(From a J-R seminar at a meeting of the John-Roger Foundation staff in 1988.)

Originally there were about four or five people running MSIA, and we had a lot of time on our hands, so I did a lot of seminars. Then other organizations started from similar beginnings, and they all spread around the world. Insight started out with three or four people, and so did PTS. The University of Santa Monica started out small as well, and it was originally called Koh-E-Nor while it was incubating for a few years. You make the announcement, put it in the Light, and then it incubates until the people that are part of that start coming in.

We were doing service all over the world, but the airlines kept charging us, the restaurants kept charging us, and the hotels kept charging us, so we had to start charging just to continue doing it. We found that it got bigger and bigger, so we had to charge more and more, and more people came in and they had to be paid. So we had to do more and more. Pretty soon this thing was just an ugly little beast—and as you know, all organizations are beasts. I don’t mean that negatively. It’s just like saying that light’s on. That’s not saying it’s negative, it’s just saying what it is.

We tried to set up all the organizations so you can at least cuddle up to them. And we know that in the moment of cuddling, you’re going to get nipped or scratched as the beast moves, because it won’t know you’re there. Even in the NOW Productions video crew, you’d be amazed at how many people got their feelings hurt because somebody pushed a camera in the wrong spot and they got told about how wrong it was. Then they decided they didn’t want to move the cameras because they didn’t want to move them to wrong places. So I did a seminar saying, “making mistakes is part of growth,” and people started to move cameras again.

We were all trying to do things perfectly. The teachings of the organizations are based upon perfection, but that’s something that we’re probably not going to attain here. But if we don’t have it out there far enough as an ideal, we won’t even make an effort to go towards it. And without that effort, we might just as well go out and put on a tin bill and pick manure with the chickens, because our life becomes based on animal instincts of survival.

We looked at it all and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with having a magnificent teaching, a magnificent Insight, a magnificent University. We’re all going to fall short, but let’s do it anyway.” We’d get involved in the organizations, we’d start working and we’d do things wrong. I don’t know how to run organizations. I’ve been learning along with everybody else, and some people were better at it than I am. It was amazing that in the process of getting to where we were going we had to overcome statements such as, “Well, you’re not living up to Insight. You’re not living up to USM. You’re not living up to …” And we would say, “Of course not.”

As soon as you can live up to something you have to put the measure out further. This is why we make things difficult for ourselves. Just stop and look at it. Does anybody make it difficult for you, or do you make it difficult for you, with what other people give you or don’t give you when you think you should have it? They’ll ask, “Where’s the report?” They think they should have it, and you don’t have it yet. They’re going to make you wrong in the next statement called, “Why not?” And then you’ll say, “Well, you’re making me wrong.” I’m not making that light on. That light is on and I’m just saying the light’s on. If they want to justify their existence by always feeling like they’re being made wrong, that’s called playing the supreme victim.

If I can moan about how wrong you’re making me, I can re-victimize you back to make you feel bad about making me feel wrong, and now you’re the victim. But you’re in the position where you have to convey the information.  We had fun with that. We have people in these organizations that are experts at taking some information and twisting it just enough so that you want to kill them, but you can’t. And you want to love them, and you can’t. You’ve got this tremendous love-hate relationship going with that person called, “God, I feel like I’m married. I can’t live with you and I can’t live without you.” Then we ask, “Could you just get the report in? Could you just do your work?” And the answer is, “Of course not. We don’t do things that way on the earth.” Then we say, “Well at least let’s keep pushing at it.”

I was talking to a fellow who was a graduate from one of the big east coast schools. I said to him, “You know, one of the greatest criticisms I get directed at me is that I don’t live up to the teachings.” He said, “How can you?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, how can I?”  He said, “Nobody can live up to them, but you have to have a guiding light out there in order to see where you’re going.” I asked him the definition of a teacher. He said, “It’s a shortcut to excellence.”

