that right sir? Because there's more threats to the ideal, more things that might bug him.
Now, what's wrong with experiencing being conscious of this world? Now I have found one interesting phenomena. A person with peace of mind is non vicious, you know, what you would call criminal. That's being vicious. I have found people with peace of mind peaceful to live with. I have found people in conflict, struggle and resistance, now matter how good they're trying to be, to be quite vicious. Have you possibly seen that in your line of work sir? (yes.Hmm? yes) So now are we interested in being good or being conscious? If you are conscious you obviously are  not in conflict, struggle, or resistance. You have peace of mind, hmm? You see being good or being kind and considerate is a by product of being conscious not a destination. It's a by product of peace of mind. We have peace of mind when we see the truth. Now it is peculiar that seeing the truth is being able to see a certain joke.  To see the truth is to see the joke.
When we see the fallacy or the joke in setting ideals, we have seen the truth, because then we ceased to be in a state of conflict, struggle, and resistance. We have seen the joke of the ideal. Now somebody's always layin' one on us, you know, you know what that means don't you? somebody laid one on you,they tie you up. So we get an ideal and we start livin' with it and we don't realize that that is the source of all our difficulty. Now the first ideal that we set up is this first little decision that the whole purpose of living is to be non disturbed by gaining pleasure and escaping pain on all levels. Then other people come along and accentuate that. 
(to be continued)

What is and what ought to be / agape

    So here is this stairway to the skies, that everybody is tryin' to get and it's struggle,conflict, and resistance. Now that's all because we made it important to have things like they ought to be and here is the only problem that any of us run in to. Now we get all kinds of emotions when we have these, those equal anger, guilt, fear, insecurity, now those all come along when we are trying to do the impossible. You can call all of them frustration if you want to, anxiety, whatever pretty word you like. Whenever you are trying to do the impossible, say just a simple thing like stand up and sit down at the same time, huh?You can't do that, is that right?You can't do it.  You can't deal with what is and you can't change it into a fantasy without being frustrated, and being in some sort of state of unpleasant emotion that a human being wasn't designed to have, anger guilt fear,insecurity,frustrations,anxiety and so forth you simply can't have. Now anything that's real I can do anything I want to with it. To some degree I can change it. I can paint the house green, I can tear down a wall, I can put in  a wall, I can tear the whole thing down or whatever, but I'm still dealing with what is but I can't deal with what ought to be and what should be. This is where we all start, I know what ought to be, I know what should be, I know what needs to be straightened up, and that of course is an illusion of the first water because we don't know what ought to be. We don't when it should rain, when it couldn't rain, whether it blows a storm or it shouldn't blow a storm, whether somebody should come along and say certain things to me, or whether certain events should happen in my existence, we don't know that. We don't know that other ought to do anything different than what they're doin'. Basically everybody is doing what they feel is right, proper, and justifiable with what light they have, and that's all we can deal with. Now we don't have to be in a state of conflict, struggle, and resistance at all times. The fact that most people are doesn't prove that it's necessary. It only says that without sufficient light this is what people are all doing. Now, uh, how many of you have really been reminded very many times in your life that you don't know what ought to be? Very few is that right?We never thought of it. We just knew we did, so we never questioned it, that I didn't know what ought to be, is that right.It took a while to get to that point didn't it?You started out in life like all the rest of us. You believed it with all your might that you knew what ought to be and consequently you had a lot of conflict with various and sundry things, and when you don't know what ought to be then you can deal with what is in one way or another or you can ignore it. It'll go away in a few minutes anyway. It only comes to pass anyway.

What and the how /meditation

Life so loves you that it will do anything you so want to do. It'll take care of the how, you take care of deciding what it is, okay? If you want to build a house why it knows how to build a house. If you want to get up and walk across the floor it picks the body up and walks across the floor. You don't know how to walk across the floor do you? You do it everyday, but you don't know, if I was to say,"well, let's stand up right now'  Would you know the first muscles you would tighten up? Just the first ones not the whole sequence, would you know the first ones huh? You wouldn't know. Okay. All you had to do is decide  I'm gonna stand up and a whole multitude of things went up and mechanically engineering impossible you're standing up, because really of all the weegles(?) in it you shouldn't be able to stand up. So our job is to figure out the what and this X, Life, Spirit within takes care of the how. But it refuses to turn the tables and because you wouldn't know how to do anything so it would be useless to tell it, but  mankind is very busy trying to turn the world upside down, it says 'oh lord you tell us what to do and I'll do it' and you haven't the foggiest idea how to stand up, you don't know how to swallow,  you don't even know how to breathe, you certainly don't know how to take a turkey sandwich and turn it in to flesh and blood, but that happens everyday, right? So I will tell you my definition of meditation if you like okay?
Meditation is lookin' at a given situation clearly concisely without emotion, just lookin' at it from all sides, clearly, until you understand it, which might take longer than we generally think it would. You know we all think we understand a thing just like that you know, which we don't. But if we looked at it quietly and carefully we would much more know what to do. And if we ever did come up clearly with the what, X, Spirit, God, whichever word you choose to use Life will take care of the how very quickly.
So I'm very much in favor of meditation if we are meditating on a given subject or thought.

The three misconceptions( from school talk 55)

(do I understand you right Bob, when you say that they're many misconceptions,but if we really work on these three,we pretty well covered..)
Covered the misconceptions,yes--all the others,some synonyms or another statement of these. That is the best I could come up with after observing and gathering out some 300 or so of them on paper. I think I could reduce them all of those to these three fundamentals

That I'm not a victim
That what anybody, including self, is doing ever has done or ever will do--at the moment of doing was felt to be right, or proper, or justifiable with what light they had.

