Continuing with the study of Lifestream Way literature.

Bad vibes. The neighbors are blaring country music through these paper-thin walls.

Continuing with meditation, using "Radha Soami" as a focusing device. Beginning to have misgivings, though, about the continued meditation, against Maharaj Dayal Nam Ji's advice. Besides, in my reply, thanking him for his letter, I assured him I definitely would not try to meditate until my initiation. I am torn between the conflicting advice of my two "gurus," Harry and Maharaj Ji, as well as my own inclinations.

9 AUG 72 - Second day this week of deep depression. Don't know why. After the association meeting this evening I am feeling much better. Worried about school, career, being alone. Guess I should just have more faith, leave it all in the Lord's hands. And what good, after all, does all the worrying do? Thus, Maharaj Ji told Edith, Joseph's wife, "Do not worry!"

10 AUG 72 - I met Gen. Glacier tonight at Joseph's home, where association was being held. He is the Master's (Maharaj Ji's) representative for this area. He gives the L.W. initiation instructions on behalf of the Master. (The inner initiation, it is said, is given by the Master simultaneously.) He is a marvelous old gentleman who, it seems, has been everywhere, done everything, and seen it all. He is charmingly egotistical, but you can tell it's just an act, to give him plenty to say, to put folks at ease. He has an abundance of humility and good humor. He says nobody should forget to laugh! He stresses this a lot, that we must always keep our sense of humor, no matter what. He also insists a person should be very sure before requesting initiation. For those not yet initiated, he advised practicing having nothing on the mind, not easy to do!

Gen. Glacier offered to tell the fortunes of a couple of the girls. He jokingly told one he would come visit her, if she was not afraid of ghosts and wouldn't mind seeing him at the foot of the bed some night. He asked her how her ballet was going. "How'd you know about that !?" she asked. "Oh, I've been around when you haven't seen me," he said. She said she had given it up six months ago. "Longer than that," he corrected. "November," she admitted. He said he would tell her something else alone. He joked with one of the fellows, Steve, that maybe he'd see him later tonight during his evening meditation. He went around the room getting acquainted with everyone. Steve mentioned to Gen. Glacier that he had come back to Austin, after being away a year, in order to get his Ph.D. Gen. Glacier said "Oh! Piling it on higher and deeper, huh?" To which Steve replied, laughing, "Amen!" Laughter all round. Much, much laughter all evening, between awed silences. A few questions and Gen. Glacier's fine answers. Association lasted two hours. Gen. Glacier also said he didn't believe in arguments. So, he and his wife have been married fifty years and had never had an argument, he said. "If I see a cloud on the horizon," he said, "I just leave." As to why we are placed in this physical realm at all, amid so much suffering and so many desires, he said that the Master told him, when he asked the same thing, that he would understand once he had gotten back to the Lord. He added that in his opinion this world was a kind of school, a representation on a cosmic scale of the truth that experience is the best teacher.

16 AUG 72 - Still having problems with my intellect over L.W. I find such concepts as karma and reincarnation embarrassingly hard to swallow, or just simply embarrassing. So if I continue with L.W. I shall have to do so by keeping my rationality in abeyance. Perhaps I can accept karma or reincarnation as possibilities, without admitting them to be at all probable. As mere possibilities they are no more unreasonable than that a loving, infinite, absolute Being has created for each of us only a single, finite lifetime and yet has filled our lives with pain and suffering, as is believed, for instance, by many Christians. And also no more unreasonable than that the entire universe of universes, all that is, in the external as well as the internal realities, objective or subjective, is ultimately meaningless, devoid of purpose, and that man himself, or any sophisticated intelligence for that matter, is merely the product of random relations in infinite time, as some secular rational materialists might have us believe.

I am continuing to attend associations and am now looking forward to applying for L.W. Initiation in latter October, when I shall finally have been on the diet and no drink or drugs, and on the pure moral life rules of this philosophy, for at least three months straight. Meanwhile, I am repeating "Radha Soami" whenever mentally free and continue to read through the L.W. literature.