The world does a very interesting thing to us. It meets us at the point of our agreement. If you agree to something the world will come and reflect it back to you. That’s why we come together in groups on this planet, because what we agreed to as a group, the world gives to us. Now, here’s the thing you’ve got to watch out for: If you agree to negativity the world is going to supply you the negativity. And it will supply you the reference points for the negativity, and give you all the evidence you need to be very negative.

Two people coming down the aisle to get married are having the same type of experience, but one has cold feet, and the other has a warm heart. The world is supplying exactly what they put out because one says, “It’s cold in here,” and the other says, “Gee, it’s really warm.” It’s the same air.

Remember the story of the Little Prince? He said, “The sun will come up, the sun will go down,” because that’s what it’s going to do anyway and he wanted his commands to be accurate and perfect. In these organizations, we can’t do that. We have to go into the imperfections. The difficult thing in being a facilitator of any class, whether it’s in religion, education, or healing, is that you have to leave your high position and come down to wherever that person has their bag of junk stuck, and grab the junk and pull it out. They’re going to hang onto it, and you’re going to go back and forth with them until they let go of it, and you’re going to have their junk all over you. Then they’re going to say, “You have junk on you,” and your job is to clean it up and go for the next pile of it. I hear people saying, “I would like to be a facilitator,” and I say, “Do you like to play in the junk?”

People don’t want to win in negativity. They really want to win at the winning edge. We have a business consulting division in Insight and I was talking to some of the people who work there. A client said, “You people must be right on the cutting edge. How do you do that?”  And the person from Insight said, “I don’t know that we’re on the cutting edge until we get past it and we look back and see that was the edge at that time, and we were on it.” But when you’re working, you don’t know you’re on the edge because you’re pioneering and there are no reference points. So everywhere you look is really an opportunity for new creation and new growth.

Years and years ago two women worked with me—Pauli and Candace. I think I worked with them, but when push comes to shove, I worked for them because they would put me through the hoops often. They would come in and say, “We don’t have any more room to stack boxes, papers, notebooks, etc.” I’d look out there and there was no other room. I’d say, “Well, go back and reorganize.” So they’d go back in and go through all the papers and get rid of a lot. They would come back and say, “We have some more space for a while.” And I’d go, “Whew.” They’d come in later and say, “We’re out of space again.” So I’d go, “Reorganize it, restructure it, redo it.” They’d go and come back and they’d say, “We have about an inch more space.”

So we spilled over into another bedroom. And it wasn’t long until they were coming up and saying, “We don’t have enough room.”  There’s a law that we’ll occupy the amount of space and time available for something even if we don’t need that space. If somebody gives it to us we will spread out into it. I thought, “What on earth are we doing? We were supposed to be a small group of non-committing people just meeting informally, loving and growing our way to God, and that’s all we wanted to do. What’s with all these papers and boxes and books, and these articles and magazines? Who ever wanted that? It wasn’t me.” I wanted to just go off and walk in the sand and follow the sun. I still do that. I’d like to do it more, and I will.

Finally, they came to me and said, “There is no more room in this house.” The only room left was my bedroom, which was the last bastion. I thought, “What do I do here?” Then I thought,“Well, it’s time for prayer.” So I did the tradition. I got down on my knees by the bed. And it kind of hurt because I’d played basketball and fell and hurt my knees a lot, so to kneel on them was a terror. So I said, “Wait, God.” And I got my pillow and put it on the floor and then put my knees on it, put my hands up on the bed, and I said, “Help. Thank you,” and got back up again. I figured that if there was a God, He knew, and if He didn’t know then least I’d give him the agenda (“Help”) and then he could fill in the outline. It wasn’t too long until Greg Stebbins called up and said, “Hey, we’ve got this place in Whittier, it’s called the Light Castle and it has this big garage.” It was bigger than two or three of the rooms in my house. I said, “We’ll take it.” I never look an angel in the mouth. I take the gift.