That I have no 'rights' which I unconsciously want to stick up for. I have only privileges which I would like to enhance and get more. Further the only thing that can't be taken away is Truth which in fact is 'what is' at this moment

prayer

Holy Spirit

Giving life to all life

root of all creatures

moving all things

healing our wounds

wiping out our mistakes

you are our true life

luminous, wonderful

awakening the heart

from its ancient sleep

Good morning raising

I can turn my attention outwardly. When we turn our attention outwardly, we can begin to put forth a bit of effort to make all those other people out there feel a wee bit better.  If everbody in this room is feeling real good, it's pretty nice, is that right? I'd have a hard time saying 'aaahhh' if everybody in here is feeling good, because a good mood is highly contagious, just like feeling grumpy is.
Now if you are in a room full of' grumpy' people, you'll find that it's a little difficult to raise the mood level, but at that moment I can decide that I have the conscious ability to raise the mood--none of the rest of the people are being conscious if they're going to keep their mood down.
So consciously I can raise the mood for the whole room. But even unconsciously -if you begin to raise the mood, a whole room full can raise those other few people. So if the world is not like you want it today; and I do read lots of things that I think most people have decided the world is going to Hades in a hand, thereby picturing an illusion that they are worse off.
So let's raise the mood to see how far I can reach out. Now I know a few people. You know a few people. Everybody else knows a few people, and if every one of us was in the mood raising business today, and that's a pretty good business to be in, I wonder how far out it go and what effect it would have? It doesn't sound like much; but if were just raising the mood a notch of everybody you came in contact with today, enough of it is going to run over, then they, possibly, will raise the mood a little bit of the next person they meet. Can you see that it wouldn't take too long for it to cover the whole world? Where does it start, with two or three people raising the mood?
Now you can do it whether you're running a business, or whether you work for someone else or even if you're staying home by yourself. Wherever you are, it's nicer if the mood is up, even if your home by yourself, have you ever tried that? It's an interesting experiment of value.
If you're driving in your car on the street, isn't it nicer to have your mood up? than it is wondering where that 'plough jockey' came from. That guy must have got his license in a crap game, blap blap blap. What are they all doing out here on the road. Don't they know it is my road, and here they are on it? You know, you can scream and holler all you want to, but you can sit there and have a good time watching everybody make things important. That is kind of interesting and you can think of it as entertainment. They all have clown suits on.
I have found that the favorite indoor sports of people is to make about everything important, no matter what it is.
Now I think it's a great big lot of fun to sit around and watch people make things important. A man called me from LA the other day and said,"I finally caught on to something, and I'm saving a lot of money.' "I used to go to the movies all the time to see a show." "Now I just go to stop on any corner, and there's a far better one going on, much better show going on with no admission fee."
So I don't know if that's good for the movie industry, but it was good for him. So here he was just having a ball because you can sit anywhere, and if you do look at a movie, you see what makes it a story is that practically all the people in it are making every insignificant thing important, and they have one person called the 'hero' or 'heroine' comes along and kind of sees through the whole show and gets it around to not making it important. Just more and more people make more and more and more things important, and it is funny! That alone can get your mood up if you are objective about it.

Rehabiting Tape 145

(Yesterday you talked about the phrase to rehabit. Could you talk about that)
Rehabit, so that's what we've been talking about. That we have a habit of looking at everything through a screen of 'what ought to be', 'what everything's needing'.
Now if your working with a person who is doing that, which happens to be 100 percent of the people, you put it in the terms that the person could understand. It's slow in degree and as simple a picture as you can get it down to until a person looks at things in a different way.
Nobody will change as long as they look at things the same way. So what your really working at is the person-not necessarily the technical frame of reference, but in their living frame of reference is for them to see differently. You don't do this in one fell swoop or one big blast, you do it by degrees according to the persons attention span and at best it's only about 30 minutes. And the person might see that they don't know what ought to be. They don't know what they need. Now all the old ideas are there and they are to be looked by degrees-slowly-and the better pictures and examples and for instances you can have, the better. And slowly the person develops a new frame of reference which means it's a new habit. Now to rehabilitate anyone means to go from the habits you did that was not satisfactory to the person and possibly everyone around them. So it's a new habit of looking at things.
Now if you have a habit of looking at yourself as a miserable bum, and the last few hours you've been looking at yourself as a pretty wonderful person, huh? Now that's rehabilitation, is it not. Pretty soon you won't have to think about having to do it, that's rehabiting. You're reminded quite frequently that you're about about to fall into the old one that you're a 'bum'. But you wake up and look at it in a different way, with a different set of words.
Now you can rehabit the way you see everybody else, ok? And the way you see housework, and the way you see teaching, and the way you see the students you work with. Every bit of it is rehabilitation. And all rehabilitation means that I see differently.
Now as long as I see the same old way, and seeing is not as accurate as people think. We see through the screens we have in front of us, quite often. So we think we're seeing it like it is, but there is many more ways to see it. Until a person has established another way of seeing, there is no rehabilitation, ok?
The man who commits a crime sees society as his enemy. He sees it as justified to take other people's property or injure their persons. As long as he sees them as a threat, it's pretty easy to justify it, isn't it?
Now if he should no longer see those people as a threat, or that people were a threat in general, he wouldn't see that crime is justifiable. So the only way he's going to be rehabilitated is if he sees differently. And the only way that's going to change is that they look at the fundamentals through which they look at things a little bit.