There are two ways to escape the raw deal that this universe sometimes hands out.
One is to go to sleep or wholly unreal and forget it.
The other is to attain a calm, serene beingness that is proof against the knocks and arrows of misfortune.
The first method has distinct liabilities. However, it is the most usual route taken by human beings who find the going too rough.
Alcohol, drugs, self-hypnotism are all men have been prone to use.
The only real trouble with them is that one wakes up into the same world, but a bit weaker, a bit redder of eye, feeling a bit worse.
The drug or other knocks on the head didn’t change the universe any and one is still in it, still catching it, probably with an even lower resistance to it. So the first method is not a very good one.
The second method, the ability to rise above it all, has long been preached. But unfortunately there wasn’t any readily available technology to accomplish it.
In the way back areas of Tibet, in the Lama Monasteries, one was supposed to be able to find technology with which, if one practiced it for twenty years, one could rise above suffering and become a serene being.
But tickets to Tibet didn’t grow on trees and, besides, the country has been gobbled up by an overpopulated China.
It’s one thing to hear that one should rise above it all and quite another to do it.
In the early 1930s, while in Engineering School, I found that Man didn’t have an adequate mental technology. In the East, before that, I had heard of mental abilities not known in the West. But they had the liability that they took too long and were somewhat like the old story about turning lead to gold. If you went up on a hill in the full of the Moon and put a lead block on a phosphorescent tree stump and said “Abracadabra,” the lead would turn to gold, providing you did not think of the word “Hippopotamus”!
So anyway, I saw that Man didn’t really have a mental technology, didn’t really have a real road out.
The road out is the road of increased awareness. It is not a wholly painless road.
Those who had already taken the road down had a rough time going up again.
If they increased their awareness enough, they would arrive at a high level where they were at cause and in which they could not only cope with their environment, but could prosper in it, well above the reach of suffering.
But how to get them up from the point to which they had already gone down?
I was finally able to map an easy road which could be traveled despite drugs, despite the starting point. And of course that made it easier for everybody.
Drugs do odd things to the mind. This makes it a bit rough to begin to go up.
I would feel pretty bad if a lot of good guys had to live with the road blocked.
Like anybody else, I have had my own share of slings and arrows over the years and I know what it is like.
It isn’t all that easy to help one’s fellows and to be helped in return. But the end product is itself worth a lot of slings and arrows.
The road out is the way up.
I hope you make it.
Best of luck.