Pauli and Candace packed up what was in those few bedrooms, and went down to the big garage that was in the Light Castle, and they spread out all the papers and they filled the garage. I said, “Where did you get all this stuff to put in this garage?  We didn’t have that much.”  They said, “Well, there were a lot of papers that were stacked up and we couldn’t get to them because it would take so long to unstack and stack it back up, so we just wouldn’t do it.”  I thought, “Well, now that it’s spread out, we’ll get more done.” But now they didn’t know where things were.  So I’d ask for some information that was in the papers, and they’d say, “When do you need it?”  Then I knew we were in trouble. I’d say, “Well, at your earliest convenience, but the person asked me about it so now I’m asking you, and they never said when they needed it, but I’m sure it’s important.” I don’t know if they ever did get their answers from the papers, but they got their answers.

Insight does something similar, and I’m amazed that more people don’t use it. Do you remember the sanctuary in Insight? How many of you go into it to find out what’s going on in your life, and in the Spirit life, and in the world around you? If you don’t, you are missing what the sanctuary is about.

Do you know that you can go in there and find out what’s going on with yourself and other people? Do you remember that when you took Insight you had such a high accuracy rate with the information you got? You thought, “Wow, I can’t believe that this inner communication is so extremely accurate. And I didn’t even know these people.” It scares you because you start to realize that in the unconscious there are no secrets.

So when somebody tells you something you can start to go into your sanctuary while you’re looking at them and get the information for what you know is so—not what is “true,” because you can’t do truth on this planet. Down here information is empirical, and there are relative degrees of it. You get in and you start to process and find the information. And I’ll tell you something very vital: the more you use the sanctuary the better it becomes, and the better you become so that you can be talking to somebody on the street and have your sanctuary working like a computer. They can be talking to you and you are just right there with it, not as a feeling, but as a knowing. When somebody says, “Well, I feel…” I almost think, “Well, that just slit our throats because feelings are running the world again today.” And it gets equally bad when somebody says, “I know,” and you know they don’t know because you’re in your sanctuary looking at theirs and there’s nobody in their sanctuary.

In Insight, everybody who comes in the room brings their own little bit that they contribute.  And if we’re bringing the very best that we possibly can at any given moment  (and that may be very, very bad but it’s the best you can bring at that moment), we realize that even as bad as it was, it was almost perfect, and it led to your progression.

It’s important to understand the progressions in your life. If you don’t understand them, you’ll be stuck and you’ll have information to beat yourself in the head, to abuse yourself and make yourself more of a victim. I’ll give you an example of one of the worst things that happened to me in this physical life to show you a progression.

My mother and father died a long time ago and I was extremely distraught. It was such a terrible thing, even though, in a way, I was working with them on other levels. But physically, although I hadn’t been living at home for years, I had such a feeling of abandonment and betrayal. I felt like, “Why did you go die? Why did you die that way? You could have died of old age.”

Many years have gone by and now I have two Rottweilers named Annie and Gort. They have been espoused for a long time but they never had any children. So finally we helped Gort figure out how to do it. And Annie was okay with that. About eight or ten days ago she had five puppies. If you’ve ever seen Rottweiler puppies they are so absolutely precious, you just can’t believe it. Little black and brown things, and when they’re eating their little feet stick out straight behind them, and you hear that sucking noise. We were sitting around the table and we heard something and I said, “Gee, that sounds like a baby cry.” It was the puppies.

It was two o’clock in the morning, and it had been raining really hard. I was in a twilight sleep, and Gort came outside my bedroom door and banged on it. So I got Johnny and I said, “Hey, go see what that is.” A few minutes later he came in my room and said, “Oh God, two of the puppies are dead.” I asked, “What happened?” He said, “I think Lady killed them.” Lady is our little white Bichon Frise. I thought, “Oh God,” and I went in there.

I was very dizzy because I have a hard time getting up when I’ve been meditating and I’m away from the body. I got in there and looked at these puppies. There was Annie, and there was blood all over. I reached down and one of the puppies that our friend was going to get was dead. I thought, “How am I going to tell him that?” I looked over and there was another one that was breathing slowly. I picked it up and blew into its nose, and I got it back. I thought, “What on earth am I doing? It’s dying. It’s got a reason to die. Why am I interfering?” So we got hold of someone else at the house and said, “Let’s take them to the vet.” We put them in two boxes.