In studying that literature, it occurs to me that some of the explanations given by this Master may be allegorical. When I find them intellectually puzzling, if only because they conflict at times with my familiar worldview, it seems easier to see them as allegories than to take them as completely literal. From this thought, continuing my meditation, I realize that many of our mathematical and scientific explanations are allegorical as well. In them we are simply defining and redefining, shaping and reshaping our "reality," through manipulating our concepts of it. Yet how can all of this affect true reality, which is not discernable by measurement or intellect alone? Both the mystic's traditional "five elements" and the scientist's atomic chart of over a hundred are culture-bound approximations, allegories, or "stories" that contain deeper truths. They are equally adequate, even though they but roughly reflect the truth, each in its own way. They are adequate simply because they work! The mystic's teachings lead his followers through their internal laboratories to confirmations of the "spiritual truths" they contain, while the scientist's students verify for themselves so-called "scientific truths" in blackboard equations, computer programs, elaborate measurements, or special experiments in their expensive external laboratories. The Truth, if anywhere, must lie within, where no slide-rule, chart, telescope, or test tube (not to mention moth or rust) can ever go. If there is an Ultimate Reality, it lies beyond our words and concepts, certainly beyond the individual. Perhaps, as L.W. suggests, it lies simultaneously within each of us and beyond each of our small selves.

While on a ride to San Antonio with Carolyn and Gen. Glacier the other day, Ralph asked him what someone could do, beyond the L.W. vows on diet, etc., while waiting to be ready for initiation. He suggested certain exercises, such as going over each day's activities in minute detail and examining them to see where we may have erred or sinned, and resolving not to do likewise again - this just before going to sleep. Then, just on awakening, while still in bed perhaps, whatever one sees first, he should think about just how it came to be as it is now, where it is now, back through all its possible transformations. Thus, as with a chair, following it back through its carpentry and then on back to its being part of a growing tree with a soul, the forms of the tree before it was a tree, perhaps back to the beginnings of creation, then before that as well.

22 AUG 72 - I managed, before leaving the state school today, to unwittingly antagonize several of the students in my building, all, of course, "in the line of duty." One, at least, of these students has a reputation for having a violent disposition and could easily have killed me with his bare fists once he had thus gotten beyond his very low frustration-explosion threshold. I still don't know how to be forceful enough with these students and yet not too forceful. And, of course, each of them should be treated as an individual.

23 AUG 72 - Supervising alone on my upper level ward (for higher intelligence mentally retarded students) tonight, I encountered by first serious incident when one of the residents had a real tantrum and fought with me and with two other residents, destroyed several things, broke out, and ran away. One of the students, who had tried to help me restrain him, suffered a seriously bruised or fractured arm and had to go to the hospital clinic. Well, I hope I have learned something from all this! (As is said by the L.W. Master, if you can really learn one thing a month in association, you will make rapid progress on the spiritual path.)

Folks in Finland, I have heard recently, have made much of a quality called sesil, or something like that, which is the will and determination not to be overcome, no matter what. I find it a very impressive concept.

Occasionally while I was growing up, strange things would happen and I would be overtaken by a special feeling. During these times it seemed to me that perhaps everything had been arranged just so that I might see things in a certain way. I thought perhaps everyone else might be in on the ruse. Or, perhaps, the elaborate arrangement had been made by other beings somehow behind the scenes, beings beyond my imagination or understanding, just as I set up at times a little world for my goldfish who, doubtless, could never guess how it had come to be or why or by whose hand (fin!). Even so, it now occurs to me that the Lord, through Maharaj Dayal Nam Ji, may have set it all up just so, that I would come to see things as I do and be led, almost despite myself, to become the disciple I was "destined" to become since before I was born. Meanwhile, through it all, persists, beyond my understanding, Ultimate Reality, That Which Is.

26 AUG 72 - On the radio, there is a record with Frost reading Frost, in the wee hours of the night/early morn. All full of death, wistful of life, it is, and more.