Annie was really upset—she’s the female Rottweiler, a really great little mama. She’s really special. I got back in bed and watched TV. About an hour later, John came back and he said, “Well, we lost all the puppies.” I have been so sick because of that. And I saw that it’s amazing that the tragedy of my mother and father dying, and all the things that have happened around me set me up to handle my puppies dying. This was an event we waited for, the timing was correct, and it was really set up perfectly, even though perfect things can’t exist on the planet—which is a very difficult thing for people to understand.

So there’s this little white Bichon named Lady that is probably the most lovable little creature in the world, with this mass of red blood down her face where she chewed up the little puppies. I called her in to see if she was okay. I rolled over, and I was so angry, I smacked her and sent her outside. As soon as I hit her, it sort of let go inside of me. I really felt like wringing her neck, except this is another dog that I love.

Now, here’s the progression: I went into the feeling of the puppies dying, went back to my mother and father, grabbed hold of that emotion, brought it forward through time and space inside of me, hit what happened today and let the emotions come up. You notice that I let them go and I shared them with you. As they came up you probably were aghast at hearing it and felt shaken, but as it came up through me it matured. You might find it maturing inside of you. Healing for one is healing for many. I let it mature and now it’s here inside of me, and it’s still shaking me, but it’s not running me.

How am I going to get over it? Maybe another batch of puppies, and I’ll be just great. Probably, I’ll go home tonight and go, “Ah, life is like that. It seems like somebody is getting killed or hurt inadvertently all the time.” So what do I do now, do I go kill Lady? The little Bichon has been very much in disfavor around our house today. She knows it. She feels bad about it.  People at the house were asking me, “J-R, what was this? Why did she do it? Was she jealous?” I said, “No. We have to understand where Lady’s coming from. If you don’t understand why she’s here and what she’s here to do, you can’t understand her behavior, and why that behavior, in time and space, is going to be fine. If it’s going to be fine in time and space it’s got to start being fine right now.”

We all learned a tremendous lesson: Don’t let Lady near puppies. They’ve been known to kill their own puppies. These dogs are territorial. That means they own the space they’re in and they will kill anything that gets in that space. That’s why I have three big dogs with one little one, because she can’t kill them. But she’ll reach up and grab them by the ears and pull them down if she wants to talk to them.

Keep your eye on what you’re doing. It’s not difficult to watch what you’re doing. Keep your mind on what you’re doing as you do it. Know full well the way you’re being treated now is exactly what you’ve put out to the world, and you’ve agreed to have it treat you that way. It’s treating you in exact agreement to what you put out. If you put out love and joy and happiness, it’s going to agree with you and give you that. If you put out hurt, animosity and despair, it will supply it to you.

The world is an inkblot. We have to realize that that’s what it’s doing or we’re going to be lost in the confusion of everybody’s inkblot perceptions. Can you rely just on your own experience? Only to a point—because you’re going to go to a place where there are no reference points for your experience. You can read about how to make a pie, and that’s not making a pie. But even after you’ve made the pie, some people can’t eat it, so that’s your experience. As you make the next few pies people will begin to eat them, and you’ll correct as you learn and grow. And then, one day when you are the famous pie maker and everybody’s got you up sky-high in the pie world, you’ll make a bad piece of pie, and they’re going to stick it to you, disregarding all the good pieces of pie you put out for centuries. Life is like that. If you don’t expect it, you’re not keeping your eyes on what you’re doing and keeping your mind on where you’re going.

Are we going to make those mistakes? I’ve got news for you—nobody really makes a mistake. It turns out that way as you go down the road. We don’t start out and say, “I’m going to make this mistake. There it is. That’s a mistake.” We just go, “This is a really good thing to do, this will really work.” We start into it and about five days later somebody says, “Here’s why that doesn’t work.” You think, “God, what a mistake. I made a mistake.” No you didn’t. The mistake was out there because it wasn’t being monitored as you went along. It happens when we take our abilities away from what we’re doing. That thing shows up where it moves off course and all we do is just course correct.

Do you want to be allowed the privilege of correcting your course whenever you feel it’s necessary? Then you’ve got to give that same privilege to everybody else. Do you know what you have to do as one of the first prerequisites of allowing them that? Forget and forgive what’s happened, or else you have an irreparable relationship. The first step in mental health is to allow forgiveness for your dumbness and possibly somebody else’s. But you can never forgive somebody else until you have the forgiveness inside of yourself. You’ll say nice things and walk away with a grudge in your heart. You’ve got to clean yourself up.

Michael Jackson wrote a song that said if you want to change the world, change the person you’re looking at in the mirror. Listen to that very carefully. We’re hearing more and more songs that say if you want to change the world, go inside. Change where you live and it will start to reflect it in the world. The world will agree to it.

How is it that some people can have a lot to and others have nothing? It looks like they’re doing the same thing, and then we judge it based on that. Folks, it is not the same thing. They came from a different place inside and did a different thing inside. Many of our experiences in life are just to teach each other how to do things and what not to do. We say, “I’m not going. I saw you do that, and I’m not going to do that. Thanks.” We all learn from each other. If you’re not learning from the person you’re with, your relationship is being irreparably damaged. You say, “I forgive myself for forgetting that I am also part of God, of life. And I forgive myself for forgetting that everyone else is also, and the permission I give to them to do what they want in their ten percent level, I take to myself. I’m staying out of yours, and you stay out of mine.”

And in that three percent level, where we meet and work together, we’re going to cooperate at such a high rate that just three percent of the time is going to take care of the ninety-seven percent of the time when we’re not together—because we do it effectively, efficiently, and lovingly. And when somebody makes a mistake you say, “Forget it, let’s go on.” What if they make the same mistake twice? You say, “Hey, watch what you’re doing because you’re making the same mistake twice. Let me draw your eyes to this mistake. Do you see it? I don’t have to tell you anymore, because you can see it. Do you know how to correct it? If you don’t, I’ll show you how.”

There’s never a good enough reason to withdraw your loving—never. There are a lot of reasons why you don’t want to participate, and that’s fine, but when you withdraw your loving from somebody out there you have to withdraw it from that place inside if you where they are also. That’s killing you. You’re being a real nasty person to yourself. Don’t do that. Find what was really great about them, and put that in that place. You don’t have to see them again, but when they come up in your mind, have that place that has loving, happiness, and okay-ness with it. Be smart in your inner life—really smart. This one out here is illusionary. God only knows what’s going to go on out here.

We can’t get the truth out of this outer world. Somebody says that this stone is worth five dollars, and another one says it’s worth five hundred, and they’re both experts. What do you do? Keep the stone, sell it to the highest bidder, or do whatever you see fit. Do what you please in your ten percent. What pleases you, pleases me. If you do what’s best for you at any given time, I don’t care how bad it looks. If that’s the best you can do, that pleases me because you’re doing it. You’re going to learn and grow, and you’re going to please other people.

Keep the loving going. Loving is a state of forgiveness and openness. When I told you about my dog Lady, if that disturbed you, forgive me inside of you for the disturbance, and make that something that we all just came up through together. My intent was to share with you how to do a progression emotionally, because I can’t go back and change what my dog did. That’s done. But I can change inside of me. And there is no need for me to go to my dog to tell her how bad she is, or to go after people in my house for not having done what they could have done. I can do a lot of blame here, all vindictively righteous and true. But it’s wrong in terms of life and the spirit of who we are. Come back inside, and just put the loving there with people. And if you don’t know somebody, that’s no reason not to be loving. You’re just not going to just put it out there; you’re going to keep it inside if you. When the two of you connect, then you extend it. And when they leave, pull it back. Put it out and pull it back. If you leave it out there somebody’s going to blunder in and hurt it. Keep your heart back where it belongs. Keep your eyes on what you’re doing. Keep your thoughts on where you want to go.

Baruch Bashan